Closing evening

✴ 8 p.m.

To conclude the festival, we pay tribute to Lionel Soukaz, a subversive filmmaker and pioneer of French queer cinema, who passed away this year.

Three films: a tribute film by filmmaker Xavier Baert, based on the memory of a seemingly lost film; then a rediscovered and restored film; and finally, Soukaz’s most controversial and perhaps most emblematic work, Ixe, screened on a double screen.

“Lionel’s cinema repeats and insists, like life. A repetition of insistent life that is nothing other than the permanent and unstoppable protest of reality. This hidden reality of the living forces that we constantly evade, that the supposed reality of daily news and imposed truths constantly dissuades us from. This cinema is therefore perceived as the immodesty of exposure and the tearing open of a wound. It offends propriety and clashes with convention. It is also a cinema of innocence, which makes no judgments: it merely shows. It does not judge judgments of any kind: political, religious, moral, family, etc., but rather makes a clean sweep of them. Reality is stripped bare, or, like a wound, bursts open; the flow, the blood that gushes forth, is vital.” (René Scherer)