The best (and worst) of BFI Flare 2023
Spring 2023 marked the 37th annual BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival, and with it, my first experience attending a film festival with press accreditation. No small feat for a semi-professional student YouTuber who hasn’t had a real job since 2020! I must say first and foremost, if you’re an online creator interested in film, you should absolutely start applying for press accreditation at festivals. I was fairly certain before applying that a channel as small as my own, as unconcerned with ‘serious’ cinema as my own stood no chance of getting in, but I was accepted that same day. Significant film organizations like the BFI may seem intimidating, but in my experience, these institutions are often very welcoming to students, young professionals, and anyone else passionate about their programming.
BFI Flare, the largest LGBTQ+ film festival in Europe (or Europe + the country formerly known as Europe), began in 1986 and operated as the ‘London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival’ from 1988 to 2014. In addition to a vast program of feature and short films, this year’s festival included VR experiences and several themed club nights. 2023’s event was reportedly the most well-attended in the festival’s history, and the excitement was certainly palpable. It’s always infectious to be in a group of passionate filmgoers, but the intensified communal energy of the attendees of an LGBTQ+ film festival is truly unmatched.
Now that the festival is over, I’ve compiled some highlights of the program along with one particular outlier. Think of it not as a compliment sandwich, but more of a compliment upside-down cake. Delicious!
The Good
The Five Devils (Les Cinq Diables, 2022, Léa Mysius, France)
The Five Devils presents a unique, heady take on modern magical realism. 10-year-old Vicky has the mysterious ability to capture and recreate people’s scents, a gift that eventually allows her to see glimpses of a past affair between her mother and another woman. There’s a lot going on in The Five Devils, but director Léa Mysius juggles every plot thread and genre element with ease, resulting in an immersive, haunting film.
What resonates most is the thematic consequence of framing the story through Vicky’s eyes. This transforms what could have been merely a time-bending romance or tragedy into an exploration of the heartbreaking revelation every child must eventually experience: that their parents once existed without them. Late in the film, Vicky asks her mother, “Did you love me before I was born?”
Every actor is in top form, but Adèle Exarchopoulos stands out as Vicky’s frustrated mother. Paul Guilhaume’s cinematography and Florencia Di Concilio’s score are also effective.
Who I Am Not (2023, Tünde Skovrán, Romania, Canada [Sepedi, Setzwana, Ishizulu, English])
Who I Am Not is a matter-of-fact documentary following the lives of two intersex South Africans. The first subject, Sharon-Rose Khumalo, is a beauty pageant contestant who has remained comfortable with the gender she was assigned at birth. Khumalo grieves for her inability to have biological children and in fact overcompensates (in her own words) with an exaggerated performance of femininity. The second subject, Dimakatso Sebidi, was assigned female at birth (which included several traumatic ‘corrective’ surgeries) but uses they/them pronouns in their adulthood and identifies with neither womanhood nor manhood.
The film feels extremely prescient at this point in history, in which something of a new wave of insidious transphobia is sweeping the West. Those crusading against trans rights have a tendency to ignore or virtually deny the existence or validity of intersex individuals. The reality, represented in Who I Am Not, is that some people, even on the ‘biological’ level that so many bigots cling to, simply do not fit into traditional constructions of sex and gender.
One scene in particular offers a resounding, if perhaps unintentional rebuttal to the infamous “What is a woman?” question that has become popular among braindead conservative pundits as a sort of ‘gotcha’ for people who believe in the human rights of transgender people. An interviewer asks Khumalo what she thinks a woman is. Khumalo answers that a woman is whoever feels like a woman. “I am a woman. I’M A WOMAN!” She yells before breaking down in tears.
The film is a poignant depiction of the two subjects trying to define their identities on both medical and cultural terms, and helps to demonstrate why biological essentialism and the obsessive enforcement of a gender binary does nothing but harm to all of us.
The Blue Caftan (2022, Maryam Touzani, Morocco, France, Belgium, Denmark [Arabic])
In The Blue Caftan, closeted Halim and his wife Mina run a struggling caftan shop. Halim’s hand stitched embroidery is exquisite but time-consuming, leading the couple to hire a young man, Youssef, to help them stay afloat, and sparking a mutual attraction between Youssef and Halim. At first glance, The Blue Caftan may seem to tread familiar narrative ground, but its true genius comes from its uniquely sensitive treatment of all parties of its love triangle.
It’s easy to imagine a much more mean-spirited, much less original version of this film. Something about a jealous, nagging wife getting in the way of the innocent mens’ romance. But Touzani moves with much more grace and nuance than that, instead crafting a story about three people who are all interconnected by love for each other. This is greatly enhanced by a twist around the midpoint of the film.
Lubna Azabal shines as Mina and brings so much complexity and vivacity to the table. The romantic element, though ultimately not the centerpiece of the film, is tender and palpable. The film features many slow, detailed sequences of Halim painstakingly crafting his caftans, something that reflects the gradual, intricate construction of the narrative into a beautiful finished product.
Drifter (2023, Hannes Hirsch, Germany [German, English])
Drifter follows Moritz, a young man who moves to Berlin with his boyfriend, only for the relationship to end soon after. He spends the next several months making various connections in the city while searching for community and self-actualization.
For possessing what appears on the surface to be a relatively thin plot, Drifter is remarkably engaging. The film’s narrative is loose, but carefully measured. The characters are strong and the emotions intense and relatable. Lorenz Hochhuth’s performance as Moritz is subtle but effective.
The most powerful takeaway from the film is Mortiz’s eventual journey to find community and kinship. His early encounters range from awkward to malicious, but as he grows more comfortable in the city and with himself, he begins to identify the genuine people in his life. As one friend, Kasi, eventually admits, “It’s just hard to find people you can trust.”
By the end of the film, not every loose thread is tied up (there remains, among other things, an implicit question about Moritz’s relationship to substances), but if anything, this only strengthens the film’s premise. This is not a rigid, play-by-play account of Moritz’s life; instead, the viewer accompanies him on his journey, drifting in and out of connection after connection.
The Fabulous Ones (Le favolose, 2022, Roberta Torre, Italy)
The Fabulous Ones is a beguiling work of docufiction that sees five aging transgender women return to the villa they once shared to attempt to fulfill the dying wish of their long-departed friend, Antonia.
This film is at once grounded and dreamlike. All of the actresses but one (in the role of the younger version of Antonia) play themselves. However, amidst documentary-style interviews with the cast are hazy interludes seemingly showing a more mysterious, supernatural side of the villa, eventually escalating into a fully scripted, fantastical climax.
The second half of the film is stronger than the first. In the former part, the characters are compelling and funny, but the film struggles to find its feet and build momentum. It is only when one woman finally shares a long-lost letter from Antonia with the group, essentially the film’s late inciting incident, that things truly pick up. From there on out, the story is highly affecting, and the unpredictable style works to the film’s advantage. The seance sequence is especially memorable, and wholly unique for the genre. The culmination of this sequence is gripping; at this point during my screening, you could’ve heard a pin drop in the auditorium.
The Fabulous Ones is strange, and perhaps not hugely accessible, but ultimately worth seeing for those very reasons.
The Bad
Wolf and Dog (Lobo e Cão, 2022, Cláudia Varejão, Portugal, France [Portuguese])
Wolf and Dog concerns a small but proud LGBTQ+ community living on the island of São Miguel, a Portuguese island in the Azores. Protagonists Ana and Luis grapple with the reality of their identities in conflict with the island’s conservative Catholic ideals.
It’s difficult to articulate just what goes wrong in Wolf and Dog. The film is visually sublime and reportedly stems from extensive research on the part of director Cláudia Varejão. However, beneath the outwardly beautiful veneer applied to virtually every aspect of the film, Varejão seems to have very little to say, as well as a rather tenuous grasp on narrative storytelling.
There aren’t exactly ‘scenes’ in Wolf and Dog. Characters speak to each other, travel, dance, gaze longingly, but the connective tissue simply isn’t there. Dialogue is aimless, relationships and motivations remain undefined, much of the action is so muddled and poorly-communicated that it becomes borderline incomprehensible. Varejão’s background is in documentary filmmaking, with Wolf and Dog being her first foray into fiction. It’s fitting, then, that much of the film feels like documentary B-roll strung together into a loose narrative.
I want to be very clear that I have enjoyed plenty of experimental cinema. I have enjoyed meandering, virtually narrative-less cinema. Such films can and have succeeded many times over, particularly in the landscape of world cinema. I don’t believe that every film need adhere to rigid Western storytelling traditions to be coherent, moving, or connect with its audience. Emphatically, Wolf and Dog is not that. Wolf and Dog seems to be aiming for traditional, if artistic, narrative filmmaking, but falls incredibly short of this goal due to its superficial treatment of its story and characters.
Every element of the film is completely dependant on appearances. Notably, the main group of characters are constantly, impeccably made-up. They shimmer with masterfully-applied body glitter and rhinestone-accentuated graphic eye looks, Euphoria-style. The styling work is certainly impressive, but it unintentionally encapsulates the film’s ultimate disconnect. Yes, these people look very pretty, but… why? Who are they underneath this visual opulence? The film essentially presents them as props. Varejão may have had the best intentions in making this film, but her final product seems utterly uninterested in the inner worlds of any of the marginalized people on display.
This also outlines the disparity in the film’s depiction of the conservative culture of the island. There’s something of a disconnect between what the film tells us about São Miguel and what we actually see on screen. On one hand, we’re told many times, explicitly and implicitly, that this is a repressive, suffocating environment. On the other, we see many times, explicitly and implicitly, an incredibly expressive, outgoing community of LGBT youth living in this community with very little visible opposition from the other islanders. Late in the film, a character’s father accosts him in the street with a homophobic tirade, the most explicit instance of bigotry shown in the film. But if anything, this feels completely unexpected due to the fact that we’ve barely seen any other pushback to the group before this moment. The kids encounter a couple of microaggressions throughout, one at school and one on a religious pilgrimage, but these don’t feel particularly unique to the island; they’re the sort of baseline comments one can expect to hear at just about any high school or from just about any older religious figure. Did I want to see these kids be more oppressed? Of course not, and I certainly don’t consider the level of oppression depicted in the film insignificant. My issue is that the film struggles to convey clearly the political climate of the setting, which is a somewhat essential aspect of the story it aims to tell.
I could go on. I could tell you about the dearth of subtlety in the film, the unmotivated use of heavy stylization, the scene in which a character describes her favorite mug cake recipe that calls for TWO WHOLE EGGS (clearly a bit of lazy dialogue or improvisation, any mug cake veteran will tell you that even one whole egg is usually too much), but I’ve said enough already. Unlike every scene in Wolf and Dog, I will quit while I’m ahead instead of dragging the moment out for 30-90 seconds longer than necessary.