Avant-Drag! review – queer artists light up the streets of Athens with joy and resistance

Drag is a tool of self-expression and of protest in this kaleidoscopic portrait of the city’s vibrant underground art The queer defiance of Fil Ieropoulos’s kaleidoscopic documentary manifests not only through its subject, but also through its form. Centring on a group of drag performers and gender-nonconforming artists in Athens, this shape-shifting film celebrates a vibrant underground scene that thrives in a homophobic system, rife with state-sanctioned discrimination and violence. Introduced through an episodic structure, figures from the community light up the screen with their artistry and activism as they carve out a safe haven of their own. In each of the vignettes, we get a glimpse of both the joy and the peril of navigating the city as a queer person. Decked out in extravagant costumes and makeup inspired by Leigh Bowery, Kangela Tromokratisch struts in towering high heels, while her drag performances, with their vaudevillian feel, parody heteronormative ideals of motherhoo...

The Cannes Film Festival sets a record for the number of female directors

The Cannes Film Festival sets a record for the number of female directors. In 2022, the Cannes Film Festival set a record for the number of female directors participating in the film review competition. After a series of scandals and heated public discussions that the main European film festival underrepresents female directors in favor of the same male directors, the festival has increased the number of women participants. Despite these changes, it is too early to rejoice at the global changes in the process of selecting festival participants. Variety notes that "the current record is just five female directors out of 21 participants in the main program of the festival. That is less than a quarter. Recall that in 2022, Iris Knobloch, who previously headed the French division of the film company Warner Bros., was elected the new president of the festival. Knobloch is the first woman to hold this position, which she will hold until 2025. Hansen-Løve, who competed in "Bergman Island" in Cannes last year, and this time the directors are back in Fort Knight, has mixed feelings about the festival. "It's clear the competition with female directors isn't great for their track record," she says. "We would like to see more of them in 2022. Sometimes, from the outside, the impression is that the competition is for male directors, and the uncertain respect is for women."

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