LGBT film festivals are becoming more and more popular in Spain as in the rest of the world. However the question is how is the impact they have within the communities where they develop?. In Spain there are at least eight. While on one hand the work that is intended at these festivals is to create attraction and re-ignite the interest of  the LGBT community, as well as reviewing different stories and characters, new subjects and identities, it is also to create an opening to the public on the continued vibrancy of the LGBT community and its development in popular culture. Trying to deny the LGBT community after that so much effort has been made to normalize it in contemporary society would be truly retrograde. That’s why these festivals are so important to preserve the LGBT culture, art, film, poetry, etc, which is produced and sometimes, unfortunately, is left  aside.

For it is clear, although homosexuality has existed since the beginning of human existence, it has only been since the last forty years or so that  the vision of the LGBT community has opened up to the closed heterosexual paradigm. Apparently, despite all the progress that in terms of gender and sexuality rights has been achieved, Western society remains highly sexist, dogmatic and a religious mechanism. Either way, festivals as these expose to the public eye  films that open new discussions and stories about various conditions of the human reality that are different -not better- than the established heterosexual model. Sometimes people forget that sexuality is not only two sexual organs, and that the preferences and lifestyles that fit each person with respect of their sexuality is beyond all of this controversy.

Sometimes, these cultural activities embark the same way as the status quo does, in liberal policies we confront the fall and we denyall  immediate mechanical support of the institutions to continue these projects involving a critical distance of the current cultural system. The danger of funding is in the ease with which the artifacts of film, sound, art in general may fall within the formal patterns and academic  trainings, actually, it is a tradition like any others. However, the LesGaiCineMad is probably currently the largest LGBT film festival in the Spanish-speaking countries. The number of visitors it receives and the variety of films make it an important event to seek out for  in Madrid .

 

For more information about the festival, visit the following website: http://www.lesgaicinemad.com/

Alexa Ray

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Translated by: Marc
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