Autumn means the return of the Cinema Queer film festival. The LGBTQ+ festival is even bigger this year, running for six days and with a new home base in Teater Pero. It kicks off on September 25 with a party in their circus tent at Tantolunden, and we caught up with festival director Oscar Eriksson to talk about it.
So to start off, what’s new about the 2018 edition of the festival?
I would say the biggest thing is that there’s one more day. We’ve changed it from a five-day festival to a six-day. We kind of promised ourselves we would stop growing, but every year there are so many films that we want to screen and so many amazing guests we want to invite. We felt that we needed to grow. We’re also moving our main theatre, to Teater Pero on Sveavägen, a new space, a new theatre. That is totally amazing, we fell in love the first time we went there, it was exactly the space we wanted. We want to have places that are more than just a cinema, people can come in the morning and can stay until late night, have breakfast, have drinks, get a tattoo in our pop-up place, they can more or less live there for the festival.
Another new thing is that you have a new venue, the Garage, in Slakthusområdet, so what can you tell us about that?
What we try to do every year is find new venues that are a little more exciting. We’ve been in churches, bathhouses, all these different venues. One thing that we felt about Stockholm is that there are so few places left to do things in. Everything is extremely expensive, it’s really posh. So we always try to find grungy, dirty places. Slakthusområdet has been a dream for us for a while, because they are going to renovate it soon. So we wanted to get in on it while there we still spaces. So we talked to Stockholms Stad, and they showed us a few places, and we found this old garage that just closed down in May. So it was perfect. It’s an old truck garage. And we’re going to have screenings there, a bar, and upstairs there are two small rooms which we’re going to re-build into installation rooms. The downstairs we’re building a big darkroom, where we’ll have a co-operation with the Berlin porn festival and screen queer porn on Friday night and Saturday. It’s going to be fun. We’re going to have the concert with Linn de Quebrada from Brazil there, we moved it from Backdoor to the Garage because we wanted it a little grungier. There will be two full days of activities there, and we will sell a Garage package ticket which covers entry there for the festival.
Talk us through some of the main features of this year’s programme.
We have over 70 films, all in all, a lot of shorts. One of the main themes is a focus on South and Central America, with a little more focus on Mexico, as Melissa [Lindgren, co-director] and I had a co-operation and screened some films with a Mexican festival this summer. So we have a curator, Lourdes Gil Alvaradejo, who is coming and has curated a programme of Mexican shorts, and we’re going to screen that on Thursday. And we’re collaborating with Panorama, the Latin American film festival, which is on at the same time as ours. So we’re going to have a talk on Saturday together with Linn de Quebrada to talk about trans rights in the region at Kulturhuset with her and other activists. And one of our main films is Tranny Fag, about Linn de Quebrada. She is so revolutionary, she’s been called the Brazilian Beyoncé, super hardcore trans activists who don’t take any shit at all.
On the subject, one of the special events this year is a tribute to the Mexican diva Chavela, who are they and why did you choose to do a special part on them?
Chavela was an icon in Mexican music. She was openly lesbian, she was really larger than life. But in most places in Europe not that many people know about her at all. We felt it was important for us to lift her as the icon she is. It’s also an amazing film. The focus on Mexico in general is because so much is going on and happening. The equality laws in many parts have gone far, even though there are many problems still. When we talk about LGBTQ and queer rights we so often look at Sweden, Europe the US, but we don’t think ‘Shit, there’s so much happening in other places’. The activism in Mexico when we were there that we saw was totally amazing, and so much more radical that we do here, they talk it out in the streets much more. That’s one of the things we really wanted to show, and you can see that in Chavela and the Mexican short films as well.
So back to the programme, what else are the highlights this year?
I would say our opening night, and the Filipino film Chedeng & Apple, which is a Filipino Thelma & Louise, a totally insane story. Two women in their mid-fifties, one of their husbands dies and she realises that she has to find her long-lost love. So it becomes a road movie that is totally, totally insane. We open the festival in a circus tent here in Tantolunden. We’ll open that with a huge party at the tent, and it’s super cool to see a film like that from a country that has a lot of problems. They have a president that is not the best to say the least, and something like this, which is super fun, super political, it’s really really a slap in to face to patriarchy and men in general, and is a tribute to friendship and lesbian love. We also have Jason Barker here from the UK, he’s the director of A Deal With The Universe, a documentary about his life as a pregnant trans man. He and his wife couldn’t become pregnant, so he decided to stop his testosterone treatment and become pregnant himself. It’s about all the obstacles that come with that, all the hospitals that said ‘we can’t do this, this is not right’, and a society that said ‘we don’t understand what you’re doing’. Jason is also a stand-up comedian who’s been working for BFI Flair, the queer film festival in London for a long time, and for the first time put the camera on himself. He’s been filming it for more than ten years, and it’s such a moving and close story. So he’s coming, we’re doing it together with Trans Film Festival on the Sunday, we’re serving a brunch, we’re showing the film at Teater Pero and there’ll be a talk with him.
Outside of the films themselves, what other events are happening during the festival?
On Friday and Saturday we are going to have two parties, both in the Garage. There’ll be a bunch of DJs and other fun stuff. On Sunday we also have a screening of Mr. Gay Syria, a film about a beauty contest for refugees. The main founder of it [Mahmoud Hassino] is also here, and he’ll be doing a longer talk on Sunday afternoon. And Jan Hammerlund, who’s been in the forefront of LGBT rights since the sixties, he’s made a short film, Frans and Lars, about two working-class men in the 1890s about how they fell in love and ended up in prison because of it. He’s going to come for the closing night and do a couple of songs and screen his film. We’re trying to bring in queer history and the people we feel we should lift.
To wrap it up, how do you feel the festival has developed over the years, and how would you like to see it develop in future?
I think when we started, we started it as a kind of mainstream festival, where we felt the most important thing was to screen films in a cinema. What we realised along the way is that of course films are super important, but the most important thing is that we have to create spaces. Bubbles where we can gather and meet have fun. Of course see films and all that, but we really need these spaces, and I think that’s what we have now. The festival has grown of course, but it’s also created venues when you can meet and be. And that’s what I feel it will be over the next few years.
So it’s not just about cultural consumption, it’s about interaction?
Exactly, and growing we want to find different meeting places. We want a programme and spaces that are as diverse as we possibly can have them. So depending on who you are and what you’re looking for, we’re trying to find those bubbles. So if it’s in a dark room on a Friday night at the Garage, perfect, but if it’s in a cosy brunch place in Sveavägen that’s also fine. We really have to fight in Stockholm to keep those spaces alive. That’s why we want to co-operate so much, we do so much with Trans Film Festival, with Panorama, we try and get Bitter Pils involved. That’s what I feel has changed the most, when we started we had our bubble as Cinema Queer. But now we don’t want to, and we will never be, alone. We want to work with as many people as we can and bring in as many co-operation partners and stuff as we can from the queer community. Because it’s a little bit scattered in Stockholm, so community, community, community is super important, and that’s what we want to keep on building.
Cinema Queer, Sep 25-30, Various Venues. For more details and full programme see cinemaqueer.se
Main Image: Oscar Eriksson & Melissa Lindgren
