Fringe! Queer Arts and Film Festival

 The festival finished last week but I have taken some time to finish watching films and gather my thoughts. 

Naturally, I spent a bit of time pondering my own film, Lactasia, which made its belated UK debut. The screening was socially distanced and relaxed and was somewhat masked. It certainly was a new experience for me to see people lying on bean bags at a festival screening. We were even offered gay masks! Well, rainbow ones. I have kept one as a souvenir. 

Here is a pic of the installation I put up at Rich Mix for my screening. 

But the other films I saw ranged from the high camp of Captain Faggotron to a whole programme of witchy experimental shorts. Captain Faggotron was great fun and a distant cousin to Lactasia in its B-movie values and humour. And it was set in Berlin, which is always a delight to see on film. 

I also saw a newly digitised version of Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too, which is an old favourite of mine. It looked great and it's always great to spend time with these amazing activists, now seen at a distance of 30 years. I think a lot of the youngers viewers were really impressed by what they saw and some women told me they wished they had been there. I had, of course, and was wearing my Lesbian Avengers T-shirt to prove it!

I viewed several shorts programmes, including the romance-themed Queer Summer Lovin'. The standout in this programme was definitely Youssou & Malek, which was very clever and beautifully shot. The two leads had great chemistry as a young couple faces being split up by life choices. 

The end of my attendance at the festival in a live capacity was the shorts programme Enchanted Visions, which featured an array of truly baffling and bewitching films, some more abstruse than others. I am not sure I truly understood any of them, in fact, but that may have been because I was utterly exhausted by that point. 

Suffice to say it was an exciting week for me, my first live festival in three years and a chance for people to see what I have been working on for eight years, too.