IRIS PRIZE 2020 | PREVIEW
October 2020, and a festival being moved online generates little surprise, this one very much included. A silver lining to this Covid cloud, however, is that this year’s Iris Prize LGBT+ Film Festival is online – and free, reports Chris Williams.
The Iris Prize is an amazing part of Cardiff’s LGBT+ visibility, bringing a host of international filmmakers and creatives to the city. While it is bittersweet that the festival is going online – hopefully just for this year – its core venues, notably Chapter Arts Centre and the Cardiff branch of the Cineworld chain, are missing out more than they already are. More positively, this year’s screenings will be accessible to a much wider audience; for instance, I’m not even able to get to Cardiff at present, but can watch this year’s festival from the settee (or even my bed).
So how will it work? From Tue 6 until Sun 11 Oct, films and events will be released gradually; screenings will be ‘on demand’, and online from 10am on the day of their release, available to watch until 11.45pm on Sun 11. If you do miss anything, or fancy a rewatch, from the end of the festival until Sat 31 Oct you’ll be able to buy tickets to watch individual screenings, or passes to multiple ones. These start at £5 and top out at £60 for an all-access pass, which includes access to all shorts and features plus three features from the archive.
During the week there will be live streaming events, including Iris Live! every evening – co-hosted by Cardiff’s own, perennially gorgeous drag queen, Jolene Dover – and watch-along events where you can check out each short film programme, as they’re first shown, along with an interactive chat room.
Thirty-five filmmakers compete for the Iris Prize itself, which at £30,000 makes it the largest LGBT+ short film prize in the world. With films originating in nations from Brazil to Iceland, Canada to Macedonia, the festival partners with 25 international LGBT+ festivals who nominate films for the shortlist, the rest being chosen by a jury from films entered through open submissions.
All 35 works represent a celebration of lives of LGBT+ people across the world, and as always the short films are programmed into themes. The content in Iris Prize 1: We’ll Be Fine (Wed 7 Oct, 11am) is summarised by Iris as “difficult journeys lead to cathartic new beginnings and signs of hope,” while Expectations (Wed 7, 2pm) is about how “living up to your family’s high hopes can be almost impossible to navigate, especially as an LGBT+ person.” Programme 8, Finding Your Way, features an appearance from Miriam Margolyes and Virginia McKenna as a couple of former World War II Land Girls in Wings: “a heart-warming LGBTQ+ love story that spans over six decades”.
Wings is also featured in the Best Of British category, a category that features two shorts from Welsh filmmakers. Rhiw Goch (On The Red Hill) is directed by now Cardiff-based Anglesey native and recent USW graduate Anna Winstone, while Go Home Polish is the second Welsh entrant: “Angered by graffiti scribbled in a British backstreet, a photographer [Michal Iwanowski] embarks on a thousand mile walk back to his birthplace in search of home.” The winner of Best British Short receives a package of services sponsored by Pinewood Studios Group.
Features are a big part of the festival as well. On behalf of Buzz, I was lucky enough to judge the best feature at the 2017 festival and they were some of the finest LGBT+ films I’ve watched. (Iceland’s Rift is one of the most beautiful horror/mysteries you’ve – probably – never seen.) Two of 2020’s features, Sweden’s Are We Lost Forever [top] and USA’s Gossamer Folds [above], include pre-recorded conversations the filmmakers, after the screenings (available from Wed 7 and Thurs 8 respectively). There are seven feature films in total, with last year’s Best Feature winner the widely acclaimed And Then We Danced.
Of course, Iris isn’t just films. Every year the festival is made up of talks, panel discussions and Q&A sessions, all of which are available to watch online this year; you can also listen to the filmmakers talk on the Iris Prize Podcasts. The Iris Awards themselves will be live streamed from 7pm on Sat 10, with host Tom Selway plus guests presenting. But what of the legendary Iris Parties? While the infamous afterparties that take place in Cardiff’s LGBT+ venues (including karaoke in The Golden Cross) can’t happen at the moment, don’t be disheartened because those are going online as well. With the help of the Zoom platform, from 8pm on Wed 7-Sat 10 the party will be brought to your living room…
Iris Prize 2020, online, Tue 6-Sun 11 Oct. All events are free to view. Info: www.irisprize.org
words CHRIS WILLIAMS