The FIRE! 2024 plants the seeds of LGTBIQ+ cinema at Institut Francès
Feature films, documentaries and short films make up the programme of the festival, which will be held between 6 and 13 June.
The 2024 edition of the FIRE!!! film festival begins with the screening of the inaugural film by Bryan Marciano entitled L'Arche de Noé (Under the Rainbow) on 6 June. It will be a week full of full-length films, short films and documentaries on the lives and experiences of gay, lesbian and transgender people, among others. Projections at Institut Francès.
This year’s slogan is ‘sowing stories, collecting memories’, an idea and a poster (the one you can see in the image), which uses the simile of the seeds and the plants to claim a collective memory of the collective, a memory that grows, makes it more visible and reflects the different ways of life of the people who are part of it.
About to reach its thirtieth edition, FIRE!!! opens with the stories of young LGTBIQ+ people who live in a family centre and who have only six months to find a way to support themselves on their own. This is the aforementioned L'Arche de Noé (Under the Rainbow), which you can see projected on the 6th or the 16th. Come on the day of the opening ceremony and you can see it with a sign language translation service.
From this point onwards, there will be a plethora of films from the official section. Among the long fiction films, there are also French films such as La Vénus d'argent (9 and 16 June), about a young non-binary girl who lives on a military base; Canadian films such as Solo, by Sophie Dupuis, in which we will get to know the drag scene in Montreal; Greek films such as The Summer with Carmen directed by Zacharias Mavroeidis or Norwegian films such as Norvegian Dream, by Leiv Igor Devold, among many, many more..
Many short films are part of the programme, as well as a good number of documentary films that both take us through the history of the LGTBIQ+ movement in Valencia (València, t'estime, by Carlos Giménez Pons; 15 June) and talk about a North American photographer dedicated to the masculine nu (Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, by Sam Shahid; 10 June) or about new models of family (Faire famille, directed by Océan; 13 June)
Among the other sections of the festival, the Trans Screen section focuses on the representation of transsexuality and non-binary genders in fiction and documentary films, with films such as Féeroce (13 June) and A bird called Memory (14 June); A l'Est de l'Edèn (At the East of Eden) brings us closer to LGTBIQ+ Asian cinema and La mirada del cinema francès (The gaze of French cinema) focuses on films from this nationality
An exhibition dedicated to Ocaña and a screening of the film by Ventura Pons (disappeared this year) Ocaña, retrat intermitent (16 June) are part of a Tribute to Ventura Pons and Ocaña. Finally, on 16 June, there will be the screening of the festival's closing film, Housekeeping for Beginners, an Australian production directed by an Australian and Macedonian director, Goran Stolevski.
If you don't want to miss the most recent and most acclaimed LGTBIQ+ themed films, come to next year's edition of the FIRE!! festival, but first check out the full programme on the website.