The 2021 selection listed below goes live to watch wherever you are in the world from 17 - 28 March.  

https://film.britishcouncil.org/about/work/fivefilmsforfreedom

Pure is a film about a girl named Celeste.  Celeste [ suh-lest ]: a name which means heavenly. Contrary to its definition, this 17-year-old girl feels full of sin. Celeste does everything in her power to maintain the image of the “perfect Christian daughter.” Even if that means participating in what she believes to be an antiquated and heteronormative cotillion ball.

Celeste is one person at church, cotillion rehearsal, and high school but an entirely different one when she is on stage reading poetry or hanging out with her best friend, Amir. When her two worlds begin to collide, she is forced to come to terms with her performativity, and find the beauty within her plurality.

Victoria    (Spain / Directed by Daniel Toledo)

A bittersweet reunion between a trans woman and her ex sparks tension and a long buried resentment.

Luca, a trans activist based in Oxford, gives the viewers an insight into their own activism in this eight minute documentary. “Trans happiness is real,” was originally a phrase their activist partner used on an art project, until Luca helped him with it, and the phrase blew up and became more than just words: it became a place for them to belong and to be proud of their identities. Luca often combats TERFs who pride themselves with sticking distasteful transphobic stickers and spreading misinformation throughout Oxford, by way of peeling off the stickers and covering them with delightful trans-positive messages. Moreover, they not only introduce viewers to a new method of combating daily transphobia in the real world, but they also speak about how happy they are to embrace themselves as a trans person, and are determined to prove that trans happiness is in fact real.

While they continue to be a community that celebrates life to the fullest, queer representation in India, to a large extent has always been stereotyped. Also excluded from popular narratives, or prominently seen only during pride month, one struggles to find the realistic picture of what the LGBTQIA++ community is all about. Offering cinephiles across the world a sensual celebration of their love and desires, Bodies of Desire, a visual poetry film, attempts to portray an honest representation of these very emotions, through characters that the Indian audience is not used to seeing on mainstream media. Using Varsha Panikar’s poetry series by the same name, the film, features four sets of lovers who emote intimacy, longing, discovery, and desire that beautifully captures the essence of what the film aims to convey.

Co-directed by Varsha and Saad Nawab, the short film, spanning a little less than four minutes, is inspired by the poet’s own reality. With Varsha Panikar being a queer filmmaker herself, the core idea behind Bodies of Desire was to create a film that represented her community and captures them through a lens, that is free from bias and prejudice, and establish a presence that is more fluid and nuanced, and is told through their perspective and not how it appears to an outsider.

A group of people laugh at two men kissing as they pass by. But was the laugh directed at them? Was the intention to be homophobic? Land of the Free discusses who owns the truth of actually what happened.