Tolerance through film

This year’s Side By Side LGBT film festival features debates as well as films from around the world.

By Ciara Bartlam and Marina Ivankiva

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: October 31, 2012 (Issue # 1733)

FOR SPT The documentary ‘I Am a Woman Now,’ which follows the first generation of transsexuals to have sex changes back in the ’50s, will be shown Nov. 2.

The fifth Bok o Bok (Side By Side) film festival, which aims to strengthen the LGBT community in Russia and unify people against discrimination in all its forms, opened in the city last week with screenings at several venues.

This year’s festival theme is the worldwide LGBT movement, and the festival features films from countries around the world, including China, Chile and Uganda, where the LGBT movement is relatively new and faces strong opposition.

For the first time, this year’s festival features political debates, with a debate on the subject “LGBT and Russian Politics” scheduled for Nov. 1 at the Zelyonaya Lampa press club following a screening of the documentary film “Outrage” (U.S., 2009) about secretly gay, high-profile U.S. politicians.

Closing this year’s festival is a film by Lucy Malloy called “Una Noche” (One Night), her first feature film, shot in Havana, Cuba where the LGBT movement is still in its infancy. Included in this year’s lineup are six Russian films — more than ever before.

“It shows that the festival has created a platform for this kind of film-making in Russia,” said Manny de Guerre, one of the festival’s organizers.

Since its inception in 2008, when the festival was held in St. Petersburg with support from venues in the city and the LGBT community, the festival has gone from strength to strength. Thousands of people have visited its events in St. Petersburg and Siberia during the last few years, and the existence of such organizations undoubtedly lends support to the LGBT community in Russia. The situation in Moscow and St. Petersburg is, however, more developed than in other regions of Russia, according to de Guerre.

“In St. Petersburg, there are three groups: Side By Side, LGBT Network and Coming Out,” de Guerre said. “During the last five years, we have been very active and through our activism, we have mobilized the community — and the community is starting to feel stronger. The festival also works in the Russian regions. We work in Siberia and people there are very frightened. People just go to clubs on a Saturday night and [the gay scene] is not open. It’s very fragmented, quite weak and is only just starting to develop.”

Holding an LGBT film festival in a country where homophobia is widespread has brought a number of organizational challenges. The inaugural version of the festival was far from hassle-free and the organizers came up against a host of obstacles. De Guerre says that issues with the local authorities in St. Petersburg proved the most problematic, forcing them to find new venues after the Dom Kino and Pik cinemas were pressured to pull out. But there was still hope.

“People had come for the festival from Moscow and there had been a hugely positive reaction from the LGBT community so we knew the festival wasn’t dead yet,” said de Guerre. “Even though they closed the festival down, we managed to find an alternative venue and for the two days of screenings, the place was packed.”

However, the introduction of a controversial law banning the “propaganda of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderness among minors” in St. Petersburg earlier this year heralded a new level of difficulty for the festival organizers.

FOR SPT ‘Una Noche’ (One Night), shot in Cuba, closes this year’s festival on Nov. 3 at the Angleterre hotel.

“After all this homophobic campaign, working in Siberia, we had a very strong reaction against the festival,” recalls de Guerre. “We were getting death threats, threats of physical violence and our local coordinator in Kemerovo was physically attacked. A week later, we were having a festival in Novosibirsk and on the second day of it, a huge picket was organized ‘in honor’ of us. We complained to the police but they weren’t interested; they just said, ‘Tomorrow, we’re not going to do anything. We’re not going to protect you.’ So we had to cancel the third day and organize taxis for our audience so that everybody could leave safely.”

Tatyana Shmankevich, another of the festival’s organizers, said that the vagueness of the anti-homosexual bill has resulted in many people in St. Petersburg adopting a cautious attitude toward being associated with the festival.

“The problem with this law, in an indirect way, is that nobody knows exactly what it is about. Everybody knows the phrase ‘homosexual propaganda,’ so people are simply afraid of working with us.”

Sixteen thousand people have attended Side by Side events during the last four years, and the festival’s own research shows that 29 percent of the audience is non-LGBT.

“They say that by coming and watching the films, by discussing them, it helps them to understand the issues more,” de Guerre said.

Despite the challenges encountered, the festival’s organizers hope that it will continue to grow and become active in more cities across Russia.

“It took many years to create the situation they have now in Europe and the U.S., and we only started five years ago,” said Shmankevich. “We have made progress and what you can see now is really cool.”

The Side By Side festival runs through Nov. 3 at Loft Project Etagi (74 Ligovsky Prospekt), Zelyonaya Lampa (3 Bankovsky Pereulok) and the Ligov movie theater (153 Ligovsky Prospekt). The closing ceremony will be held on Nov. 3 at the Angleterre hotel (24 Malaya Morskaya Ulitsa).

www.bok-o-bok.ru