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Outburst Queer Arts Festival, with Ulster Presents, marks their 20th Anniversary in a special event with acclaimed French filmmaker - Celine Sciamma.
20 years ago, in the same year that Outburst began, French filmmaker Céline Sciamma released her first feature, Water Lilies, giving audiences a first glimpse of her tender and poetically uncompromising feminist approach to filmmaking. Since then, she has become one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of her generation, with films like Tomboy, Girlhood, Petite Maman and the multi-award-winning Portrait of Lady on Fire.
Her activist work has been just as powerful, as a vital feminist voice in the screen industry around gender parity, representation and workers’ rights.
In addition to talks at screening in Queens Film Theatre, Outburst Arts will host a unique presentation by Celine Sciamma at Ulster University.
Friday 13 November : Salon des Refusées: The First Century of Feminist Cinema at 7pm
As long as there has been cinema, women have been making it: as performers, producers, editors, composers, curators, critics, writers and directors. From Loïe Fuller, born in 1862, to Lucrecia Martel, debuting in 2001, Céline Sciamma presents her personal, provisional, global herstory of cinema as a medium for feminist invention and refusal.
Sciamma re-visions a cinema ‘plus palpitante’: more alive, more tangible, more more palpable in its rage and beauty. It marks, as she says, women filmmakers’ very present place in the history of film – and also marks the limits and losses, telling stories of those who quit, those who spoke out, and those who were forced out.
The event highlights what is tender, in both its senses: touching encounters from across the cinematic spectrum that form a personal scrapbook that connects to Sciamma’s own films; and the sometimes overwhelming and sometimes violent sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia that deform both the cinematic canon and film workers’ lives. Taking a truly transnational approach, the lecture welcomes anyone curious to learn more about cinema and feminism, and will introduce even the most Letterboxd of film viewers to new filmmakers to explore, or new ways to see filmmakers, through their activism as well as their art, with powerful attention to the revolutionary films of Heiny Srour, Assia Djebar, Sara Gómez, and Sarah Maldoror.
Dancing with tuxedo’d butches, lesbian manifestos and trans composers, Sciamma’s lecture is a celebration of feminist cinema as a radical act, and a reminder that we – the viewers – have to keep it alive in our bodies.
Belfast Campus
2-24 York Street, Belfast, BT15 1AP
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