• Mezipatra Queer Festival brings ten feature and 38 short films.
• This year’s competition tells big stories which offer authentic queer experience from six continents.
• The films’ diversity of genres, environments, topics and characters reflects the theme of the festival’s 22nd edition, Celebrate Life. 

The main competition of Mezipatra Queer Film Festival will introduce ten feature films. Six of the films competing for the prize of the international jury were directed by women. One of them is the French director Catherine Corsini and her harsh social drama, The Divide (Le Fracture), about a couple whose mishap leads them to the emergency room of a Paris hospital during the Yellow Vests protests. This striking diagnosis of the current problems in French society, full of omnipresent social inequality, earned Corsini a Queer Palm at this year’s Cannes.

Cristiane Oliveira is another female director, presenting her coming-of-age drama The First Death of Joana (A Primeira Morte de Joana), about a girl unravelling family secrets after the death of her favourite auntie. German director Henrika Kull’s Bliss (Glück) offers an intimate insight into the everyday routine of brothels. Evi Romen’s directing debut, Why Not You (Hochwald), represents a mature and thematically rich film about a dancer dealing with his boyfriend’s death. The film won a Best Feature Film Award at Bolzano festival in Italy. Sweetheart by Marley Morrison is an entertaining coming-of-age film for wide audiences, focusing on seventeen-year-old girl on holidays with her parents. The holiday comedy about first love will enchant you with its cheeky humour and touching acting performances. And the last of the six directing women is Zoé Wittock and her bold film Jumbo, about the love of a girl for an amusement park attraction, starring Noémie Merlant.

The other films in the feature films competitions include Daniel Sánchez López’s Boy Meets Boy about Harry’s trip to Berlin, where he enjoys music and dance in night clubs rather than sightseeing. Landlocked, a sensitive road movie by Timothy Hall, addresses the burning issue of problems between children and their trans parents, and offers excellent acting performances. Potato Dreams Of America is a comedy by Wes Hurley which, with humour and wit, examines a family that emigrated from the Soviet Union to the USA. And the last film in the program is Moneyboys, a visual essay by C.B. Yie about the lives of sex workers who spend the money they earn not only on luxuries in the Chinese megalopolis, but also on supporting their families in Taiwanese countryside.

Apart from the main competition, the festival also features a selection of short films. The films, judged by a student jury, are divided into seven thematically different blocks. Eyes on You offers stories of female protagonists, First Time shows the wishes and desires of the trans community. The third block, Take Whatever You Want, examines the boundaries of one’s body and privacy. Injection – Explosion – Destruction looks at the world in utterly non-traditional ways, and gender identity is examined in depth in Out of My Shell. Delicious Boys reveal everything boys and men may long for. And the last block in the selection is Queer Hygge, full of soothing shorts perfect for watching under a warm blanket.

Main feature film competition

The Divide / La Fracture (Catherine Corsini, France, 2021)
Potato Dreams Of America (Wes Hurley, USA, 2021)
The First Death of Joana / A Primeira Morte de Joana (Cristiane Oliveira, Brazil, 2021)
Jumbo (Zoé Wittock, France, 2020)
Moneyboys (C.B. Yi, Taiwan, 2021)
Why Not You? / Hochwald (Evi Romen, Austria, 2021)
Boy Meets Boy (Daniel Sánchez López, Germany, 2021)
Bliss / Glück (Henrika Kull, Germany, 2021)
Landlocked (Timothy Hall, USA, 2021)
Sweetheart (Marley Morrison, UK, 2021)