March: OUR STORY: Be Gay, Do Crime_1: When in Chicago…

In March, Our Story begins its series Be Gay, Do Crime in Chicago. Seven decades apart, in the famous city still known as the “capital of crime”, Swoon and Bound’s two protagonist couples live their lives outside the confines of the law.
Products of the New Queer Cinema of the 90s, these related works are both central projects in the LGBTQ+ filmmakers movement: the refusal to make themselves respectable at a time of persistent antipathy towards a community hard hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic; and the desire to reclaim and explore the damaging fictional figure of the queer villain ‘from the inside’.

In Swoon, Tom Kalin examines the story of murderous duo Leopold and Loeb, questioning the historic representation of both their homosexuality and their monstrosity. In Bound, the Wachowski sisters cleverly play with the codes of camp and mafia films, offering their criminal heroines satisfying revenge on the system and machismo which holds them down.

April: OUR STORY: Be Gay, Do Crime_2: ‘Nice cut & paste job!’

Dykes and fags resist outright the attempts of the state to make pictures of us and resist outright the state’s attempts to suppress our pictures. — John Greyson

In April, Our Story interrogates the multiple ways in which queer artists navigate and confront questions of image rights and copyright. Queer cinema is characterised by abundant reuse, misappropriation, or plain and simple plagiarism of existing works, particularly in its most experimental and militant inflexions. From Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising to Todd Haynes’ Superstar, numerous creations have been considered as infringing on intellectual property rights. Copyright specialist Séverine Dusollier, during a presentation in french, will look at some examples of queer creations that have been legally threatened, or even simply censored. With Un©ut, John Greyson presents copyright as serving a wider apparatus of surveillance and control over the desires and productions of minorities. Sondra Perry's It's in the Game traces the misuse of a black basketball player's image in a video game and addresses the issue of cultural appropriation in the age of new media. With Jubilee 2033, Zach Blas advocates a queer “counter-internet” and a “utopian practice of plagiarism” as an alternative to platform capitalism.

May: OUR STORY: Juliana and the Street Kids’ Revolution

In May, Our Story takes a look at a classic of Peruvian cinema. Created and produced by Grupo Chaski, a collective of engaged filmmakers determined to bring cinema to the marginalised zones of the country, the film Juliana follows the tribulations of a child from Lima’s poor quarters in the late 80’s.

Juliana is, according to some, the first niña feminista of Peruvian cinema: her resourcefulness, her compassion, her resilience, her instincts for leadership, will leave their mark on an entire generation. Even more intriguing, Juliana adopts a masc identity to survive. The directors are less interested in exploring the gender identity of their protagonist than the plight of street children and their necessary revolt against those who exploit them. However, by letting her character live her life without constantly bringing her back to her femininity, the film leaves us free to understand Juliana for ourselves.

En collaboration avec