Celebrating 15 years THE IRIS PRIZE FILM FESTIVAL in Wales glorious capital Cardiff has become a leading voice in championing LGBT+ short films, and a significant event in the British film festival calendar.
The Festival is the home of the Iris Prize a stunning £30,000 film award – the world’s largest short film prize which allows the winner to make a new short film.
This year there is a shortlist of 35 international filmmakers : 50% women and 50 % men representing the full diversity and gender, including trans and non-binary individuals, actively engaging across the LGBT+ community.
Plus outside the Competition the Festival aslo screens some of the best new queer feature films at the Premiere Cinemas Cardiff in the city centre plus most of the program will be ONLINE throughout October for wider UK audiences to enjoy.
Here's Queerguru's Pick of the Must-See Movies
FIREBIRD is an enormously satisfying and complete film. It tells a full tale of life, and love, and loss from its beginning right up to an end that could never need or want a sequel. PEETER REBANE‘S story of two Soviet military recruits, a pilot officer and a private, falling in love on a military base during the 70s cold war, is based on a true story. Skeptical as we are about stories ‘based on’ truth, people’s ages and weights on dating profiles might make that same claim, there is an undeniably human element to this story that grips the heart and mind with a sense of both individuality and history.
GOODBYE MOTHER is one of those cases of don’t judge a Book (or in this case movie) but its cover. Having wrongly assumed that this was a straightforward story of a closeted gay man taking a boyfriend home to Vietnam for the first time, and being forced to choose between his conservative family or the new love of his life. It surprisingly had more depth dealing with the whole ramifications of an extended family still coping with the changes brought about by the ending of the Vietnam war.
REBEL DYKES: In the opening minutes of this powerful documentary we hear a voice that says ‘ we were young, working-class and poor: we were dykes NOT lesbians.” It is a statement of fact but there is a slight edge to it which we take as a warning not to misinterpret who this group of queer women really were. The film starts in the early 1980’s when a group of women set up a Camp outside the RAF MILITARY BASE ON GREENHAM COMMON in the UK. They were ostensibly there to protest the fact that the Government was allowing the US Military to store nuclear CRUISE MISSILES there.
Even though the documentary ends with a ‘where are they now’ section and most of the women seemed enveloped in some form of respectability, they still come over as good-spirited and still anarchic and funny(!). It’s just that their fierceness has mellowed. Kudos to filmmakers HARRI SHANAHAN, Sian A. Williams, and SIOBHAN FAHEY for making this fascinating record. Our queer history so needs to be told, so we can all remember the journey that others have made on our behalf.
SAINT NARCISSE A new film from the Canadian queer auteur Bruce La Bruce is always an event. We are careful not to include him as part of the wave of new queer cinema that the leading Film scholar Ruby B Rich first recognized. LaBruce is one of the leaders of the queercore movement which is. noted for the avant-garde and unapologetic gay answer to the punk movement.
That is self-evident even in movies like Saint Narcisse that although is as mainstream as La Bruce will ever go, still bears all the usual signature hallmarks of his more fringe work. E.G. there is plenty of nudity, incest, an obsession with religious themes, and with Saint Sebastian who is often recognized by the queer community as ‘one of us’.
SWAN SONG. Veteran queer actor UDO KIER gives the performance of a lifetime in TODD STEPHEN’S delicious camp comedy. This is Stephen’s adaption of the story of Pat Pitsenberger …….known to everyone as Mr. Pat ….. an elderly outrageously camp hairdresser who catered to the whims of town’s snobby socialites in his day. Now financially broke after being swindled out of inheriting the house he had shared with his late-life partner, Mr. Pat, is stuck in a miserable Assisted Living Facility surrounded by very old ……. and very straight …. people just sitting around waiting to die.
IF Kier is not nominated for an Academy Award for this then we will know that there is no real justice in the world !
WEEKEND Some 10 years ago Brit Filmmaker ANDREW HAIGH made this simple uncompromising love story about two very regular gay men in the Midlands which he shot in just two weeks. Unwittingly it changed the whole landscape of queer British movies at the time getting an unprecedented rave review from the NY Times, winning 23 major awards and all our hearts and u minds too. If you have already seen it, go again, and if you havent then you will kick yourself if you miss it.
To see the entire IRIS PRIZE FESTIVAL program and how to access the online program https://irisprize.org/ PLUS to read full reviews of these films , and over 1250 other queer movies go to https:// queerguru.com
