The Scottish Queer International Film festival (SQIFF) opens its doors at Glasgow’s CCA and other venues across the city today. SQIFF’s goal is to “get people watching, talking about and making more queer films”. Yaz Duncan caught up with Helen Wright from SQIFF to find out more.
Dyke Hard is billed as a ’musical action horror sci- fi comedy. Who do you think would enjoy this film?
People who are fans of trashy, camp cinema. Dyke Hard definitely takes inspiration from the films of John Waters, so anyone who’s a fan of him should see it. Also, if you’re interested in lesbian representation, this is a really unique approach to that with a strong political ethos with trans women and women of colour in the main roles.
The feminist shorts are a collection of six short films dealing with intersectional issues affecting those who identify or are perceived as female. How important was it that the SQIFF was inclusive?
Very important. It’s a queer event and that means inclusion and intersectionality should be at the heart of it. Putting together the feminist shorts programme was interesting and also difficult. We felt we wanted to cover some of the big issues and debates in feminism, so that meant, for example, talking about the status of trans women in society and about sexual desire in women sometimes being repressed but of course we couldn’t cover everything that people find important. It’s a snapshot really consisting of some amazing films that we came across which address or highlight different feminist themes.
Dyke Hard
The Female Masculinity Appreciation Society particularly caught my eye. A lot of people see ‘femininity’ and masculinity’ as mutually exclusive and opposite. Do you think this film will challenge that notion?
Maybe! This film is great. It’s a documentary about an event which happens in London about four or five times a year at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Female masculinity is celebrated, people dress up and there is an arm-wrestling contest. The film is pretty cute and funny but it does challenge society’s ideas about gender as well, yes. Mostly it does this through honouring all the wonderful characters that attend the night and letting them talk about their experiences of masculinity.
These shorts feature feminist issues and issues that face queer women. Do you think that lesbian, trans and queer women are often underrepresented or made invisible?
Yes, I do. A main reason we wanted to make SQIFF happen is the pretty terrible representation of queer people in general in the films that typically make it into cinemas but that representation gets worse when it comes to women and worse again when it comes to queer and trans women. Our feminist shorts programme is a small attempt to redress this and we’ve also got lots of other films in the programme which give a voice to lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans women. For instance, A Gay Girl in Damascus, which is a thriller-like documentary telling the shocking story behind a white man from the US pretending to be a lesbian woman living in Syria, and Finding Phong, which uses video diaries to allow a trans woman in Vietnam to talk about her experiences.
I,You,Her, FU377 and #BlackWomensLivesMatter deal with queer and feminist issue from an international point of view. Do you think enough is being done to present a queer narrative that includes people of colour?
No, I don’t think enough is being done on that front. Racism and underrepresentation of queer people of colour is a huge problem. Of course, in Glasgow there was the excellent Queer Trans Intersex People of Colour film festival Glitch in March. An event like that is really important in, again, giving a voice to people and communities which are marginalised. We’ve tried in our own programme to address that as well by including films with a wide range of perspectives. The three films you mention above are all brilliant. I, You, Her is about two trans women in Turkey discussing their lives and the country’s politics. FU377 is an animation by a filmmaker based in London called Neelu Bhuman. We like it so much we’re screening it twice – the second screening is in front of a doc about LGBT rights in India, Breaking Free. And #BlackWomensLivesMatter is an experimental and poetic collage of images used to oppress women of colour and words of resistance against this. It was made as part of a Queer Women of Colour film festival and filmmaking and activist group in San Francisco.
[Yaz Duncan]
SQIFF runs 24-27 September 2015. For information on tickets and the full festival programme, visit sqiff.org.