We are happy to collaborate yet again with the Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF) and present apackageof four films from the Archive of theArsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art at the 13th edition of the BQFF. The Festival opens on August 4, 2023 at Alliance Française, and moves to the Bhavan on August 5 & 6, 2023.
Since 2009, BQFF has been a community-funded, collectively-run, entry-free, annual film festival located in Bangalore, India. BQFF is an important avenue to bring to the Bangalore queer communities and public experimental, contemporary, archival, and/or social justice themed films and video art by queer filmmakers from across the city, the country and the world. BQFF is committed to the circulation of queer cinema, with a focus on films from non-Western locations, films by independent filmmakers, popular cinema that experiments with LGBTQ+ themes, and experimental radically queer films that push our ideas of good aesthetics. Alongside the film programming, the Festival also hosts art and photography exhibitions, poetry readings, drag acts and dance & theatre performances by queer artists.
Mondial 2010 Roy Dib
Lebanon | 2014 | 19 min. | Arabic with English subtitles Friday August 4, 11.40 a.m. | Alliance Française
A Lebanese gay couple decides to take a road trip to Ramallah. The film is recorded with their camera as they chronicle their journey. The viewers are invited through the couple’s conversations into the universe of a fading city. Mondial 2010 is a discussion of institutional borders in modern day Middle East. It uses video as an apparatus to transgress boundaries that are inflicted on people. It is a travel film in a trajectory that doesn’t allow travel, starring two male lovers, in a setting where homosexuality is a punishable felony.
Between Claudia Schillinger
Germany | 1989 | 7 min. | No dialogue Saturday August 5, 5.25 p.m. | Bhavan
Between is an attempt to show sexual fantasies and give them a specific cinematic form. "A summer afternoon full of daydreams. Sexual fantasies are embodied in black and white images of androgynous bodies. (...) Between relies on lustful fragmentation of the body, surreal sequences of scenes and ambivalent symbolism. The desire for an idiosyncratic staging of the body dominated the zeitgeist of the 1980s." - Rudolf Frieling.
Sexparty Angelika Levi
Netherlands, Germany | 1987 | 7 min. | Silent Saturday August 5, 5.35 p.m. | Bhavan
"Much of what the women filmed at a party in the punk and squatter scene was "lost" in the Kodak film lab. Sexparty thus remains unfinished, a fragment, and as such, one could say, a testimony to the precariousness of queer culture." - Marc Siegel.
Untitled Sequence of Gaps Vika Kirchenbauer
Germany | 2020 | 13 min. | English Sunday August 6, 9.10 a.m. | Bhavan
The invisible spectrum of light - that which is felt but never seen - becomes a means of approaching trauma-induced memory loss in this essay film composed of short vignettes of varying technique and materiality. Violence and its mechanisms, class and queerness are thereby viewed from within rather than by means of representation. The film combines planetary macro perspectives, physical phenomena and individual accounts of affective subject formation.
