BFI Flare preview from Sight and Sound April 2014 issue
Get those glad rags out… Tonight sees the launch of this year’s BFI Flare – the new name for the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival – which runs until March 30. I previewed the event for Sight & Sound magazine and you can read my piece below (reprinted with permission). There’s also a round-up of Not Television-friendly titles at the fest you can check out here. Yum.
Flare path
In recognition of the increasing complexity of sexual politics, the renamed BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival aims for inclusivity
What’s in a name? In 2013, the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival set about canvassing opinion on whether it should change its title. The event launched in 1986 as Gay’s Own Pictures, promptly added ‘lesbian’ and adopted its current formulation, and has remained the same ever since. Meanwhile, LGBT has become the standard term in public discourse around issues of sexuality: B is for bisexual and T for transgender. Many now add Q for queer or questioning and I for intersex; some also use C for curious or celibate, A for asexual, P for polyamorous and K for kink. It’s an increasingly broad church.
The festival has responded to these shifting realities with a new identity, announced in February, as BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival. Whether LGBT will prove better than ‘lesbian and gay’ at covering the diversity of experiences showcased remains to be seen – the opinion-canvassing process apparently made clear that the catch-all term ‘queer’ was actively opposed by a significant proportion of the festival’s constituents. Meanwhile, the word ‘flare’, according to BFI head of cinemas and festivals Clare Stewart, “has a conceptual richness suggesting the light of a cinema projector or a beacon and the spark of an idea, moving forward and growing outward”. It also suggests a distress signal – not entirely inappropriately given the increasingly troubling situation for many non-straight people around the world, with notable recent legal setbacks in Russia, India, Uganda and Nigeria, among others. The 2014 festival addresses such concerns both explicitly and obliquely.
Like the London Film Festival, Flare is divided into conceptual sections, in this case ‘Hearts’ (about love, romance and friendship), ‘Bodies’ (sex, identity and transformation), and ‘Minds’ (art, politics and community). The boundary between the first two seems porous: Will You Dance With Me?, an intriguing premiere showcasing footage filmed by Derek Jarman at a special 1984 nightclub event, is in the former; Gerontophilia, Bruce LaBruce’s intergenerational odd-couple escapade, is in the latter. ‘Minds’ contains more documentaries, including portraits of ‘gender outlaw’ Kate Bornstein (Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger) and riot grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna (The Punk Singer).
The festival opens and closes with Sundance prize-winning titles about difficult, even traumatic processes of change. British feature Lilting, directed by Hong Khaou, features Ben Whishaw as a young man grieving his lover by trying to connect with the latter’s prickly mother (Cheng Pei Pei); the closing film, Australian director Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays, follows the shifting relationship over a year between a teenager (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) and her mother (Del Herbert-Jane) as the latter transitions from Jane to James.
In terms of explicit engagement with political adversity, this inaugural Flare contains a handful of hard-hitting documentaries. Micah Fink’s The Abominable Crime focuses on homophobia in Jamaica,where the Offences Against the Person law has arguably enabled violence. The film screens with Habeeb Lawal’s short Veil of Silence, about Nigeria’s recent law against same-sex marriage. Born This Way looks at LGBT life in Cameroon, where homosexuality is illegal, and Marta Cunningham’s Valentine Road examines the case of queer Californian high-school student Larry King, murdered by a classmate. A round-table discussion, ‘The Abominable Laws’, aims to put these disturbing subjects in context.
Such films are the most sobering aspect of a festival that always contains more than its share of (often campy) fun and games. But some of this year’s larkier inclusions could be read as deflected expressions of anxiety. As well as melodrama and bling, a Queer Bollywood strand offers engagement with a culture whose relationship with LGBT issues has recently grown unexpectedly fraught. At the festival’s launch event, the warmest, buzziest reception was for ‘We Love Caged Lesbians’, a talk to be accompanied by a screening of the 1949 women-in-prison feature Caged and a themed after-party; and for ‘Scream Queens: Gay Boys and the Horror Film’, a talk on horror’s hidden queer history, programmed alongside four 80s titles where the red comes with a dash of pink, including The Lost Boys and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part II: Freddy’s Revenge. Fun – but also reminders that the threats of incarceration and violence are subjects with significant purchase in the LGBT imagination right now – and that flares are not just spectacular displays but calls to action.
And here’s that round-up of ten choice screenings again. See you there…
