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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Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory wins the 2024 Film London Jarman award

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Tafakory’s blend of reality and fiction is ‘a compelling exploration of displacement, memory and resistance’ according to the judging panel

Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory has won this year’s Film London Jarman award, which recognises British excellence in the field of moving image.

Tafakory took the £10,000 prize for her work, which combines found footage with the cinematic traditions of post-revolutionary Iran. Her 2020 film Irani Bag used a split-screen technique to show how handbags were often deployed in films as stand-ins for human touch. The censorship of intimacy is a theme through Tafakory’s work – from the abstract, non-linear narrative film Nazarbazi (2022) to the following year’s Mast-del, which explored a forbidden relationship between two women.

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