The 2014 opening night of the Hamburg Queer Film Festival was envisioned as a moment of proud celebration of the festival’s 25th anniversary: the feature-length documentary ACTING OUT about the festival was to be premiered, a conference on the topic of queer film culture took place and the mayor of the city was to open the festival. However, instead of becoming a smooth glamorous night, community activists intervened and disrupted the opening. The event and its surrounding discussions sent the festival and its volunteer collective into an identity crisis. What exactly had happened? The appearance of the city mayor became the epitome of the clash of radical queer activism, neoliberal city marketing and cultural politics on the eve of the so-called “European migrant crisis” in 2015. Using this incident as an example, in this talk I will unravel the various stakeholder demands that queer community film festivals have to negotiate in order to function as platforms that champion queer film and filmmakers, remain independent and open for political and identity articulation, and at the same time, secure resources and organizational clout to stay afloat within the cultural field. Given the ongoing political discussions surrounding the migration movements in the Mediterranean on Europe’s borders, in this talk Loist will also try to sketch the developments on the queer film festival circuit since this incident.  

Skadi Loist, Assistant Professor for Production Cultures in Audiovisual Media Industries
Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam, Germany

Loist is PI of the research project “Film Circulation on the International Film Festival Network and the Impact on Global Film Culture” (BMBF 2017–2021) and PI of the international research project “„GEP Analysis: Assessing, Understanding, and Modeling the Impact of Gender Equity Policies (GEP) in the Film Industry“ (2021-2024). Skadi co-founded the Film Festival Research Network (FFRN) in 2008, serves as Steering Committee member of NECS and Editorial Board member of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. Skadi has published widely on film festivals, queer film culture, and equity, diversity and inclusion in media industries, and (co-)edited Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice (with Marijke de Valck and Brendan Kredell, 2016); “Teaching European Cinema: The European University Film Award (EUFA) Project” a dossier in Alphaville 14/2017; “Queer/ing Film Festivals” a special issue of Studies in European Cinema (15:1, 2018, with Leanne Dawson), and “Gendered Media Production” a special issue of Media Industries (6:1, 2019, with Deb Verhoeven).

To attend the Zoom discussion with Skadi Loist, please submit the RSVP above. After you submit the RSVP, you will receive a confirmation email with the Zoom link.