7th Queer Wave continues at NiMAC with films, workshops and discussions

Nicosia, Cyprus. The 7th Queer Wave festival continues at NiMAC until September 27 with screenings, workshops, parallel events and tributes to queer ancestors, providing a platform for the LGBTQIA+ community.

Screenings on September 23 and 24

Shorts V: The New Era will be screened at 7pm on September 23, celebrating trans joy, honouring resistance and imagining future possibilities for trans people.

At 9.30pm, the festival will screen Carmen Emmi’s Sundance-winning debut feature Plainclothes, a psychological thriller set in the 1990s about a closeted police officer arresting men at a gay cruising spot.

On September 24, Shorts VI: Lady Friends, featuring women-centred stories about connection and longing, will be shown at 7pm. Elliott Tuttle’s Blue Film will have its Cypriot premiere at 9.30pm.

Films, performance and DJ sets

A Family Ties short-film programme will be screened at 7.30pm on September 25. It will be followed by Bearcave, a Venice-winning film directed by Stergios Dinopoulos and Krysianna Papadakis.

The screening follows the recent cancellation of the film’s appearance in the Greek village of Paraskevi, Aigialeia, after homophobic backlash. The evening will continue with the 20-minute waacking piece Tea Party and DJ sets by Electrika and NANA.

Workshops and documentaries

The September 26 programme will begin at 3pm with The Book Club on Queer Horror, a critical-thinking workshop in which George Rallis will examine the history of queer horror.

At 5pm, Shorts VIII: Unity in Community will explore ecology, sport and sex positivity in relation to safe spaces and community. The programme will include a Q&A with Thanasis Tsimpinis on The Jezebels.

At 7pm, Rati Tsideladze’s A Song Without Home, which won the Mermaid Award at this year’s Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, will examine a trans woman from Georgia seeking asylum in Austria after parting with her mother.

Later that night, the festival will present Pillion by Harry Lighton, which explores master-slave dynamics. Lead actor Alexander Skarsgård has described the film as a “dom-com”. The closing party, Wh*reticu/ture, will be Queer Wave’s third collaboration with Trash Your Gender.

Final day

The festival’s final day, September 27, will begin at 3pm with Trans Talks, a roundtable discussion for trans, non-binary and gender-expansive people about navigating the world.

At 5pm, Queer Wave will mark 100 years since Karin Swanström’s The Girl in Tails (1926) with a screening of the silent comedy, which addresses conformity, feminism and gender roles and is regarded as a pioneering feminist and queer classic of the Swedish silent era.