Five Flavours Film Festival
Queer Section

This year's edition of Five Flavours Film Festival takes place between November 12 and 20. Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw holds the screenings of “Queer Asia” section.

Five Flavours Film Festival is the only survey od South and South-East Asian films in Poland and in this part of Europe.

Every year, Five Flavours' program combines the extremes: wild genre cinema and avant-garde auteur pictures, epic productions and intimate independent films, high quality entertainment and socially-engaged works. The extremes are visible already in the opening film - Jin Jang's "Man on High Heels" marries a quality crime story with a psychological drama of an excellent police officer who feels like... a woman, trapped in a perfect, male body.

Queer Asia - a FOCUS section, this year with an intercultural character, is an overview of the most interesting LGBTI productions from South and South-East Asia made in the past two years. From the beginning, the Festival's objective was to reinforce the attitudes of tolerance and openness – the section is a continuation of this trend.

Sexual and gender non-normativity is a theme pertaining to every geographical latitude, but its interpretation, the language used to describe and show it, the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and overt and covert social rules setting the frameworks for individual expression differ significantly. Films are a tool which allows to talk about those differences in many-sided ways, transcending the boundaries between the intimate and the public, between aesthetics and political activism.

Queer Asia section presents the most recent productions from South and South-East Asia, whose themes relate to the experiences of non-heterosexual persons and of those questioning their own gender identity. Contemporary Asian queer cinema is not a cohesive movement – it is a set of different narrations and forms, portraying the experienced of LGBTI persons from different countries, social strata and communities. The films become a space for negotiation between traditional and modern models of relationships and families, and for a debate with the set norms. Their protagonists undermine the binary definition of gender, their relationships with other people go beyond the clear-cut categories. The variety of stylistics – from subversive kitsch to classic, studied pictures – reflects the multiplicity of viewpoints, letting the audience peak not only into the lives of individual characters, but also the communities in which they function.