Scottish Queer International Film Festival announces 2024 programme
SQIFF returns for its ninth annual celebration of LGBTQIA+ filmmaking talent with a five-day festival that includes a documentary on the lesbian Greek paradise Lesvos, an installation celebrating the much-missed Bonjour, and a lively short film programme
Queers, assemble! The essential Scottish Queer International Film Festival (or SQIFF for short) is returning this Autumn, running 8 to 12 October at the CCA and GFT in Glasgow, and it’s another enticing programme featuring exciting voices in LGBTQIA+ cinema.
A festival highlight looks to be the lyrical documentary Lesvia from Greek filmmaker Tzeli Hadjidimitriou, which takes us to the island of Lesvos (12 Oct, CCA). For the last five decades, lesbians from all over the globe have been drawn to this Greek island, the birthplace of the poet Sappho, with many of them making it their home. This flourishing of a queer community on the island has not been without its tensions with locals, however. Hadjidimitriou, who is both a lesbian and a native of Lesvos, finds herself in the middle of these tensions, and explores them in a film concerned with love, community, conflict, and what it means to feel accepted.
SQIFF have also unearthed a classic of LGBTQIA+ cinema for this edition: Isao Fujisawa’s Bye Bye Love from 1974 (10 Oct, CCA). Screening in partnership with another great LGBTQIA+ festival, Queer East, this counterculture road movie from Japan was thought lost until the negatives turned up in a warehouse in 2018. It follows two young people as they undertake a doomed summer road trip through Japan, and explores romantic love that transcends gender, sexuality, and even the body. This will be Bye Bye Love’s first screening in Scotland.
Elsewhere, there’s a series of 15 sharply curated short film programmes that explore themes such as the often delicate and heartbreaking nature of queer love (Blossoming Wilt, 9 Oct), queer people’s evolving relationship with the internet (The Real Internet Is Inside You, 9 Oct) and the power of music to empower marginalised communities (Music as Resistance, 12 Oct) to name just a few. The festival also kicks off with short films with a programme celebrating local LGBTQIA+ filmmaking (Opening Night Scottish Shorts, 8 Oct).
There’s plenty more going on at SQIFF outside the cinema space, including an installation looking back at the legacy and community forged at Glasgow’s beloved and much-missed queer club and workers’ cooperative Bonjour, which closed at the end of last year. There are also a bunch of workshops and discussions planned, a performance by Glasgow-based musician and audio-visual artist Kyalo Searle-Mbullu, and a letter-writing workshop with artist Huss Mitha, which will use tools from abolitionist theory and sci-fi to allow participants to imagine future versions of themselves.
The festival will come to a close with a party at CCA in collaboration with Q’IWA, Mojxmma and Scandal and will feature a full QTIBPOC line-up of artists and performances, including a BSL-interpreted cabaret.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more inclusive festival on the UK calendar than SQIFF, with all screenings featuring audio description, live captioning, BSL interpretation, descriptive subtitles and more. All tickets are priced on a pay-what-you-can basis. For the full programme, head to sqiff.org