Today marks the start of GAZE Dublin’s 25th LGBT film festival. The best contemporary LGBT films will be celebrated at the Light House Cinema in Smithfield this bank holiday weekend. The programme will include documentaries, discussions and retrospective screenings. The programme looks to be especially promising this year with celebrations in full swing to mark 25 years of honouring LGBT film in Dublin. A look back at the last quarter century will examine the role of storytelling in the milestones that the LGBT community have achieved during this time.
The festival begins tonight (Thursday 3 August) with a screening of The 34th, a documentary following those who drove the fight for marriage equality on the lead up to the Marriage Equality referendum on 22 May 2015. The documentary spans a decade, culminating in the 34th amendment to the Irish constitution, allowing for marriage without distinction of sex.
The programme will run through until Monday evening, closing with a screening of one of the most critically praised LGBT films this year, God’s Own Country. The film focuses on Johnny, a young English man who works on his parents’ remote farm. His lonely existence is dramatically transformed when he begins a close relationship with a Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe who takes up temporary work at the farm.
Noel Sutton, Festival Director of GAZE said, “I’m thrilled to welcome such an exciting group of filmmakers from our anniversary programme. We have a 25-year history of bringing audiences and filmmakers together to discuss and reflect on LGBT film and culture both from Ireland and across the world and this year will be no exception. Appropriately our guests will be both looking back through our collective past in films like Queerama and Against the Law, while also reflecting modern gay life and storytelling in the two very different voyages of Dreamboat and The Dark Mile. Our retrospective screening of The Crying Game gives us a chance to reflect on the journey of Trans visibility in Ireland from one of perceived sensationalism to having some of the most progressive laws in Europe.”
More about the programme can be found on the GAZE website: https://www.gaze.ie/
And on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/gazefilmfest/