FIRE returns!! with the purpose of “sowing stories, harvesting memories”, as dictated by the motto of this twenty-ninth edition, which will be held from June 6 to 16.
Frame from ‘All the Silence’
Once again this year, that prelude to summer arrives in the city of Barcelona in which passions and identities are ignited in an incandescent flame. Organized by Casal Lambda, the LGTBI Film Festival – FIRE!! returns to the French Institute with an unbeatable selection of national and international fiction and documentary feature films and short films.
An unavoidable date for those in love with this already consecrated annual meeting between creators and stories from the shadows, who fight to overthrow all kinds of prejudices. There is a wide representation of all the colors of the flag in their selection, but above all there is a firm social and cultural commitment in the proclamation of freedom. Added to daily passes this year two artistic exhibitions: Sport friendly. The track of diversity!, by the French photographer Émilien Buffard, and the vector portraits of Rubén Antón, Santa Ocaña. Fetits, somnis and transvestism.
Below we review 10 of the essential gems that will make people talk during this season: exciting stories of friendship, love, resilience and family, but also pieces of the history of artists to be vindicated, who fought so that their voice was never silenced.
Who will be saved from the great Flood? The entire LGBTIQ+ spectrum of young people expelled from their homes could fit into the private ark of the young French director Bryan Marciano, who opens this edition of FIRE!!. Behind the apparent comedy, the excesses and the desire to assert oneself, broken lives hide. In the shelter association managed by Noëlle (Valérie Lemercier), together with her assistant Alex (Finnegan Oldfield), they have six months to find a job and housing, but also to accept themselves as they are. A race against time in which feelings are on the surface, and through which tutors are also forced to reflect on their own mistakes and question their own motivations.
Marciano displays his multidisciplinary capacity in his first project as a director, in which he has also been in charge of the script, in four hands together with Noé Debré (who does a double at the festival with The Venus d’argent), and also the direction of photography, together with Vincent van Gelder. The filmmaker is one of the great promises of French cinema: in 2018 he created and starred in the series Vingt-cinqwhich earned him the award for Best Actor in the Series Mania competition, and now he premieres this very personal work that will thrill the public who liked it I’m loving you madly.
It passed through the documentary section of the Marché du Film at the Cannes Festival in 2023, but its playful social portrait makes the boundaries between what is real and what is fictional remain suspended. Director Sean Devlin revisits the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan that marked his previous work, When the storm fadesto set the delirious portrait of Jaya, a transgender woman, disaster survivor, former comedian and recently unemployed school teacher, who embarks on a trip to the Philippines in the hope of winning a beauty pageant. queer and pocket the prize. On his way he bumps into Arnel, a young student looking for a family.
Comedy and realism intersect the future of both characters in a wild Philippines, with issues of social emergency, such as climate change, LGTBIQ+ rights, transphobia and a harsh criticism of colonialism. Humor and love are two horses that ride in the same personal world of Jaya, brought to the screen thanks to the production of actor Alan Cumming, from the series The Good Wifeand Adam McKay, director of the film Don’t look up.
On Saturday the 8th, the actor Félix Mauritaud, brand new protagonist of Sauvageand Théodore Pellerin, from the film Genesis or the most recent series Benjamin Franklin, will present in person the romantic drama written and directed by Sophie Dupuis, which won the award for best Canadian film at the last Toronto Film Festival. A film about the impossibility of romantic and family relationships, in an environment in which they end up being blown up by toxic dynamics.
The scene drag of Montreal is portrayed realistically since Olivier (Mauritaud), a new waiter, meets Simon (Pellerin), a rising star in the world of the environment. Claire (Anne-Marie Cadieux), her mother, a famous opera singer who has returned to the city for work after an absence of fifteen years, also enters the young talent’s life. Simon will try to reconnect with her, but the future of both relationships will make him realize that he deserves better. Eroticism, sentimentality and performing arts, in addition to notable lead performances, make Only in one of the unmissable works of this edition.
Sofia is seventeen years old and a promising volleyball player from Brazil who plays with her gender-fluid team. When faced with an unwanted pregnancy, she is forced to seek help in a country where abortion is criminalized in most cases, and then becomes the target of a fundamentalist group, determined to stop her at any cost.
Filmmaker Lillah Halla makes her feature film debut with this powerful and vindictive debut film, which earned her the young jury prize at the Rotterdam Festival. Critics have praised the sorority queer with which the film responds to a certain Brazilian conservatism, as well as the authorship with which Halla portrays poignant topics such as abortion or the barriers to women’s rights in the country.
British actor James Floyd writes the script and co-directs, along with Sally El Hosaini, this film that has screened at festivals such as Toronto, London and Sydney. It stars the young Ben Hardy (Bohemian Rhapsody), as a single father who works as a mechanic, who one day meets Aysha (Jason Patel), a beautiful and seductive British Indian woman, at an underground nightclub. Luke soon realizes that the dancer is not the cisgender woman he thought, but once her prejudices are broken, he connects with her in a beautiful way, questioning whether love could arise from her.
The full incursion into the environment drag and Hindu in Hardy’s life will demarcate a before and after, in a story in which the cultural shock and the supposed forbidden romance promise to bring the viewer to tears. Social and religious codes will be about to be blown up, in a dramatic staging, but not without neon lights and flashes of glitter.
The Australian-Macedonian director Goran Stolevski surprised in 2022 with his fantastic story You will not be alone, in which supernatural beings exchanged bodies in a kind of traveling story. In some way, he recovers the subtle motif of the characters in the margins, through this new proposal with a radically different tone, nominated for best film in the Orizzonti section of the last Venice Festival and winner of the Queer Lion award.
In a dramatic and emotional key, Housekeeping for Beginners focuses on a very unconventional family. When Suada (Alina Serban), a Romani mother of two daughters (a rebellious teenager and a five-year-old girl) receives a cancer diagnosis, her partner, Dita (Anamaria Marinca), faces difficult decisions. Her house is a refuge for young boys and girls, separated from Macedonian society for being Roma and queer. Toni, a gay friend, reluctantly takes on the role of the girls’ father and Dita’s supposed fiancé, but the “marriage” will not be a bed of roses. Stolevski does a double in FIRE!!, with the second film in his filmography, Of an ageabout a short-lived gay romance.
Art and eroticism emerge from the photographs of male nudes by photographer George Platt Lynes, who defined himself as openly gay during his life, in the first half of the 20th century. The actor Yul Brynner was one of those who passed his target, although the world was not able to see those photographs until the 1990s. Only some were saved from destruction when, already ill, he decided to close his studio.
The exciting life of the artist is the central theme of this documentary directed by American Sam Shahid, which previously screened at the San Sebastián Festival. Although the work of celebrity and fashion portraits was the most visible face of Platt Lynes, work like that of Hidden Master claims his revolutionary contribution to the art of the nude. With a long list of personalities who offer their anecdotes, the film investigates his long friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alfred Kinsey, and summons the figure of the photographer as worthy of establishing himself in the pantheon of artists who have expressed themselves with elegance and sexual attraction of the image.
The director Carlos Giménez Pons will be present at the event, presenting the first documentary that narrates the LGTBI history of the city of Turia from the 70s to the early 2000s. The valuable unpublished material of Valencia, dear you It delves into an open and plural metropolis, full of stories, such as the first lgtbiphobic demonstrations and attacks, Brigade 26, the Moviment d’Alliberament Gai del Pais Valencià, the beginnings of Lambda, the Balkiss discotheque, the Ploma 2 cabaret, the Rampova’s last testimony, the trans struggle, AIDS, the first gay bookstore in the city or the first lesbian collective in the Valencian Community.
All of this, faithfully collected in an exhaustive review of the liberation designs collected during more than three decades in which the coastal city began to build its present and its future also from the margins. The work has more than a dozen testimonies that marked a before and after in the Valencian struggle where, for the first time, activists, historical figures, drag queens, businessmen and historians come together to form a unique and still unknown story.
The Polish director Leiv Igor Devold, based in Norway, leaves the documentary genre with which he has worked in his first two feature films, to approach this third from fiction set in the cold Scandinavian landscape and in personal experiences. In it, gay romance and social tensions within the working class intermingle to place its young protagonists in a personal and sentimental conflict.
It tells the story of Robert (Hubert Milkowski), a tough Polish immigrant worker. In his effort to rescue his mother from her financial difficulties, he finds work at a salmon processing company run by a small immigrant community. He is tutored in the job by Ivar (Karl Bekele Steinland), the adopted son of the plant’s wealthy owner. The two young people deal with problems of cultural displacement, economic inequality and sexual identity, exchanging the boundaries between friendship and love with their relationship.
The performer Adriana Llabres won the best actress award at the Morelia Festival, for her role in this film, which also won an award at the Amsterdam LGTBIQ+ Film Festival. Film and theater director Diego del Río explores the challenges and buried feelings between two women: a sign language teacher who is gradually losing her hearing, and her deaf girlfriend. He also takes it to a personal level, with the incursion of the world of theater into the life of Miriam (Llabres), for whom acting and music are everything.
Certainly, its premise would be reminiscent of the film Sound of metalwith which Del Río shares a safe bet on innovation in the acoustic design of the footage, which gives the viewer the sensation of accompanying the protagonist on her complicated journey towards the loss of one of her senses and her consequent emotional turmoil.
