The thirteenth edition of the queer festival “Kreivės” will take place in Vilnius on September 4–9. The festival’s film programme includes screenings of the competition shorts and four films from the retrospective programme “This Side of the Iron Curtain”. As every year, the festival will go beyond film screenings, with the programme featuring performances, a guided tour, an audiovisual installation, a party, a symposium, readings and conversations. On September 11–12, the festival events will move to Kaunas.
On September 4, the festival will open at “SODAS2123” with a triptych. This year’s programme will begin with performances by “Dragana”, bringing strange, sexy and even somewhat absurd characters to the stage – Charlie, Gilė neskuba, Kūnuogas, Estrada and Querelle. After the bustle of the stage, audiences will be invited to take a breather with a carefully curated programme of short films. It features four competition films – stories about desire, discovery, intimacy and queer lives. The evening will end with a mingle at “Estafetė” bar.
This year’s “Kreivės” retrospective film programme, “This Side of the Iron Curtain”, will look at Eastern Europe during the Cold War and at what seemed as though it was not supposed to exist either in reality or on screen. In the Soviet Union and its satellite states, same-sex relationships were criminalised, pathologised and treated as taboo. Through four retrospective films, the programme will explore whether it was possible to see queer characters on the cinema screen, from what perspective they were portrayed, and whether we can speak of queer cinema during the Soviet era.
Gunārs Piesis’s film “In the Shadow of Death” (“Nāves ēnā”, Latvia, 1971) can be understood as a queer film only if we know the details of the director’s biography. In Radomir Vasilevsky’s “Dubravka” (“Dubravka”, Ukraine, 1967), it may be difficult for today’s viewer to look past the lesbian love story, yet the film was perceived differently at the time. In “The Valley of the Bees” (“Údolí včel”, Czechia, 1968), Czech cinema classic František Vláčil uses the language of Aesop to depict the love between two knights. From today’s perspective, everything seems more than obvious, yet critics still tend to discuss the film primarily as a reflection on ideology, politics or religion. And Károly Makk’s “Another Way” (“Egymásra nézve”, 1982) is the most explicit of the four, portraying the relationship between two women without metaphors. The films will be introduced by Jasmina Šepetavc, a researcher at the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Jānis Ozoliņš, associate professor at the Art Academy of Latvia and senior researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia, and Ilona Vitkauskaitė, a film critic and one of the festival programmers.
At SODAS2123, the one-day symposium “Queer Archiving and Art”, organised by “išgirsti” Lithuanian queer archive together with the Nordic-Baltic Queer Archival Network, will take place. During three sessions, archivists, artists, curators and researchers will come together to discuss how queer history is collected and interpreted, how different aspects of queer history are cared for and how they can be shared with wider audiences.
At “Meno avilys”, Swedish queer archives and museums will introduce their collections and work preserving and presenting queer histories, while also reflecting on different approaches to queer cultural heritage through objects, sound and moving images. The venue will also host Kristijonas Dirsė’s audiovisual installation “Unseen, Unheard”, which invites visitors to immerse themselves in the histories of Vilnius’s queer community and explores their (in)visibility in the urban environment.
On the eve of the festival, the queer gallery “išgirsti” will also open Volungė Aušra Griškonytė’s exhibition “Sluts. Home Archive”, which will remain open throughout September. The exhibition presents a photographic series depicting the artist’s surroundings and close friends, and their fluid explorations of gender identity through cross-dressing and attempts to break free from rigid social norms.
Finally, on September 11–12, the festival events will move to Kaunas, becoming part of the programme of the second “Kaunas Pride”. The social centre “Emma” will host screenings of “Dubravka” and the short-film programme “Trumpikės. Atrinkta”.
The queer festival “Kreivės” will take place from September 4–12. Most of the festival events will be held at “SODAS2123” (Vitebsko g. 23, Vilnius), “Skalvija” (A. Goštauto g. 2, Vilnius), and “Meno avilys” (A. Goštauto g. 2, Vilnius). Festival events in Kaunas will take place at the “Emma” social centre (I. Kanto St 25).
The “Kreivės” festival is organised by “išgirsti”. The events are partially funded by the Lithuanian Film Centre, Vilnius City Municipality, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Nordic Culture Point, and Norway Grants.
