North African Queer Film Festival
Presented by Dhakira Collective
From September 7 to 22, 2023
A celebration of queerness in North Africa both in our collective past and present, this festival offers an unprecedented look into queer cinematic and cultural productions from the region and aims to create a strong sense of community and belonging for North African queer people across the globe. The North African Queer Film Festival features stories by and about sexual and gender minorities in North Africa and its diasporas in an effort to cast a light on the social, political, emotional and cultural aspects of queer identity in the region while challenging historically dominant modes of representation and continuous erasure of LGBTQ+ North Africans. The films in this program serve as a window into the historical presence of queer people in the region who have always been here despite marginalization, criminalization and erasure by the current systems of oppression in North Africa inherited from colonization.
Free entrance. First come, first served.
North African Queer Film Festival
Anyab (Fangs)
This Egyptian remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show from 1981 completely reinvents O’Brien’s classic, refocusing its efforts on a horde of flamboyant vampires who enjoy nothing more than a sing-a-long.
Mohammed Shebl
Egypt
language: Egyptian Arabic
subtitles: English
100 min
North African Queer Film Festival
Man of Ashes
Hachemi and his friend Farfat are part of a group of distraught young people. Hachemi’s forced marriage is experienced as a sudden turning inward, bringing back painful, repressed memories of their childhood, traumas that they carry into their long adolescence.
Nouri Bouzid
Tunisia
language: Tunisian Arabic
subtitles: English
109 min
North African Queer Film Festival
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t
Crossing the borders of nation, race, gender and sexual identity, three short films explore (in)visibility, hiding and authenticity through characters who refuse definition.
language: Arabic, German, English
subtitles: English
52 min
North African Queer Film Festival
Queer Utopias
The films in this program combine the visual codes of science fiction, fantasy, imagination, poetic cinema, queer icons with representations of gender/queer and racial minorities to paint a critical portrait of our societies.
France
language: French
subtitles: English
63 min
North African Queer Film Festival
Un peu pour mon cœur et un peu pour mon Dieu
Since in Algeria most women traditionally are not allowed to mix with men, Meddahates customarily entertain gatherings of women. This film is a portrait of one such female orchestra.
Brita Landoff
Algeria, Sweden
language: Algerian arabic, French
subtitles: French
58 min
