Prologue

The spread of unfair and unequal situations should be a constant flow and not  marginal in the cinema.The specialized film festivals showing these situations should start looking straight away and not sideways. They should not be a minority appointments, but for a great audience. At a time, it was difficult to get out of the margins and have one’s own voice to be heard. Nevertheless, the Barcelona International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has achieved it. It has been necessary to be very constant at denouncing injustices so that they could be corrected. Denouncing the injustices is the beginning of the road and they can be changed with insistence and time.

The Barcelona International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (FICGLB) has been insisting for eleven years forcing us to look at the front, to look through the window that some others insist on closing because it is not as watching a bucolic landscape. Unfortunately, there is still homophobia, bullying in schools or repressive sexual situations to be denounced and to be shown. The protagonists of these stories have found in the screens of this festival a place to shelter.They have a forum to relieve their feelings, to shout out and never be silenced, to open that window that should never be closed.

After all these years, the time has recognised its organizers that this event is still a bastion of avant-garde, and the courage is implied in its contents. The FICGLB is a very important appointment indeed, a serious and rigorous commitment to principles that go beyond the red carpet. Many of the films that you can see here, are difficult to be released. The organizers bet for quality, innovation, discovery of young emergent talents and compromising documentaries.

Ventura Pons, Agustí Villaronga, Antoni Llorens and Paco Poch are also some of the professionals who have supported, with their presence, the existence of this film festival that was never intended to stay just in the complaint ,but awareness and showing is also the biginning of a change which has brought with it a good cinema. One can not ask for more, well yes, in fact we ask for many future editions.

Carlos Cuadros
Director General del ICAA
Ministerio de Cultura

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Presentation

The Gay and Lesbian Film Festival of Catalonia initiates this eleventh edition by being not only a reference throughout the world of the festivals specialized in homosexual themes, but it is also a model that shows high quality productions hardly found in commercial circuits.

I am pleased to congratulate the organizers, and specially to Xavier-Daniel, whose commitment, tenacity and love for the Cinema has been able to combine magnificently Art with the struggle for sexual diversity. The International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival shows, on one hand, the commitment of this country for sexual freedom, achieving so a complete normalization of homosexuality in all the fields either social, political and institutional, by making it possible, on the other hand, through the movies, and placing Catalonia at a very high level with outstanding films recognised in Europe and world art.

Culture, art and creativity are very powerful means of expression to win the battle against prejudices in order to overcome all kinds of suspicions and understand that a society is richer if personal choices are respected and also if any kind of discrimination is put away. The present Film Festival has contributed, year after year, to build an open, plural and democratic society.

Thank you very much for all this achievement.

Ferran Mascarell
Conseller de Cultura
Generalitat de Catalunya

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Provocation that will not let you indifferent

In this eleventh edition we will start with a new collaboration by adding another screening centre in Barcelona, this is The American House of Catalonia. Due to the attention that FICGLB has dedicated over those years to films shot in Latin America, there will be an opening session on 27th October where films from Cuba, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador will be participating, as well as Peru with a film denouncing homophobia (Hate crimes).

In this edition you will find, as usual, films that you can hardly see in commercial cinemas, since this is one of the main aspects that make FICGLB a special festival unlike any others. The followers of short films will enjoy a careful selection and the supporters of the documentaries also have an important place. Every selection has been made from more than 600 titles submitted from thirty different countries, and viewed all of them.

These are some of the social and cultural concerns of young filmmakers: The Art of eroticism and sensuality (Diptych), fetishism (The Life and Death of Celso Junior, 43-44), sex without a face (Mates), surgical operation transgender performed twice in the same person (Angrarna). In the field of education is given a voice to children, boys and girls, aged 6 to 12 (What do you know?), by denouncing the school bullying (Bullied) and also drawing special attention to old people (Home for the Golden Gays). There have also been selected some works from Film schools in Tel Aviv, Paris, ESCAC, CECC, First Team, and films that have been submitted to film festivals such as Sundance, Cannes, Berlin ...

We highlight some other issues such as: antagonistic social realities: the death sentence of young children in Iran (Angels on Death Row), suicide in the middle youth (Bumblefuck, USA), the abuse of innocent children (Deux inconnus), the hit musical (Mary Lou), the horror-gore (Bite Marks), the portrait of a Hollywood glamour of disenchantment (Going Down in La-La Land), violent actions of members of repressive and fascist groups in the film (Skoonheid) winner of the Queer Palm in Cannes, broken taboos and machism demitification in the boxing world (My last round, Angel) and a cmpromising follow-up with the camera about Chastity Bono, Cher's daughter, who took the decision of changing gender, becoming Chaz Bono (Becoming Chaz). Ten years ago we had Chastity as a member of the jury and this year is Chaz. From here we wish to thank him for his open predisposition towards the Festival.

The present festival is going to be a provocative scenery which will invite you to reflect and above all will not let anyone indifferent.

Xavier-Daniel
Founder and Director of FICGLB

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State-Sponsored Homophobia – Latin American Report 2011

In March 2011 the Human Rights Council of the United Nations issued a Joint Declaration which calls on States to put an end to the violence, criminal penalties and the violations of human rights of lesbian, trans, gay, bisexual and intersex people. They emphasized the view that these important topics related to the realization of human rights should be addressed. The Declaration was signed by 85 states worldwide. Latin American and Caribbean countries which signed this document are: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela. The absence of Peru and of the majority of the Caribbean countries indicates that the advocacy of international organizations should pay special attention to engaging the decision making networks in these territories. With this in mind, local and international activists, as well as decision-makers who have spoken in favor of the Declaration, should build alliances which will build citizenship-exercicing spaces where this possibility has been denied.

There are important changes and advances in the recognition of the right to equality and non-discrimination against LGBTI people in Latin America and the Caribbean, as throughout the world, that were unthinkable a few years ago. However, in most cases these advances do not have the institutionality necessary to remain effective. This fact is a fundamental concern to significantly advance in the eradication of stigma and discrimination. However, everything indicates that the access to the exercise of rights not only depends on the actions that take place in the institutions and mechanisms that have been described. We should stress certain factors that constitute strategies and approaches that underlie affirmative actions for recognition of LGBTI civil rights.

The continuing struggle for visibility and radical exercise of power: the emphasis of ILGA LAC Political action promoting visibility exposes the conflictive interaction between on one side official institutions and on the other side groups of people considered to lack legitimacy, because of their perceived
inconsistence with the formal molds that these institutions want these groups to fit in. This conflict in turn, emphasizes the importance of the intervention of normative legislation facilitating changes at different levels.

The State Sponsored Homophobia Report refers only to one level. Therefore, we want to emphasize the existence of a whole tapestry of actions that precede policy changes such as those mentioned above. Also, this emphasizes the importance of the kind of activism that ILGA-LAC promotes, something that is
corroborated by the information contained in the Report, and should be stressed and often repeated. The demand and struggle for the right to have rights has the effect of unveiling the existence of oppression and its impact. The moment complaints and denunciations are filed, there is a possibility of transforming
culture.

(...) In 2010, the first walk for sexual diversity took place in Jamaica. As activists from different countries of the territory participate in international meetings, they have managed to engage the involvement of the international community in the cultural dynamics of violence observed in their region. These are expressed in acts of violence both by the formal criminalization and penalization of the so called practice of sodomy, and by the societal normative regulation and sanctioning of morality and decency. This Report describes this criminalization, which in some cases reaches unbelievable levels. In Guyana, for example, the act of sodomy is punishable by imprisonment for life.

The reality of the Americas is also very complex (...) "Results of Monitoring Trans Murder: (Update February 2011)," 424 murders of trans people have taken place on the continent between 2008 and 2010. Activists know that these data do not reflect the actual circumstances of violence that affect trans people. Not all cases are reported, but a majority of them are part of the crime reports. Furthermore, there is no trial or punishment for the people who have been identified as agents of transphobic violence. It is important to state that it is this continent where the highest number of murders of trans people in the world takes place.

(...) "What is not there does not exist; what does not exist has no rights." That is a recurring motto in the vision of ILGA-LAC. Major Latin American LGBTI advocacy.

Finally, it seems important to use this space to promote actions and themes which aim to modify the scenarios of discrimination. We know these strategies help to push back the hetero-normative vision that is still expressed in the legal foundations of Latin America and the Caribbean. Although ILGA LAC promotes and carries out specific actions against lesbophobia, transphobia, homophobia, bifobia in general, we believe that there are some priorities that are worth underlining:

(1) The actions to support the Caribbean region. It is necessary for the world that those laws that criminalize sodomy are repealed, and those relating to morality and good manners analyzed and reconsidered, and move away from heterosexual normativism;

(2) The actions in support of Honduras. It is unacceptable that people are being killed and that the international civil community does not come up with standard intervention strategies. More activists and other people may very well still be killed in that country. Support for Honduras means support for more freedom throughout Latin America and the Caribbean;

(3) The struggle for trans depathologization must become a priority. We should persist in reporting and denouncing institutions and practices, promoting therapies to cure from lesbianism, transvestism, homosexuality and bisexuality;

(4) The struggle to enact anti-discrimination laws that counter the legal landscape presented in this report. This will radicalize the struggle for institutional acceptance of declarations, conventions and laws in each of the countries that make up Latin America and the Caribbean.

(5) To encourage the creation of lesbian networks, that minimize the impacts of underrepresentation in LGBTI organizations, in order to promote their own proposals and projects of cultural, political and social intervention.

(6) The struggle for a secular state in Latin America State.

Lesbophobia, transphobia, homophobia, biphobia is not only expressed in the content of the discriminatory laws which this report records, but also by the way a lack of will to create change, be it in the form of declarations of good intent to the actual putting into practice of these declarations. It requires institutions, financial resources and involvement of civil society in decision-making, among others, to really build a world for all people. On this road, the struggle against sexism, racism, neoliberalism - among several oppressive ideologies - is part of the struggle of ILGA-LAC - because a radical exercise of citizenship – is one that enables the expression of diverse identities in every area of our continent.

Amaranta Gómez Regalado, Toli Hernández Morales, Pedro Paradiso Sottile
ILGA-LAC Board members, representatives for Latin America and the Caribbean to the ILGA World Board – The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association - www.ilga.org

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