Agender picks up where Phag Off left off at the end of its mandate, and challenges the calcification of its models. It proposes a series of reflections and practices on body politics among lgbtiq communities and countercultural movements, deconstructing the heteronormative norm that universalizes the categories of sex, sexuality and gender. From this point of view, Agender works on a cinematographic level, focusing in particular on Spanish cinematography. It crosses linguistic borders and includes popular gay fiction, political and social documentaries, queer experimental shorts, independent pornography and art video. This year these different approaches center around a specific theme: emotion.
AgenderPhobia. If the kids are united….
The Sakia Gunn Film Project is a form of denunciation, a crude documentary on a violent episode that involves all those people who have died as a consequence of sexist, lesbophobic and transphobic violence. The victim is Sakia Gunn, a fifteen year old queer African-American girl from New Jersey, who was killed by an adult African-American man just for the pleasure of destroying a weak and unarmed person who, with her extra large hip hop clothes, did not have a clearly defined gender identity. A political and sociological journey emerges from this painful and deadly event, involving the “Pier People,” the young African-American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer –often homeless – community which gathers and lives around a pier at Christopher Street, one of the main streets of New York’s gay neighborhood. Sakia Gunn Film Project is a project revolving around the creation of memory, carried out by African-American Lgbtiq organizations such as Fierce in contexts where brutal violence attempts not only to physically eliminate diversity, but also to remove it from the collective imaginary. The movie will be introduced by two shorts. The first one, Three Queer Mice, is a cartoon about the queer youth organization Global Action Project. The second one was just shown at the Belgian queer festival Pink Screen and is titled What Are We Doing Tonight. The film is directed by Marie Vermeiren, who narrates the night experiences of a gang of young women who attack the sexist language of advertising banners. It is a hymn to stickerism, poster art and the billboard liberation front, although interpreted from a gender perspective.
Bears on Film. Roaring Screens, Love Nights
We propose once again the Bears on Film subsection. This year’s theme is “roaring screens, love nights,” a videoscape that explores and deconstructs representations of masculinity in the lgbt community and beyond. The friendly bears are represented by a new cult figure of Spanish and worldwide cinematography: Juan Flahn, director of Chuecatown. The film, which has received numerous awards and has been shown at lgbt and queer festivals around the world, besides being an exceptional movie, is an extremely profound and ironic reflection on how bears live in Chueca, Madrid’s famous “barrio.” It is also a reflection on the process of gay gentrification taking place in contemporary metropoles. The plot centers on the meaning of this transformation, which creates a boundary in the West of gay codification and opens up new vital spaces, while at the same time flattening specific dimensions. The protagonist is a murderer in a breathtaking thriller, between the bear bars, saunas and desolate roads of Chueca, as the neighborhood changes its historical identity from a lumpen neighborhood inhabited by shoemakers, prostitutes and drug-addicts to a gay market. The story is part of a wider reflection on the meaning of gay couples – presented sometimes in a fluid, sometimes in a fragmented way – of fluctuating families where the female subject and maternity are viewed through a specifically Spanish gay lens and redefined according to new models. The film will be opened by Ahmet is My Family, a tribute to Ahmet Yildiz by filmmaker Jonathan Robinson. The short is an emotional denunciation of the first gay honour killing of an activist bear involved in Turkish lgbtq rights, which received much attention on the part of the Turkish press. Ahmet Yildiz’s family is a different one, one that, rather than bullets, gives him the love of remembrance. This testimony will be narrated by Olivier Cerri aka Kaptain Bear, founder of the movement to remember Yildiz’s death.
Emoporn.
Where to loose oneself is erotic and to find oneself is political: a review of love sex and deperation
Once upon a time there was indie porn, a field of reflection and action where libertarian forms of exploration led to an extreme deconstruction of the mysoginist and heterocentric violence of commercial pornography, substituting it with a playful, independent, feminist and queer pornography, characterized by fluctuating and self-represented bodies. We once engaged in digital forms of experimentation with online texts, where bodies became a battlefield and the forms of self-representation shifted the ethics and esthetics of “Do It Yourself” to the digital realm. Today all this has given way to the emergence of markets of social networks which sell porntainment products built around identity niches, aimed at a fifteen-second masturbation, depriving indie porn of its original subversive and experimental meaning. The main issue, in this context, has to do with the concept of “Porn Sublime,” as defined by Barbara DeGenevieve, that is the experience of knowledge/liberation that accompanies this break, the horror of pleasure, the nudity of the private as a form of politics from below. Today the last taboo is represented by the nakedness of emotion, by the exposure of emotion in a body text that has always denied it because of its anti-economic nature, impossible to represent in the identity niches that transform independent porn into a marketing tool. Emoporn aims at deconstructing the silent body, at initiating a process of desymbolization leading to a decentering of the “subliminal” through the territories of unknowable emotion; the forms of love on the border between paradise and death, in a constant landslide in the meanders of orgasm, where the process of loosing oneself is erotic and that of finding oneself is political, where “Emo” represents the blood pulsing inside vital bodies.
Agender proposes a selection of love, sex and desperation to explore these moments of transformation…pulsing bodies. The main protagonists are Katrien Jakobs, pornfeminist, net artist, producer of Amsterdam’s Netporn Conferences and Media Studies professor at the University of Hong Kong. Together with Florian Kramer, one of the founders of the Neoista movement, she will present Melktime.
Tekfestival will present the bodies and desires of French director Laurance Chanfro, of American director Charles Lum, of Tuscan videoartist Pier Giorgio De Pinto, of Mancunian experimental filmmaker Kevin Rolfe, of Canadian F-to-M performer Tobaron Waxman, of the queer photo and video collective MyJemmaTemp, which will all explore the most unknown territories of emotion, where eros and thanatos unite in a pandroginous copula.
MaricaTv. Better to be a faggot than a fascist
“Marica/maricón,” which in Spanish means “faggot,” is a reappropriation of that term on the part of the Spanish gay community. It displaces the term “queer,” which looses much of its meaning once it is translated into another language. Marica TV is a channel dealing with lgbtq rights; a way of zapping through time and space in order to see how Spanish and Portuguese language television have talked about issues such as rights, sexphobia and emargination, manifestations, sexually transmitted diseases, sex work, tolerance of and education about diversity. Marica TV is the outcome of a social communication content analysis, through the use of advertising and tv journalism. In this zapping, we will traverse different times and spaces, from the 1960s to today, traveling through Spain, Portugal and several Latin American countries. The cut-up has been conceived by Fabio Giuffrè, an Italian archivist, filmmaker and gay activist and at present leads a LGBTQ movie festival dedicated to Spain and Latin America on the site Buzz Intercultura.
2009 edition 
