Queer Kid in the Landscape: an evening of films exploring queer childhood experience

Join us for an evening where we contemplate the intricacies of growing up queer in the 80s through the lens of three short films. Afterwards we'll host a post-screening Q+A to discuss the themes and experiences of the filmmakers!

There will be a bar for drinks 🍸

Doors at 7pm

Tickets £5.50 advance // £7 On The Door

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Films

LET MY BODY SPEAK / Madonna Adib (UK, Lebanon, 2020, 10’)

The body does not forget. A sexually repressive childhood in Damascus is experienced alongside the growing socio-political repression of the city in the late 1980s and early 90s. Intercutting the landscape of her own body with family archive, the filmmaker embodies the trauma of her queer childhood in Damascus. https://www.scottishdocinstitute.com/2020/11/04/madonna-adib-let-my-body-speak/

THE PERPETRATORS / Richard Squires (UK, 2022, 14’)

Suburban London, the 1980s. A stranger in the family becomes a ghost child and awakens the monsters and desires of a queer childhood. Commenced during lockdown and shot in the neighbourhoods the filmmaker grew up in, THE PERPETRATORS collages moody analogue film, original animation and archival materials in a dreamy autofiction of queer darkness that ponders the correlations between Stranger Danger, the construction of homosexual identity and the institution of the family. At a time when political leaders are once again escalating narratives of the queer threat to children, Squires’ timely reflection on his own 1980s childhood exposes the history of pathological representations of menacing queers. http://lmfyffproductions.com/the-perpetrators/

THE YEAR I BROKE MY VOICE / Angelo Madsen Minax (US, 2012, 47’)

A cast of trans performers, portraying male characters from 1980s coming-of-age films, drift through a post-apocalyptic wasteland sharing misadventures and forging strange kinships. Impromptu races, night-time spooning, cheating at card games, attempts at hypnotism, pocket-knife haircuts, and sexual fantasies become attempts at knowing one another. Constructed from interpretations and re-enactments of 1980s coming of age movies, including The Outsiders (1983), Stand By Me (1986) and The Year My Voice Broke (1987), the film re-approaches the master narrative of childhood’s transition into adulthood from a subversive, yet altogether fragile and uncertain vantage point. 

https://www.angelomadsen.com/the-year-i-broke-my-voice

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This event is hosted in VFD's new event space '64 Stoke Newington' Road'

The screening room is accessed by a staircase leading down to a basement. 

If there is anything we can do to facilitate your visit to VFD then please contact us on info@vfdalston.com and we will do our very best to help in advance and on the night.