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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Blood Star review – young tearaway fights for survival in cat-and-mouse thriller

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Vintage-car driver is chased through New Mexico by a small-town sheriff in Lawrence Jacomelli’s snappily shot debut

Kicking off with tearaway Bobbie (Britni Camacho) zooming across the New Mexico badlands in her vintage Ford back to her no-good boyfriend, this film rides a two-lane blacktop straight for the heart of classic Americana. British director Lawrence Jacomelli dons the appropriate outlaw squint for this cat-and-mouse thriller – one that’s capable of picking out a sharp composition, too – but ultimately his debut is too disjointed to hit top gear.

Ignoring her sister’s warnings about reconciling with her violent partner, Bobbie stops for petrol and brushes off the skeezy pestering of Sheriff Bilstein (John Schwab), but the purse-lipped lawman picks her up down the road for speeding and supposedly damaging his siren. They cut a deal for her to reimburse him for the damage – and our suspicions that something dodgy is going down are confirmed back at the gas station where she withdraws the money (the prologue in which Jacomelli shows us another girl being horribly murdered was another clue).

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