From November 12 to 21 move to the rhythm of the 14th edition of Pink Screens, the Brussels Queer Film Festival, celebrating sexualities and different genders with over 80 films.

Head to Lithuania for a poetic, magical escape in Alanté Kavaïté’s The Summer of Sangailé or risk a trip to the forest where all fantasies come to life in Jacques Accordé’s Amor Eterno. Shake up standard representations and fixed categories with Jan Soldat and his series of short films on the construction of masculinity and the dominance-submission relationship. Rediscover figures like Christine Delphy with Sylvie Tissot’s Je ne suis pas féminisme mais... and R.W. Fassbinder with Christian Thomsen Braad’s Lieben ohne zu Fordern, which provides an intimate and illuminating portrait of the still controversial filmmaker.

Pink Screens is also a ten-day expo of debates, performances and meetings to assault and deconstruct binaries. Whether before or after a session, and into the early hours, Pink Screens is 10 days of festivities and often folly as an event on the new queer scene, all closing on a high with the not-to-be-missed Pink Night.

Welcome all ye curious and daring! Welcome Pinkscreeners!

Focus Greek

This edition will be a chance to travel to Hellenic lands, where we meet a Greek archaeologist and an Egyptian immigrant who are joined in the angst of their personal experience at the heart of Christos Voupouras’s 7 Kinds of Wrath. In a series of short films, we will move from one reality to another : from the feelings of an adolescent fascinated by his tormenter in Thanasis Neofotistos’s Prosefhi : Greek School Prayer , to a zookeeper devasted by the departure of the gorilla he was in charge of in Nikolaos Kyritsis’s King Kong. In Telemachos Alexiou’s Queen Antigone, the line between myth and reality is blurred, clearly highlighting the current tragedy plaguing the country. The film is a fascinating contemporary, queer reinterpretation of the text by Sophocles, showing a young woman facing crisis slipping into the skin of Oedipus’s daughter.

Focus Boundaries

The boundaries that we would like to see, if not disappear, at least open a little more, are the cause of unspeakable tragedy in the early twenty-first century. They are becoming increasingly closed in every country because of national or nationalistic egoism. In Oriented by Jake Witzenfeld, we follow three Palestinian friends, citizens of Israel who are faced with an increasingly socially-divided and violent state of Israel. Two more films force us to confront the difficulties and humiliation suffered by young people wishing to live in a country other than where they were born. A escondidas by Mikel Rueda follows Ibrahim, a young Moroccan in an unwelcoming Spain, where only the young wanderer Rafa takes a liking to him. 7 Kinds of Wrath draws on the difficulties of integration when mistrust prevails.

Focus Double identity

We define ourselves in terms of the other, but would we be the same if we’d taken a different path ? That’s the question raised by Marco Berger in Mariposa where the single flutter of a butterfly’s wing can change destiny. Constantly navigating between two possibilities, the director questions the notion of fatality where chance has no place. On her journey, the heroine Princess of Tali Shalom-Ezer meets her male double who totally fascinates her : a tale of two kindred souls entwined in a fascinating androgyny. The problem is that identity can also be a mask, a decoy. Sophie Deraspe confronts us with this experience in The Amina Profil, where the filmmaker unveils a sordid game of manipulation and lies through a virtual relationship between a Canadian lesbian activist and a Syrian blogger.

Focus Fragil

The last pink thread winding its way through this year’s festival. Fragility could be the over-arching notion spanning the entire programme. We also felt it was important to underline, through the theme of this year’s Zinneke Parade, the delicate nature of first feature films that give us perspective while the feelings of the protagonists melt our hearts. Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar’s Margarita, With a Straw takes us beyond Laila’s handicap to her sexual pleasure and experiences. Mauricio Lopez Fernández’s La visita plunges us into an ultra-conservative, silent atmosphere unique to Chile where the inhabitants are shaken by the return of a son turned daughter. Finally, in Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon’s Beira-Mar, we share the angst and emotions of first love when one feels different.

This ’Fragile’ focus is the result of a collaboration with Zinneke asbl and an extension of their Fragil exhibition.