Explicitly playing with gender and gender performance has been foundational to Swinton’s career and identity as a performer. Swinton’s queer identity emerges from a person who is both presumptively heterosexual and who has largely chosen presumptively heterosexual roles. So what makes her a queer cult figure? This is the 3rd feature in our special A Bigger Splash week.
LGBTQ
HotDocs 2016: Conversations with the creative team behind essential doc Check It
Check It follows several members of the inspiring gay and transgender teen gang Check It through their struggles on the harsh streets of Washington, D.C.
Vogueing at Berlinale: Kiki and Strike a Pose
Despite being a rather niche subject, two films about vogueing competed in the Panorama Documentary section at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Sandy Powell’s costumes in Carol tell what words can’t
Costume designer Sandy Powell showed how two starkly different women refashion one another into a perfect match.
Being 17 is more Sciamma’s than Techiné’s film
Berlinale correspondent Elena Lazic reviews Being 17. Although it was written by Céline Sciamma and directed by André Techiné, it’s got Sciamma’s fingerprints all over it.
Nasty Baby is a half-baked bougie satire
The film gleefully sends up bourgeois attitudes as ridiculous before suggesting they’re harmful. Yet we’re not meant to dislike the characters causing harm. It’s an interesting premise that hasn’t been fully fleshed out. Likewise, Silva’s choice to shoot the film handheld, in all its clumsiness, prevents the film from ever being a beautiful work of art. It’s an aesthetic designed to be cheap and adaptable to an improvised script, but it doesn’t allow for much formal rigour. It lulls us into a kind of complacency, setting up a story of middle-class liberalism, before subverting the genre’s expectations.