Andrew Ahn’s latest feature The Wedding Banquet opens this year’s BFI Flare Film Festival, which runs from March 19 – 30 at the BFI Southbank in London.
It’s a big-ticket title, arriving in London following a debut bow at Sundance with a red-hot cast including Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, and serves as a sign of the festival’s continued relevance and mainstream appeal.
Currently the UK’s largest queer film event, Flare is also one of the world’s longest-running queer film festivals. It turns 40 next year. The BFI is already planning a series of celebrations to mark the milestone. Highlights from this year’s lineup, however, include screenings of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Berlinale title Hot Milk starring Emma Mackey and Vicky Krieps, Lamin Leroy Gibba’s buzzy German series Black Fruit, and Truong Minh Quy’s beloved Cannes title Viet and Nam. The festival will close with the erotic thriller Night Stage by Brazilian directing duo Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon while Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer headline the festival’s ‘Best Of Year’ round-up. On the industry side, veteran producer and former Focus CEO James Schamus and Lenkiewicz are among the headline speakers.
Below, BFI Flare and LFF programmer Grace Barber-Plentie digs into this year’s lineup, how shifts in the industry have improved conditions for queer films and filmmakers, and how the festival positions itself with changing political winds in the U.S. and UK.
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DEADLINE: Grace, is Flare the biggest Queer film event in the world?
GRACE BARBER-PLENTIE: Biggest in Europe. We’ve got some older cousins like Frameline in San Francisco. We turn 40 next year and they’re about to turn 50.
DEADLINE: Maybe I’m just paying more attention but it feels like Flare has grown in prominence of late. I was just at the Berlinale and a few people told me they were coming to London for Flare, which I’d never heard before.
BARBER-PLENTIE: The work we do at Flare hasn’t changed, but the film industry has. The way queer films are spoken about has changed. It’s no longer such a rarity or something that can be sidelined. Also, distributors and sales agents are starting to take notice and work with us. This year our opening film is Universal’s The Wedding Banquet and we’ve had a couple of films from Mubi over the last couple of years. So it comes down to the industry shifting.
DEADLINE: The Wedding Banquet is a pretty big title to grab as the opener. How’d that come about?
BARBER-PLENTIE: It was always a film that we had on our radar. And obviously, Andrew [Ahn] is such an exciting presence in the film industry right now. I loved Fire Island so much. And similarly, Bowen Yang is doing some amazing things. We were lucky that Universal was also aware of us and the timings aligned so it was a mutual thing.
DEADLINE: So how does Flare programming work? Do you guys all work on LFF at the same time? What’s the split?
BARBER-PLENTIE: There is a bit of crossover, but luckily, it’s mainly one after the next. We start in November and LFF finishes in October. So it takes a bit of time to get your head around, but also throughout the year we’re going to other events like Cannes, and Berlin, and I went to Frameline last year. So while we’re in the programming process for LFF, we’re still seeing films that could work for Flare. But November is when we really start, and our team is made up of people who work internally, year-round on festivals. And then there are also some amazing freelance, external programmers.
DEADLINE: Does Kristy Matheson work on Flare too?
BARBER-PLENTIE: She does but in a more overarching capacity. As she’s not part of the community she’s clear in terms of her boundaries, but she works more on the organizational side of things, marketing, and things like that. And then she’ll help us make decisions when it comes to what we want to have for the opening and closing. But she’s not prescriptive. She gives us freedom, which is such a rare and lovely thing to have.
DEADLINE: A few years ago there was a great time when a few British Queer women filmmakers were debuting films. There was Dionne Edwards, Georgia Oakley, Charlotte Wells, and a few others. I spoke with Dionne and Georgia and they both said to me they had come through Flare’s mentorship schemes. When programming the event do you have a specific interest in creating an end goal like that? With the times we’re in, I guess that’s a pretty political endeavor.
BARBER-PLENTIE: Yeah, it’s weird because Queerness is almost mainstream now in the film industry. But as you say, that doesn’t stop Queerness and Queer festivals from being politicized. It’s a really strange position to be in. In terms of filmmakers, we have a filmmakers mentorship scheme that we do in association with BAFTA, and all those amazing filmmakers came through that, and we keep track of their work. We’ve been so lucky that they’ve all made these amazing films and wanted to show them with us. We had a nice moment last year. Amrou, the director of Layla, which was last year’s opening film, and Savannah, the producer, met during our scheme. They’ve said they wouldn’t have met and made that film together if not for that scheme. It’s nice to see that we’re actually helping the industry.
DEADLINE: Who would you say is the Flare audience?
BARBER-PLENTIE: It’s pretty varied. There’s always going to be specific interest if you’re a member of the Queer alphabet. But we also get a real mix of everyone going to see everything. That’s the thing if you’re invested in Flare, you’ll usually take a chance and see anything. Also, with us having the festival all in one building, people are here and it feels like more of an event. And we’ve got things happening around the building as well. Also, with our 25 and Under scheme we are starting to attract a younger audience to Flare, which is exciting.
DEADLINE: You’ve got a great talks programme this year that includes James Schamus. How do you put that programme together?
BARBER-PLENTIE: It’s born out of the programming process. We will program the entire festival and then look at the filmmakers coming. We’re lucky that we have a lot of filmmakers who return to Flare with their films. For example, Marco Berger has screened multiple projects with us over the last few years. It’s great to have this legacy. Sometimes with Queer cinema, in a similar way to how people used to treat Black Filmmakers, you make one film, it does the festival circuit, and then gets disregarded. So I think it’s a really good way of saying that Queer filmmakers can have extensive careers and make multiple films.
DEADLINE: Do you often see films that come to Flare receiving healthy theatrical releases?
BARBER-PLENTIE: It varies. Some films will come to the festival with distribution already. Last year we screened Crossing by Levan Akin which was released by Mubi. There was a film we screened a couple of years ago that we had the world premiere for called Big Boys, which still hasn’t got a UK release. I need it to get a UK release because it’s such a wonderful film. But I’ve been following what’s been happening with that film in the U.S., and it has now been released over there, and some major outlets reviewed the film. So it’s nice to know we screened it first and then it went off and found its audience.
DEADLINE: And the closing film Night Stage. What can you tell me about it?
BARBER-PLENTIE: I don’t want to talk much about it because it’s a real genre film with some fun twists and turns. The filmmakers are also Flare alumni. The film is about an aspiring actor who, whilst on the dating apps, encounters a guy who is about to be put in a big position of political power and they start a love affair that leads to them having sex in public places. It’s beautifully shot. The score is stunning. It’s proper cinema that you want to see on the big screen. But it also has a sense of fun, and it’s going to be so fun to watch with an audience.
DEADLINE: Are there any titles you could pick out and highlight for our readers?
BARBER-PLENTIE: It’s hard because they’re all my babies, but I can give you two that maybe people aren’t immediately looking at. There’s a cool Canadian documentary called A Mother Apart, which is about Staceyann Chin, who is a Jamaican poet, and her relationship with her mother and also her relationship with her daughter. She is a Lesbian who had a child on her own. Essentially, the film is about Staceyann addressing how her relationship with her mum has been difficult, and how to ensure that she doesn’t pass that on to her daughter. And then we’ve got a cool American film that’s coming to us from SXSW called Outerlands. It stars Asia Kate Dillon. They were excellent in Billions and Orange Is The New Black. It’s an American comedy-drama. It’s a really cool film in the sense that it’s about someone who is nonbinary, but it’s not about them coming out and finding their identity. It’s a character that’s already fully formed, and it’s about them processing some things that have happened in their life. They end up becoming the temporary guardian of a child, and it forces them to face their own childhood. It’s also about gentrification in San Francisco.
The post BFI Flare Programmer Grace Barber-Plentie On Landing ‘The Wedding Banquet’ & How Industry Shifts Are Creating Space For Queer Film Culture appeared first on Deadline.
