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Sussex symposium on queer film in Cinecity film festival
Posted on behalf of: School of Media, Film and Music
Last updated: Wednesday, 7 November 2012
A still from the film My Dead Brain (2009), directed by Sarah Stuve and to be shown at Cinecity 2012.
A new cinema network based at the University of Sussex is partnering with a Brighton film festival to present a day of queer film events this month.
The Global Queer Cinema network, which was launched in April, has organised a day of events on Saturday 24 November as part of the annual Cinecity festival.
The day begins with a seminar involving filmmakers, activists and curators from New York, London and Mumbai in a roundtable discussion on curating queer film.
The panel will consider a number of questions, including:
- How does cinema create and sustain queer public cultures?
- What do we want from queer film culture?
- What kinds of spaces might queer film screenings create and what role can they play in public life?
Dr Rosalind Galt, Reader in Film Studies and one of the organisers of the Global Queer Cinema network, says. “LGBTQ film festivals have become a staple of the international festival circuit and some gay films garner success at the British box office.
“But around the world, LGBTQ film screenings have been sites for homophobic violence and some critics say the spaces for diverse views of queer life are limited in mainstream gay cinema.”
The discussion, which takes place at 2pm at the Sallis Benney Theatre in central Brighton, will be followed by a free screening of new short films from India.
The day will conclude at 9pm at The Basement, with two programmes of films from MIX, a New York City queer experimental film and video festival.
Throughout the Cinecity programme, which runs from 15 November-2 December, there are a number of gay-interest events that complement the day.
Dr Galt heads the Global Queer Cinema network together with fellow film scholar Dr Karl Schoonover from the University of Warwick.
The project will interrogate the relationships between international LGBTQ politics and film and media practices. It will study queer films from around the world, consider what communities are produced from LGBTQ film festivals, and ask how contemporary queer visual culture intersects with discourses of human rights, multiculturalism and world cinema.
The project, which is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), will bring together more than a dozen scholars, filmmakers, activists and film-festival programmers for a series of events in Brighton and London in 2012-13.
The next event will be at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in March 2013.