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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The Balcony Movie review – funny/sad film that offers a view into strangers’ lives

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Pawel Lozinski’s documentary collects conversations with passers-by he talks to from the window of his Warsaw flat

Polish film-maker Pawel Lozinski has curated this amusing, cumulatively melancholy documentary which he has shot from the first-floor balcony in his flat in the Saska Kępa district of Warsaw. Over a number of years, and with a microphone discreetly attached to the chainlink fence at street level, he simply calls down to people going past and asks them to stop and talk about something, anything.

There are a lot of dog-walkers and people with babies; most people smile or grimace politely and say they are not special enough to be featured in a film. A priest says he can’t talk because he is carrying the Holy Sacrament. Others obligingly talk: one woman sings a rather beautiful song, a man talks about being homeless, having just got out of prison. People confide their sadness at the loss of a loved one, though one woman sheepishly confesses her profound happiness that her abusive husband has died. A couple of tough-looking guys carrying the Polish flag talk about patriotism and attack “equal rights and faggotry”.

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