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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Jimpa review – Olivia Colman soars in otherwise muddled queer family drama

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Sundance film festival: Australian director Sophie Hyde’s earnest, semi-autobiographical film moves before it starts to meander

More so than other film festivals, Sundance can be a kingmaking force, shining light on an unknown film-maker and then entering into a mutually beneficial relationship with them. Directors return, shifted from smaller to larger venues, off-peak to primetime slots, and watching this steady climb can be a gratifying reward.

The Australian director Sophie Hyde has earned this more than most. Her first film, 52 Tuesdays, a thoughtful drama about a transitioning parent’s relationship with their daughter, won her the festival’s best director prize before she returned five years later with Animals, a sharp and spiky adaptation of Emma Jane Unsworth’s painfully perceptive novel of a fracturing friendship. She returned three years later with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, an unusually frank and explicit comedy drama with a standout Emma Thompson (who, along with Animals’ Holliday Grainger deserved far more serious awards attention). In just over a decade, Hyde had established herself as someone whose name had become an instant sign of a certain top-tier Sundance quality, a skilled actors’ director whose films burrowed deeper than most.

Jimpa is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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