Queerguru covers most of the major LGBTQ+ Film Fests around the globe, but once in a while, we love to turn our attention to one of the smaller specialized queer Fests. Just like the Soura Film Fest. Its a Berlin-based fest that sheds light on cinematic talents from the SWANA (South West Asia & North Africa) region.
Soura—which means ‘image’ in Arabic, is about sharing a vision of life that is poignant, defiant, and unique.
The festival’s mission is to create a safe and welcoming space for filmmakers whose creative vision has challenged heteronormativity and patriarchal environments, and have explored queerness and what it represents to them. Queerness, as seen by the festival, is not exclusive to efforts related to the LGBTQ+ community, but also tackles themes such as feminism, migration and human relationships that defy oppressive social constructs. Every fight for basic human rights is our fight when it comes to seeing the world from a queer gaze.
Over the past few decades, the SWANA region has witnessed a lot of political engagement within queer communities, whether against laws that criminalize their lives or in favor of change and education. Fieldwork has been positively affecting individuals from the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and especially transgender communities, but activists have also been involved in debates that support women’s rights and the well-being of other communities treated as minorities, in an effort to normalize an anti-colonial environment that stands against imperialism.
The four-day Fest runs from 9/29 to 10/2 and will be screening 6 feature films including Shall I Compare You To A Summer’s Day Inspired by William Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18, in which an unidentified narrator lauds the beauty of a young man, is an experimental theatre-film hybrid by Egypt’s Mohammad Shawky Hassan. The loose narrative tells the story of two men and their doomed attraction to one another.
The other feature films are :
El Houb, Moroccan-Dutch Karim returns to his family home and opens up to his parents about being into men. Their reaction inspires a journey of discovery through Karim’s isolation as he attempts to break an ingrained culture of silence.
This Is Not Me, Two trans people learn to navigate the Iranian courts in order to begin their transition.
Sirens, Lilas and Shery, co-founders and guitarists of the Middle East’s first all-female metal band, wrestle with friendship, sexuality and destruction in their pursuit of becoming thrash metal rock stars.
Scenes I Imagine, Hayalimdeki Sahneler aims to explain and analyze scenes from 3 heavily queer coded Turkish films from 80s.
Tea with Adonis. Adonis is a queer seventy-three-year-old man. He currently lives in the Ashrafieh district of Beirut. He continues to water his numerous plants daily and host his numerous friends for cheerful dinners every other week. Adonis is full of stories from the sixties, seventies, eighties and the nineties.
THU, SEP 29 - OCT 1 Soura Film Festival - 4th Edition http://sourafilmfest.com/
