Presenting cutting-edge movies from around the world, Barbican’s Pride season this summer brings you Queer 80s: Cinema on the Brink of Global Change. Get ready to time travel back to a decade where LGBTQ+ representation and creativity on screen flourished.
In the 80s, queer filmmakers worldwide told fresh stories in bold, provocative ways that brought unapologetic LGBTQ+ depictions to the big screen.
The world stood on the cusp of transformation. Borders were about to shift (three films in this program come from countries that wouldn’t exist after 1991), the fight to end Apartheid in South Africa pressed on, and even as outdated anti-LGBTQ+ laws began to fall, the AIDS crisis sparked a devastating wave of homophobia. The epidemic compelled artists to create politically engaged work against a shifting backdrop of change and unrest.
Alex Davidson, Barbican Cinema Curator, says: “Building on the success of last year’s Queer 90s season, I’m thrilled to explore the transformative 1980s and bring these rarely-seen LGBTQ+ films to the Barbican cinemas.”
“With films from the final years of the Brazilian dictatorship, South African Apartheid, and the former Soviet Union and East & West Germany, these exceptional films include a wild and wonderful take on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a stunning Azerbaijani folk tale by a filmmaker imprisoned for his sexuality, an outrageous gay erotic satire from Japan, and Almodóvar’s clever gender play in Law of Desire. These films are emblematic of a world on the brink of massive change.”
Season Highlights:
Quest for Love, South Africa 1988, Dir Helena Nogueira.
Alexandra (Jana Cilliers), a political journalist, is released from a South African prison after accusing the government of plotting military intervention in the neighbouring country of Mozania (a thinly-disguised Mozambique). As she waits to reunite with her lover, marine biologist Dorothy (Sandra Prinsloo), she reflects on the last few years, including her relationship and her political awakening. Banned in its home country for its anti-Apartheid stance and the lesbian romance at its centre, Quest for Love is fiercely critical of South Africa’s intervention in Angola and Mozambique.
Radical Defiance: Queer Brazilian Super-8 Shorts 1982-3
From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a wave of radical short films, shot on Super-8 by queer filmmakers, emerged in northeastern Brazil as part of a movement termed ‘Cinema Guei’. These films denounced conservativism and religious oppression that continued to prevail under the military rule and celebrated gay lives at a time of intense, machismofuelled prejudice. Shorts include Closes- romantic and erotic scenes between a young gay couple are interspersed with drag performance and vox pops considering contemporary attitudes, some positive, some homophobic, towards gay lives in Paraíba.
Tongues Untied, US 1989, Dir Marlon Riggs.
Marlon Riggs blends archive footage into his unique, experimental film, to, in his own words, “shatter the nation’s brutalising silence on matters of sexual and racial difference”. The films shows homophobia (including a notorious routine from Eddie Murphy’s stand-up), racism in the gay community (sexualisation of the Black male body by white men) and the devastation of the AIDS crisis.
For programme information visit https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2024/series/queer-80s
