Looking for little-known nuggets of queer cinema? The Lawrens Queer Cinema Club site is a gold mine

If you are looking for queer movie or series which are just as many archive LGBTI + precious, Lawrens Shyboi organized you a real gold mine.

His website Homosexual cinema club lists and makes visible ” resources and archives of queer, trans and dyke cultures on screen “. Each post features a director or queer job and even offers a link to the movies when they are accessible.

As for her Instagram page (@lawrens_shyboi), it’s full of recommendations of unknown nuggets And of analysis representations of the oddity on screen, from yesterday to today. During a meeting with Madmoizelle, he told us about these works “witnesses of our stories” is located “out of the way of cisheteronormal systems”.

How did your interest in queer cinema come about?

Lawren Shyboi: I think it all started when I discovered mine not heterosexualityas a teenager I started looking representations because when you are a child, you are isolated and it is “Hetero-earth” in your college, you want it find stories you don’t necessarily experience in your life and to which you can identified. I started looking for lesbian movies then. For example, I searched a lot on Youtube and Univers-L, a site that did lesbian movie listings. I spent hours and hours there!

How is queer cinema defined?

For me, queer cinema is a political approach filmmakers. Refers to how they politicize their cinemaie the way them highlight And request themes that are the reality of LGBTQI + people.

Talking about queer cinema is also one way of doing this theorizes the oddity in an aesthetic context. It seems important to me to show films that are not necessarily smooth fictionslinear narratives ranging from point A to point B. Queer films plays on genresThey formatsyou don’t really know if it is fiction Where is it from documentaryif it’s improvised Where is it Very to write. Sometimes you almost feel like you are in front of a play.

Is there a period of queer cinema that particularly marked you?

I really like the period of the years 1990-2000. There is everything a fairly politicized section of cinema in the 1990s with the crisis of AIDS, whereas before it was less true. I think there was at that moment an urgency to speak, to express oneself, to make a collective cinema and to organize oneself.

These films weren’t necessarily militant, but they raised political issues. Directors and Directors talked a lot about their own experienceswho broke with representations mainstream, clichés and stigmatizations that we used to see. I am very interested discover the story of LGBTI + people through this cinema.

Do you think queer on-screen portrayals have evolved and are better today?

These films that I’m trying to bring out make a nice counterpoint the most funded, produced and broadcast speeches and shows today. Even if there is more visibility todayeven in French cinema or on Netflix and all platforms, there is always many speeches and performances problematic. To this day, when looking for LGBT resources, you mostly come across movies where people trans are played by cis actorsor a lot heteronormal. For example, a film where the only goal of a lesbian couple is to get married, have children and buy a house … I find it very nice to discover the richness of what has been created before.

When you watch these movies, you realize they are brings you a lot. It gives you a lot force and that opens you to many thoughts which are not seen in the cinema today. Past movies have almost more to tell you than current movies ! You find out the story of LGBTI + peopleand above all you realize: “Can already existedwe had already been told these things and these people were already in the process of doing so fight ! “

Could you recommend three nuggets to start our exploration?

Forbidden loves: beyond prejudices, the lives and words of lesbians(1992) available for free in the original version with subtitles.

Thank God, I’m a lesbian (1992). The movie is on Youtube with subtitles.

And as a newer resource, Clarifications on Netflix!

Featured image credit: © Queer cinema club