bomb threat – The Russian Reader

The crowd at the opening of the Twelfth Side by Side International LGBT Film Festival in Petersburg, 14 November 2019. Photo courtesy of Side by Side

Press Release, 15 November 2019

The Twelfth Side by Side International LGBT Film Festival opened in Petersburg on November 14 despite stubborn attempts by ill-wishers to disrupt it. At 7:00 p.m. on the dot, right at the moment when the festival’s opening ceremony was set to begin, the festival venue, the Sokos Hotel on Birzhevoy Pereulok, received an anonymous phone call about a bomb or other explosive device that had, allegedly, been planted in the building. The numerous people who had come to the festival were evacuated from the building along with the hotel’s guests. For nearly two hours, police and Emergency Ministry officers checked the hotel. Of course, the “warning” proved to be deliberately false.

Despite these criminal attempts to disrupt it, the Twelfth Side by Side Festival began with a necessarily brief but emotionally charged opening ceremony during which the audience was addressed by the festival’s partners and jury, as well as a guest of the festival, Belgian filmmaker Marianne Lambert, whose documentary film I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman will be shown on November 15.

“What I have seen has reaffirmed for me that this is the place where we need to fight for our rights,” Lambert said.

The opening film was the Brazilian drama Hard Paint, which won the Teddy Award as the best LGBTQ-themed feature film at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival. Before the screening, film critic Ksenia Reutova said many interesting things about the film’s co-directors, Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon, as well as filling in this stunning picture’s context for the audience, telling them about the special, unenviable position of Porto Alegre, the setting of the film and the filmmakers’ hometown, and the recent conservative turn in Brazilian politics, which is very similar to what has been happening in our country.

The first day of the Twelfth Side by Side Festival was marked by a fighting spirit and an atmosphere of solidarity. The festival will run for another seven days, featuring a wide-ranging program of documentaries, features, and short films, as well as appearances by special guests from Russia and abroad, and discussions about transgender people, transgender parents, LGBT in big-time sports, non-binary people, and the victories and shortcomings of the LGBT movement in Russia and worldwide.