- Guests from abroad will visit Mezipatra Queer Film Festival this year again.
- Visitors can look forward to American director Rhys Ernst, producer and distributor Michael Raisler, and the director of Freedom to Marry documentary, Eddie Rosenstein.
- The accompanying program's guests will feature Berlin DJ Killa, and an activist and legend of Berlin night life, Mahide Lein.
Director and screenwriter Rhys Ernst will come to Prague to introduce his feature debut, Adam. The American artist and filmmaker has been focusing on trans representation in film and TV production for a long time. Ernst is one of the producers of the successful Transparent series, and a winner of the Horizon Award for representing the LGBTQ+ community in media.
Another filmmaker to present his film at Mezipatra is Eddie Rosenstein. This Pittsburgh native has made almost twenty short and feature documentary films and cooperates with numerous TV channels as a documentary producer. Mezipatra will feature his documentary in the Reunion section – Freedom to Marry about the fight for equalization of same-sex marriage in the USA.
Festival visitors can meet directors Giselle Bailey and Nneka Onuorah, the creators of Burn the House Down documentary about contemporary queer scene in Paris. Bailey is a Jamaican director and producer. Her latest projects include My House docu-series about African-American vogue scene in New York, and producing Gaycation, an Emmy-nominated docu-series about homophobia and queer culture. Onuorah is an American documentary director, TV producer, and queer activist. At Mezipatra 2016, she introduced her The Same Difference documentary on the discrimination within the African-American lesbian community. She also worked on Netflix docu-series about the American prison system, First and Last. The festival will also welcome Victoria Carmen Sonne – one of the leading actresses of Psychosia, a Gothic drama set in a psychiatric ward. This young rising star from Denmark has already appeared in Holiday and Winter Brothers.
A new section in the accompanying program is Queering the Industry, intended not only for film professionals, but also for all those interested in the inner workings of the audiovisual industry. Apart from the aforementioned Rhys Ernst, who will present the Mainstreaming Minorities masterclass, the program also features Michael Reisler, the producer of Mezipatra's last two winning films, Beach Rats and We the Animals, and a distributor from Peccadillo Pictures, Tom Abell. The Festivals for Freedom panel's participants include Bohdan Zhuk from the Molodist festival in Kiev, Ana Lok from Belarussian Dotyk festival, and Zita Hosszúová from Slovak Festival Inakosti.
The accompanying program will also welcome DJ KILLA, who headlines the Golden Times party on Saturday and performs at such Berlin clubs as Griessmühle and Tresor. She is also one of the founders of Lecken queer feminist collective. Berlin is the homebase of other program guests as well – the lecturers from the Sex School Hub platform, Lina Bembe and Almond Amanda Lindebach, and activist Mahide Lein, who is intertwined with the local club scene. At Mezipatra, Lein will introduce a unique selection of television magazines for lesbians, LÄSBISCH-TV Presents the 90s.
Mezipatra winners will be selected by two juries – the main, and the student one. The main jury includes the festival's former director and queer activist Aleš Rumpel, the producer and distributor Michael Raisler, and Darina Alster, a Czech visual artist and teacher. The invitation for student jury has been accepted by audiovisual artist Omar El-Sadek, journalist Mahulena Kopecká, and artist Kateřina Konvalinková.
QFF Mezipatra 2019
Praha 7. – 14. 11.
Brno 15. – 22. 11.
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