Publication details
Programming of the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival: Between Western openness and Eastern opportunities
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Mezipatra Queer Film Festival is a queer film festival that is located in two Czech major cities, Prague and Brno. It has taken place every year since 2000, although first two years were Brno-only. In the context of post-socialist space, its position in the society is quite anomalous – in a similar way as is the case of Ljubljana Festival LGBT Filma, although for different reasons. Although Mezipatra does not have such a long-running tradition as the festival in Ljubljana, it can draw on Czech society’s quite fair-minded attitudes toward LGBTIQ+ people, at least in the context of Central-East European societies. This made Mezipatra quite popular among heterosexual cisgender people who make about 50 % of festival attendants every year. Due of this, there is only quite a small number of attendants who exclusively prefer assimilationist commercial homonormative films that are usually intended as the box-office success and that are important parts of Western queer film festivals. This makes Mezipatra festival organizers feel not to be bounded by Western queer festival’s “traditional programming strategies”. Paradoxically, the stable heterosexual cisgender audience base gives organizers wider options to use “queer programming strategies” and present a good number of experimental queer films, films of independent queer authors with the aim of supporting them, as well as originally non-queer films that can be reinterpreted under new circumstances. Our research is based on semi-structured interviews with organizers of Mezipatra Queer Film Festival. |