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

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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...
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All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt review – experimental film pulls on the senses

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Sundance film festival: Raven Jackson’s gorgeous, sparsely worded debut film evokes the non-linear memories of one Black woman in Mississippi

There will be a moment in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the gorgeous, unconventional debut from Raven Jackson, when the film’s spell works. It may be in the first 15 minutes, lulled by Mississippi’s lush soundscape and meditative shots of a southern summer, or an extended take in a hospital delivery room. It could wait until the final scene, an ode to memories already recorded and yet to come.

The pull of this sparsely worded, deeply sensitive film will probably depend on what triggers one’s personal sentimentality and, more pertinently, how much you know about it going in. The plot is so loosely outlined, and the camera so frequently turned to hands over faces, that it could be difficult, sans context, to pick up on its ambitious logic: a series of non-chronological memories in the life of one Black woman, connected by the senses of touch and sound and particularly attuned to the lingering feel of one’s skin on another.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt premiered at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year

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