Queer Wave festival ends in Nicosia, names audience award winners

Carmen Emmi’s Plainclothes and Rati Tsiteladze’s A Song Without Home won the feature film audience awards at Queer Wave, the Cyprus LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Its seventh edition ran from September 18 to 27 at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC). The organisers said the festival drew more than 2,000 people over ten days and screened more than 50 Cyprus premieres, both shorts and features, from over 36 countries, including Thailand, South Africa, Iraq, Ecuador, Georgia, Brazil and Croatia. Feature winners Festival-goers voted for the winners throughout the ten days. Plainclothes, a Sundance-winning psychological thriller set in the 1990s about a closeted police officer tasked with seducing and arresting men at a gay cruising spot, won Best Narrative Feature. A Song Without Home, which follows a Georgian trans woman seeking asylum in Austria, won Best Documentary Feature. Other screenings included Hafsia Herzi’s Cannes-winning The Little Sister, Ivona Juka’s Cyprus co-production Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day, Harry Lighton’s Pillion, and a centenary screening of the 1926 Swedish silent film The Girl in Tails. The festival closed with a sing-along screening of Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Other awards Mathieu Morei’s Yaoi Dumb Bitch, about queerness and family, won Best Mid-Length Film. Best Narrative Short went to Italiano by Mehdi Davachi, an Iranian short about connection and resistance amid political turmoil. Best Documentary Short went to The Jezebels by Thanasis Tsimpinis, about community, sex positivity and safe spaces. Best Animated Short went to Two Black Boys in Paradise by Baz Sells, a stop-motion film based on a poem by Dean Atta. Workshops and guests The festival held four workshops: one on queer solidarity across borders with Palestinian artists from DARAQ Crew; a creative writing session led by BAFTA-winning author and screenwriter Dean Atta; a workshop on queer horror with George Rallis; and Trans Talks, a roundtable for trans people and friends initiated by Tanya and Garose. Visiting filmmakers and guests took part in Q&A sessions. They included British artist Sam Ashby, who presented his anthology and introduced Rosa von Praunheim’s City of Lost Souls as founder of Little Joe; Flora Woudstra Hablé, with her short Destroy Me, Please; and Tsimpinis. Godisamang Khunou, Florenza Deniz Incirli and Merima Šišić spoke after the screening of Daughters of the Tallest Tree, an anthology of five documentaries from four continents co-directed by Cypriot filmmaker Incirli. Audiovisual installations at NiMAC paid tribute to Paola Revenioti and Andreas Karayian. Evening events included an audiovisual opening ceremony by φμδ, a drag show by Aphroditios themed on 1980s Berlin, a 20-minute waacking piece titled Tea Party, and late-night sets by DJs and collectives including DARAQ Crew, C’Est Demon!, Electrika, NANA and Trash Your Gender.