This year’s Symposium, titled The ‘Other’ Queers – Cinematic Images from the Periphery of Europe, tackled the various specific aspects of queerness in the context of Central and East Europe (CEE) and Central Asia (CA). For the longest time, queer cinema, art and activism were seen as things that existed predominantly in the “West”, coming to the forefront of CEE, as well as CA civil and artistic concerns only after socialism had been replaced by capitalism, and the supposed conservatism of the aforementioned regions by European liberalism. While the truth is, non-heteronormativity and queer cinematic images have always been part of the cultural landscape on Europe’s “periphery”.
In April 2024, our team member Jasmina Šepetavc and Yulia Serdyukova, a Ukrainian film producer and activist, co-curated this year’s goEast film festival Symposium. Since its inception in 2001, the goEast festival, which takes place in Wiesbaden, Germany, has become one of the most important international platforms focusing on Central and Eastern European cinema. An important part of the festival’s yearly programme is its Symposium, which brings together scholars, specialists, artists, and the general public for lectures, discussions, and screenings.
Jasmina Šepetavc and Yulia Serdyukova thus brought together marginalized yet rebelliously vital past and present queer artistic images from the different CEE and CA countries, while engaging critically with the concept of “Eastern/post-socialist queerness”: What is it exactly? Is it an imitation of “Western” frameworks or something different, multiple, potentially disruptive? In lectures, discussions, an exhibition, a performance, four feature-length older films and five short film programs, artists, filmmakers, activists and scholars explored their unique kinds of queerness in the temporal dimensions of the past, present and future. As diverse as these presented works were, they all had in common the potential of queer art to imagine different, better and more just futures and societies.
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