Pink Screens

We are delighted to present the visual for the 9th edition of Pink Screens Film Festival which will take place from 21 to 30 October at Cinema Nova.
Bold and subversive, Pink Screens is the only film festival in Belgium that challenges, in a plural and non Manichean way, issues about gender and sexualities, with a twist of honesty, humour and curiosity.
Pink Screens Film Festival is organised by volunteer association Genres d’à Côté and considers queer theories and themes with a cinephile angle, exploring original and taboo-free cinematography from all over the world.
Once again, our programme will explore various themes, in parallel with an exclusive focus on two artists who can’t be easily labelled: Barbara Hammer and Daniel Schmid. With the collaboration of Bozar and Cinematek, we will put these essential, though very little known, artists into the spotlight. Moreover, following a retrospective at New York’s MOMA, and before London’s Tate Modern, Pink Screens and Bozar will be the only to show the amazing works of Barbara Hammer in Belgium!
We hope to find you as curious as we are excited to programme challenging films in our festival.
The Team of Pink Screens Film Festival

Barbara Hammer, born in 1939 in Hollywood, she is a lesbian director and has written, directed and produced her own films; documentaries or self-biographies, her films are generally black and white. Her films are marginal, often experimental, and have won several awards: they explore female sexuality, build a lesbian heritage and celebrate queer life.

www.pinkscreens.org

Peru, in a small fishing port where the mentality of the village is deeply marked by tradition, Miguel, married and soon to be father is also in love with Santiago, a painter shunned by the village community for his homosexuality. Following an accident, Santiago disappears from the eyes of all except Miguel, allowing them to ‘openly’ live out their passion….This ‘haunted’ story firmly rooted in daily reality told in an enlightened, sensual and disturbing film.

This rich fiction, based upon the incredible but true story of Anne Lister, a bold and passionate heroine of the 19th century, who frightens the English countryside living openly her life as a lesbian. From conquest to conquest, Anne Lister kept a secret coded diary where she described her sexual adventures in a bold and contemporary style. What more to say? Here is the first modern lesbian!

Raised by their two mothers, together for 20 years, a brother and sister now old enough to legally access their files, decide to search out the donor who is the father of them both… Winner of a Teddy for best film in 2010, this hilarious comedy gives us a Annette Bening unrecognizable in a couple with the always sublime Julianne Moore, gay icon and now also a lesbian icon. As the donor-father, Mark Ruffalo is irresistibly sexy.

Omar and Emmanuel spare nothing to prove that they no longer love each other. This film by Christophe Honoré (’Les Chansons d’amour’) is between a work of fiction set in a ‘hot’ – in the erotic sense! – suburb and a travel guide to New York. A sexual film (yes there is a lot of sex), tender, romantic, violent and surprising that uses the screen to show off the impressive body of ex-porn star François Sagal while confronted by his lovers.

Once upon a time there was an emerging feminist movement with inspired female artists and a magazine, ’Heresies’, which allowed them to explore their condition of women in the world of Arts collectively as well as the issues on the agenda of the feminist movement at the time. The Heretics is the story of this magazine, through newsreels and contemporary interviews, that tells about the ’awakening’ of these women and their careers both as artists and militants. An insight into a moment in the history of women that will make you regret not having been part of it.

A heroine addicted actress, a director and his friend with a camera form a strange and hallucinating trio in search of the ultimate work of art. How far will they go? With Cecilia Roth, Eusebio Poncela, and so it seems, Almodovar who voiceovers one of the actresses. This lost cult film populated by legends, signed by a cursed director of the Movida, displays a boundless fascination for a cinema total and spellbinding, and remains one of the films which marked the young post-Franco Spain.

Bruno has just been dumped by his girlfriend and decides to seduce her new boy friend Pedro to undermine the new couple. The result of this love triangle is a mix of tenderness and sensuality: trapped in their own game, the young he(te)ros of the movie give themselves away to the confusion of their feelings. A first original movie that moves from being a prudish comedy to an intimate light drama, with interpreters who are as young as they are hot.

For or against pro-sex feminism? If you want to update yourself on this matter you have to see this movie of Virginie Despentes: she treats this subject brilliantly. From the 1980s to nowadays, with interviews and excerpts of shows by Maria Beatty, Ann Sprinkle, Émilie Jouvet, Lydia Lunch... The post-porn movement is brought forward as a tool of feminist protest, exploring the body, the gender stakes, the relations between power and female sexuality. Instructive as well as constructive!

Riot Acts takes us to meet trans-artists in the North American rock scene. This journey interspersed with musical discoveries crosses the testimony of this double experience, both of identity and music. It flows through subjects such as the influence of identity on literature, the relationship between the voice and its eventual changes due to hormones, the way to present on stage a society where body and identity are undeniably political, and offering an original and rich approach to trans-identity.

Jesse, a 12 year old, has just arrived in a rather conservative rural village with her less than understanding father and her ’delightfully’ normal little sister. Fascinated with insects and barricaded behind her helmet, she doesn’t fit the traditional role of girls her age, who are thrilled to welcome her with a rain of meatballs. This moving film evokes the hardship of the passage from childhood to adolescence through the beautiful character of a tomboy... or a full-blown woman ?!

What is ‘Feminist Porn’? Is it possible to produce feminist pornographic films? What form would they take? Does it lead us to an alternative representation of feminine sexuality by filming bodies differently, as well as sex, desire and pleasure? Twelve female film makers try to respond to this question through twelve short films. Without a clear opening definition, or a monolithic response at the end, but twelve various illustrations that are as much questions as answers.

Lily Brest, a solitary prostitute unable to solicitate for herself, her pimp obsessed with the sex of his clients, her father, ex-Nazi and transvestite, a Jewish promoter….a kaleidoscope of multiple personalities. The Shadow of Angels is a film about power, money and the total impunity of love. Its beauty is not only due to Fassbinder’s story, but also the dramatic force of the images and the direction of Schmid, but also the interpretation by an actress of immense talent, Ingrid Caven.

This documentary about Daniel Schmid, director and friend of R.W. Fassbinder and W. Schroeter plunges us into the effervescent creativity of 1970s Germany. Thanks to numerous sequences extracted from his films, in his company or that of his numerous collaborators (Ingred Caven, Bulle Ogier…) we undertake a magnificent cinematic voyage into the life and works of one of the most original artists Switzerland has given us.

It’s the summer of all changes and the ultimate step into adulthood. Jorgelina’s parents divorce and her teenage sister becomes distant, leaving her to play alone in la Boyita, the caravan of their childhood. In the countryside she meets Mario, the son of some neighboring peasants, with whom she discovers that the world is a much more complex, confusing and fascinating place. A beautiful and intimate movie about the awakening and mysteries of sexual identity, through the eyes of a child.

Smith lives a peaceful existence around the campus: he hangs out with his best friend, the impertinent Stella, sleeps with the beautiful London while lusting for Thor, his sublime and somewhat moronic flatmate – till one terrifying night when under the influence of drugs his whole world changes. Araki throws a bit of Twin Peaks into his trashy universe with the wit of Totally f****** up, Nowhere and Doom Generation.