Festival
The queerfilm festival Bremen was founded in 1994 with the idea of showing a few films to accompany the lesbian-gay “Herbsterwachen”. Since then, the festival has taken place annually in October and presents queer films to the local LGBTIQ* community and the interested public. Since its foundation, the festival has become a permanent fixture in the queer event calendar of the Northwest. The cooperation with other independent LGBTIQ* festivals in the QueerScope network ensures supra-regional networking.
For six days in October, the festival presents a diverse mix of feature films, documentaries and short films at Bremen’s communal theatre CITY 46 , selected from current productions by our volunteer team. All films will be shown as Bremen premieres and in original versions with German or English subtitles. The festival’s supporting program includes not only talks with directors and activists, but also the great raffle with its charming raffle fairies*, the lavishly decorated queerfilm bar with its daily changing activist bar staff and the cosy space for lively and connecting conversations before and after the films.
A special award is the election of the cinematic audience favourite, which is awarded every year among the feature-length films.
We see it as an important cultural and queer political mission to bring life realities and challenges of the LGBTIQ* community to the big screen. Our festival program is put together by a volunteer program committee. In terms of content, we pay attention to perspectives beyond heteronormative identities, body concepts, and heteronormative sexual/romantic desire when selecting films. It is important to us to show different representations of different bodies beyond socially shaped ideas of norms. We would like to focus on perspectives from the global south, which rarely appear in queer cinema and where filmmakers struggle with more difficult production conditions for queer films. We pay attention to marginalized perspectives in relation to BIPoC and other people who are negatively affected by racism/anti-Semitism/gadjé racism (“antiziganism”) and who experience structural/institutional discrimination or exclusion based on their religious (dis)affiliation. Also, the question of opportunities for participation in social life and in the educational system is included in the selection of films. What perspectives are taken up in the film? Are people of different social backgrounds and incomes and of different ages shown?