Beyond the glitz and glamour of the big film festivals such as the Cannes or Berlinale, small-scale film festivals continue to curate meaningful cinema silently for their audiences. This article throws light on Swedish queer film festivals, which, despite continuous struggle, continue to bring together the LGBTQIA+ community in Sweden.
The queer body is political. It does not fit into the norm boxes society provides. It is too big, too black, too hairy, too soft, too pale, too slim, and too muscular. It refuses to testify for one or the other sex, it is not distinct enough. Our bodies are political. By existing and being visible, we bear witness to the norms that affect everyone, queer or not. These norms can lead to self-hatred and to hate from others. Hate against us because we do not force our bodies to fit into these norms — hatred that can lead to harassment, discrimination, violence, and murder. Hate that causes LGTBQ + people to feel worse and have less access to resources. The queer body is political activism. We are celebrating the queer body through films, discussions, and performances at MQF.
- an extract from the festival blog of the Malmö Queer Film festival (MQF) 2019
Film Festival Curation
Film festival curation is commonly understood as a glamorous job—one with red carpets, mingling with celebrities, and dazzling after-parties. Through this article, I would like to illustrate a counterview, one where curating small-scale, identity-based film festivals is not so much about opulence but rather a form of community-building and civic activism.
The ideas I present here are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Swedish queer film festivals between 2016 and 2021 as part of my doctoral research, where I explored the relevance of these queer film festivals in the lives of LGBTQIA+ persons living in Sweden. I reveal that these festivals are not simply cultural events where films about gender and sexuality are screened but places through which the political lives of LGBTQIA+ persons become intelligible.
The Swedish LGBTQIA+ Paradox
Sweden, compared to many other countries in the world, has one of the most progressive outlooks on LGBTQIA+ persons. Discrimination based on gender and sexuality is strictly prohibited; this became part of the Swedish constitution in 2011. Legal change of gender identity was allowed as early as 1972. The legalization of same-sex relationships dates to 1944. Other LGBTQIA+-friendly legislation, such as gender-neutral wedding laws (2009), adoption rights for gay and lesbian couples (2003), and insemination rights for lesbians (2005), have been continuously adopted by the Swedish state.
Legally, LGBTQIA+ persons are equal in all aspects to any other person living in Sweden. Their social situation, however, as described to me by many LGBTQIA+ individuals, was complex and not robust. Many people regularly complained about being discriminated against based on their sexual or gender orientation. Trans people I interacted with specifically pointed out the discrimination they faced in accessing healthcare. For example, even though the right to choose one’s gender is protected legally, many complained about the normative bias they faced during their evaluation meetings with physicians before their gender reassignment was sanctioned.
The point of these examples is that LGBTQIA+ persons live in situations that are far more complicated (and biased) than what comes across when looking at the legal frameworks and the image portrayed by governmental publications. Herein lies the paradox. Not only do many LGBTQIA+ persons living in Sweden articulate concerns that impede them from living their lives on par with other members of society, but the Swedish state, in practice, does not always recognize their situation of vulnerability.
While LGBTQIA+ persons living in Sweden are relatively safe from being persecuted by the state, their concerns begin with being seen, acknowledged, and recognized as precarious. This form of precarity, as anthropologist Clara Han (2018) writes, is “a condition of being and feeling insecure in life that extends to one’s (dis)connectedness from a sense of social community” (p. 348). Feelings of abandonment and a lack of community emerged as a constant theme punctuating my research within queer film festivals in Sweden. It is my argument that it is the condition of being socially precarious that is curated by queer film festivals in Sweden.
Curating Swedish Queer Film Festivals
Q has been organizing the Malmö Queer Film Festival (MQF) since 2009. Short and stoutly built, in her late forties, she is a quintessential cinephile. Q has a doctorate in Cultural Gender Studies from the University of Oldenburg, a mid-sized town in northern Germany. She fell in love with queer cinema in her late teens as a film studies student. In 2009, Q immigrated to Malmö from Germany with her partner, who teaches at a university in a neighboring town. Q’s first job in Sweden was working as a cinema projectionist. It was during this time that she first conceived of a queer film festival for Malmö. Through Folkets Bio, she found financial and logistical support to start the MQF as an annual film festival. A few years later, she started working for Malmö Against Discrimination (Malmö mot Diskriminering), a non-profit organization, as an educator and trainer. But even then, Q continued organizing the MQF every year.
A few months into my fieldwork, sitting on the stools of the café at Panora, the cinema where MQF takes place, Q and I were engrossed in a conversation in which she was telling me about her work as a curator.
“To have a film festival that screens films about lesbians and gays, and then every other year we have a film about bisexuality or a couple of trans films, I think that is totally boring because that is something we know,” she said and added, “while programming for the MQF, I am interested in that which we do not know.”
I asked her to explain what it was that she thought “we” did not know. In response to my question, she said, “What happens when someone is an immigrant and trans? If someone is disabled and queer? That is what we don’t know, and I am interested in knowing. I am always interested in intersectionality.”
The term “intersectionality” was first coined by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989), who placed Black women at the center of her analysis to show how the intersection of race and sex renders Black women’s experiences invisible within the doctrinal definitions of discrimination. Q’s use of the term intersectionality was akin to the way it was theorized by Crenshaw, except that Q did not place a particular identity group at the center of this intersection. Instead, intersectionality was understood in the context of inclusivity of all “queer” bodies. Anyone could be a victim, by accident, of the multiple forms of discrimination headed in their direction.
An example of how intersectionality worked as a compelling principle at the MQF was to work on specific themes that did not have a central place in broader LGBTQIA+ debates in Sweden. The theme of the 2017 festival was issues of (in)accessibility and LGBTQIA+ identities. In the following year, the intersectional focus of the festival remained with the theme of “Class and Activism.”
The Pandemic and Resilience
In early 2020, MQF was almost ready with its preparations for its next festival scheduled in April. The film program was decided, the posters were in place, and the cinema was booked. These plans, however, were scattered to the winds in 2020 when the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) held the world in its grip. On March 17th, the MQF announced that the event was either canceled or postponed. CQF was also hit hard by the consequences of the pandemic. The funding that the festival received was reduced by half, as were their opportunities to host the festival across several venues in Stockholm.
In the fall, as the spread of infection slowed, cinemas partially resumed operations. MQF returned with a Queer Film Day in November, featuring their recurring regional short queer film program and a feature screening. Earlier in October, CQF had already opened as Hotel Cinema Queer 2020, taking over an under-construction hotel and turning it into a single venue spread across several rooms at the site. The festival ran for a week, with a fifty-person limit at gatherings as recommended by the Swedish Public Health Agency (FHM), and hosted a full event. For those who could not attend, access to a digital festival was included in the festival pass.
The resilience of Sweden’s queer film festivals was laudatory. For Q, the experience of working on a low budget was an advantage. Fewer resources meant greater stability for the festival, which, according to Q, was “mostly built around the commitment of queers.” The MQF, she says, will remain “as long as there are queers who want to get involved and ‘do’ the festival.”
The support shown to the queer film festival by the volunteer community that it has constructed around itself was also the reason behind a successful CQF. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, MQF and CQF have shown that films are an antidote to hopelessness and despair. Even as the extreme right-wing party, currently sitting in government in Sweden, exerts influence by cutting down spending on LGBTQIA+ culture, it is hard to say what the future of queer film festivals will look like. The challenges that lie ahead for these festivals are immense but can be overcome if we recognize their significance and continue to engage with and support them.
Works Cited
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, Volume 1989, Issue 1, Article 8.
Han, C. (2018). Precarity, precariousness, and vulnerability. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47, 331-343.
