2 minute read
ARTS
With Alex Klingberg
FilmPride, Brighton & Hove Pride’s official queer film festival, will return in August for its third year. This year it’ll be online only.
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We caught up with Deborah Espect, the festival’s artistic director, to find out more.
What inspired you to start FilmPride?
I created FilmPride with Bill Smith, who runs Latest TV, three years ago. I’d just done a series of shows on Latest TV where I’d introduced LGBTQ+ short films, documentaries and animations, and I realised that, as far as I knew, we didn’t have a queer film festival in Brighton. So I talked to Bill about it and it turned out that he’d also started thinking about this!
We joined forces, and FilmPride was born. We agreed that, as well as delivering live events, it would be great to run part of the festival on TV, to offer filmmakers the chance to have their work broadcast on our local channel. This makes us very different from other film festivals, and FilmPride has actually been screened on different channels in the country! This year, we’re really excited to have Northern Visions in Belfast, Sheffield Live! and KMTV in Kent as our TV partners again.
Give us some of the highlights of this year’s festival.
There are over 70 films, from many different parts of the world, about so many different topics, so there will definitely be something for everyone. The common denominator is that they are all high-quality films. We have beautiful animations, hard-hitting documentaries and very moving dramas. As well as some very light-hearted content, too. We’ve also interviewed filmmakers about their experiences of making their films, and about what it’s like to be queer where they are based, so this will be a very interesting opportunity for our audiences to find out more about the people behind the films they watched in the festival.
How can people get involved and support FilmPride?
The best way to support us is to sign up on our website (www.filmpride. org) and watch our films. And then to check out all the Q&As with the filmmakers. And to talk about us on social media (and everywhere else). As we are a volunteer-run festival with no funding, word of mouth is the best way to help us.
The FilmPride TV festival will run from August 2 - 15 at 9pm on Latest TV (Freeview 7 and Virgin 159) and online from August 16 - 31, www.filmpride.org.
