Announcing Open Call Projects 2024
We continue to be impressed by the brilliantly inventive ideas submitted by programmers and curators across the UK for our Open Call.
This year’s selected projects shine a light on films and themes that have been overlooked, combining cinema with music, art and community.
Chinese Queers; Diasporic Dykes: Saving Face + Reality Fragment 160921
Programmed by Yifan He
Yifan’s programme explores Chinese diasporic lesbian identity through film and shared resources. Alice Wu’s Saving Face screened at Sundance in 2005, the first mainstream Asian-American lesbian film and a beautiful, underappreciated rom com that navigates tensions between Queer identity and cultural heritage.
Alongside the feature interdisciplinary artist April Lin 林森 will present the short film Reality Fragment 160921, which they made as part of the duo Qigemu. The film is a genre-defying mixture of docufiction, experimental narrative, and video art about two people curating their own universe.
You’ll also be able to take home a zine made by April and Yifan for the screening, with insights about the films as well as a curated list of other films that represent East Asian lesbians and Queer people who experience misogyny.
Ahfiwe Cinema presents: Praise Train
Programmed by Sula DF
Sula's event explores Black radical aesthetics and spirituality through two extraordinary films. Julie Dash's acclaimed Praise House leads the way, powerfully exploring black spiritual expression and cultural heritage. Complementing it is the 1930s silent gem Hellbound Train by Eloyice Gist - remarkably one of few surviving works by an African American woman director from that era, offering a glimpse into the cultural excesses of the Jazz Age. So naturally, accompanying the film will be a live, surrealist jazz composition by swaampcat (Ebunoluwa Adepoju).
By spotlighting these two visionary but rarely seen films together, the event provides a unique lens into the bold, radically beautiful perspectives of two pioneering Black filmmakers from decades past.
Tickets will be on sale for both events when the Flatpack Festival programme goes live mid-March.