Practices & Representations from the Body

Cineground: A Portuguese Queer Cinematography of the 1970’s

Joana de Sousa

Cultural producer, curator and filmmaker

A Portuguese Queer In 1975, artist Óscar Alves and filmmaker João Paulo Ferreira founded the amateur film production cooperative Cineground. Inspired by the films of Andy Warhol, which reached Portugal after the 1974 Revolution that ended decades of repressive dictatorship, Cineground regarded Super8 as a “professional format”, exploring its technical limits to ensure the best artistic results possible. The group addressed for the first time in Portuguese cinema non-normative sexualities and gender expressions, something that was still criminalized in the 1970’s. Underground filmmaking at its core, they screened their films in bars and nightclubs, developing an alternative screening circuit. The cooperative was short-lived, ending in 1978, but left an important heritage within the queer history of Portugal. Before passing, Óscar Alves donated his screening rights to Queer Lisboa International Film Festival. Now, in a joint effort with Cinemateca Portuguesa, the surviving prints are being preserved and digitized. 

Cineground’s archive poses many important questions: how to preserve, activate and remediate LGBTQI+ collections, especially those which were produced under precarious conditions, requiring specific cataloguing and restoration methods? 

Queer Presence/Representation in a List Festivals, Is the Future Really Bright?

Cédric Succivalli

Programmer and film critic

Despite the growing presence of queer cinema in A list festivals over the past decade. It’s the future really bright for LGTBIQ+ representation and visibility?

The last Festival de Cannes saw the lowest number of eligible Queer Palm films in quite a while. Cedric Succivalli has been working as a programmer at Giornate Degli Autori, the independent section of the Venice Film Festival, according to him, since this year a dramatic decrease of queer stories submitted it’s a fact. Is it just a peculiarity, an off year so to speak, or should we get worried? Through an overview of the past 10 years, we will try to see what the trend really is and most importantly: what we can do to revert a possible lack of representation again.

Body/Excess: A Ruminant Exercise

Lucrecia Masson Córdoba

Researcher

Despite the growing presence of queer cinema in A list festivals over the past decade. It’s the future really bright for LGTBIQ+ representation and visibility?

This is a journey and a conversation about some visual proposals as -also- decolonising practices. It is the place of the dissident body in relation to that which is called nature that this exercise seeks to destabilize. At the rhythm of rumination we will invoke bodies that are not one.

Round table

Non Binary Aesthetics

Moderator

Mariona Borrull / Crítique de cine · Film Critic

A so-called “female gaze” has been institutionalized within cinema, as if to capture the ways in which the normal (patriarchal) norms of the moving image are transgressed. Naturally, this “female” gaze starts from a binary approach and therefore has to be questioned. However, thinking about and reordering the transgressions that the “female gaze” has had on the canon has served to give name and entity to these revolutions.

Now let us invent a third gaze, one that accepts change and vapidity as its most rigorous center. A queer, trans, neutral perspective: how does it take shape within the arts, and what forms does it take, what tools does it give us, and how do we embrace it without stifling it, also in a queer way?

Parte-hartzaileak · Participantes · Participants

Caru Basakatua

Screenwriter, queer, from Vallekas, feels a particular attraction for stories that explore and celebrate the queer, dissident and counter-cultural. Caru holds a PhD cum laude in Clinical and Health Psychology, and is also interested in behaviorism, mental health and queer sexuality fields. Caru’s short debut Desviación típica has been selected at more than 40 festivals around the world.

Zuz Martin Segarra

Cartoonist since 2010 and non-binary queer activist and feminist. Among her long story work stands out Alicia en un mundo real, Annemarie and Residencia de Estudiantes. Martin Segarra’s works have the starting point from a dissident, critical and committed look, as also happens in the comics Irse o morir, or Black is beltza II: Ainhoa, in which Martin adapted the film script.

M. Benito Píriz aka Panda

His work is divided between sculpture (Pikete Tuning, Backpacks, Trends) and literature, for which seeks a new space with projects such as the autotune recital The Most Dramatic Panda EVER or the always-on-the-process book M1 C4R4 N0 P3G4 C0N 3ST3 MUND0. A storytelling of affective relationships interrupted by individual problems.