3rd Side By Side LGBT International Film Festival Side By Side
The festival was planned to run from the 15th to the 23rd of October in 2010 and it was supported by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, American screenwriter and director Gus Van Sant, British director Ken Loach, British actor, director and writer Stephen Fry, Russian actor and artist Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), and film critic Mikhail Trofimenkov. Later on they were joined by British actor Ian McKellen, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe Thomas Hammarberg, British writer and director Mike Leigh, singer Marc Almond, and American director Bruce LaBruce.
In 2010 the film festival passed without incidents in public venues. For the first time animations were included in the program. An exhibition of LGBT film festival posters from Europe, Asia, America and Africa was also held, in order to visually show the history of the development of such festivals. The non-competition program under the name of “Love behind the Iron Curtain” presented vintage films shot in the countries from the former Socialist block: Hungarian film “Another way” from 1982 by Károly Makk, “Westler”, a film from the Federal Republic of Germany by Wieland Speck, and “Coming out” by Heiner Carow, which was the first and last gay film produced in the German Democratic Republic as it was released only a few hours before the Berlin Wall fell.
The festival was visited by special guests: Swedish animator Lasse Persson, German actor Matthias Freihof, Israeli director Tomer Heymann, Danish directors Iben Haar Andersen and Minna Gross, Turkish transgender activist, heroine of the movie Me and Nuri Bula, transsexual Esmeray, Russian director Dmitriy Gribanov, and film critic Oleg Kovalov. Roundtable discussions were held about children in same-sex families, transgender rights in Russia and Turkey, homophobia in society, movement for LGBT rights in Russia and the world, among others.
This year the film festival found a visual embodiment for its award called BoBik (an analogue of the Berlin bear Teddy and the Venetian Queer Lion). The prototype of Bobik was festival founder Manny de Guerre’s dog. The name comes from the abbreviation for the festival “Bok o Bok” (“Side by Side” in Russian).
The competition program consisted of four features including one Russian, four documentaries and fourteen short films. For the first time, there was also an animation section presented with twelve films.
Read more about this topic: Side By Side (film Festival)
Famous quotes containing the words side, film and/or festival:
“Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other—two gay guardian angels every human ought to have.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.”
—Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
“The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)