For almost 20 years, Genres d’à côté asbl has been involved in the showing in Belgium of films that deal with the issues of gender, different sexual orientations and minority lifestyles. It unearths new productions and screens them during its monthly film club or at the Pink Screens Festival in the second week of November.
Since December 2017, OUR STORY, a project involving CINEMATEK and Pink Screens Film Festival, has been diving into the queer and LGBT archives and cinematic collections: Classics, never-before seen and little-known treasures will be the lights guiding us through our history and memory.
Every 3 months, the project gives the chance to revisit a film, a topic or a director; these marginalised or well-known images are sometimes accompanied by special presentations and context setting.
Visualising the history of the queer identity and movement through cinema is also one of the aims of Our Story.
This project is especially inspired by the American Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, which has been committed to preserving and saving LGBTQI cinematic works since 2005 and is a collaboration between the OutFest Film Festival and the University of California UCLA. This project was presented at the OUR STORY session in March 2018 through The Watermelon Woman (1996), a restored film by Cheryl Dunye that is considered the first fictional feature film made by an African-American lesbian.