23rd Torino GLBT Film Festival to Feature Retrospectives and Tributes

Filed Under Arts, Gay Entertainment, Gay Events, Gay Film | March 5th, 2008 

23rd Torino GLBT Film Festival 'Da Sodoma a Hollywood'The 23rd Torino GLBT Film Festival “Da Sodoma a Hollywood” takes place 17th-25th April, 2008. Along with the competition sections (full-length features, shorts, documentaries), this year edition will also focus on a retrospective on Japanese queer films from the 1960s to the present and on full retrospective tributes to Sébastien Lifshitz and Stanley Kwan (who will both be present at the festival). Controversial artist Terence Koh will be present too with the première of his new feature “God”.

Torino, Italy — “Da Sodoma a Hollywood”, the Torino International GLBT Film Festival, enters its 23rd consecutive year, and the third jointly organized and administrated in collaboration with the National Museum of Cinema: 23 years of exploration and construction of queer imagination.

With a sharp discerning eye for perceiving new developments, the Festival has gone from strength to strength, becoming one of the major drivers of dialogue between the GLBT community and the public. Moreover, it has introduced Italian audiences to the works of established directors such as François Ozon, Gus Van Sant, Derek Jarman and Todd Haynes, as well as less known filmmakers including Eytan Fox, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Alain Guiraudie, Auraeus Solito and Brillante Mendoza.

Highlights scheduled for this year’s film festival:

International Competition
Three sections: feature films, shorts and documentaries. Three international juries, one for each section, will award the Ottavio Mai Prize to the best feature film and a best in its category prize to winners in the other sections. An audience prize will be awarded the best film in each section.

Panorama
Three out-of-competition sections: feature films, shorts and documentaries from the latest film and video productions.

Retrospective: j-ender: big bang love in Japan

An exciting journey into the empire of senses and signs. In collaboration with NEO(N)EIGA, the Festival will present the first European retrospective of Japanese queer films from the 1960s to the present. The retrospective will cross borders of gender and genre as it explores the Land of the Rising Sun. From the artistic freedom and experiments of the nuberu bagu (Japanese nouvelle vague) through the traditional theater and the political soft core of pinku eiga (transvestism and outrageous pop culture), to the cartoons, in Japanese named Anime, that open a window onto desires and passions that would be difficult to find elsewhere. The cinema offers unique perspectives for us as distant observers of a country and a culture whose complexity is revealed in the endless paradigms of self-portrayal.

Featured Tributes:

Divine, camp icon par excellence, who died in 1988 at age 43 – indirectly celebrated by the festival in 2005 with the big Tribute to John Waters’ cinema – will be remembered on the 20th anniversary of his death with an image-gift by Francesco Vezzoli and with a screening of Paul Bartel’s Lust in the Dust (1985), where Divine teamed up with Tab Hunter in a triumph of kitsch.

Stanley Kwan: Identity and Desire
Whether documentary or fiction, Kwan’s cinema traces a solitary yet necessary path across the cinematography of Hong Kong, spanning the two decades before and after annexation to the People’s Republic of China. His characters give a compelling account of historical events, interwoven with highly personal elements of their own lives. Bodies move through the changes taking place in China’s major cities (Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai), holding firm to the ancient dream of preserving beauty and, through love, imbuing the images with the explosive force of desire. The passion in Kwan’s films flows like a soft breeze coming in through a window, silently growing stronger, becoming a habit, until it explodes the delicate balance of existence. Kwan will present Hold You Tight (1997), Lun yu (2001) and Everlasting Regret (2006), among his other films.

Terence Koh: One of the most representative of new generation U.S. artists, Koh’s works have been exhibited in numerous one-man shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Kunsthalle Zürich, among other museums, as well as in public and private contemporary art collections, including Charles Saatchi’s collection. With the joint support of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the Festival will pay tribute to Koh with the screening of God (2007), considered a true film-manifest of the artist’s poetry caught in the tension between decadence and youth counterculture esthetics.

More Info about this year’s festival: 23rd Torino GLBT Film Festival ‘Da Sodoma a Hollywood’

Related Post: 23rd Torino GLBT Film Festival Awards List