Canadian filmmaker John Greyson (above with festival supporter Laura Righi) was at the 24 Torino GLBT Film Festival to receive a special award for his latest effort, the part-documentary, part-fiction Fig Trees, about the struggles of AIDS activists Tim McCaskell of Toronto and Zackie Achmat of Cape Town, as they fight governments and the pharmaceutical industry for better access to antiviral drugs. Fig Trees won the Teddy Award for best documentary at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival.
As per the Torino festival's release, "Greyson hopes that his presence in Torino will help the festival audience to share the Spanish and European Union opinions (including the possibility to send 1 million condoms to the countries affected by this disease) in opposition to the pope's recent declarations."
Chinese filmmaker Shen Weiwei (with festival programmer Cosimo Santoro, left) at the world premiere of his directorial debut Fire in Silence.
"The idea of this film sprang from a meeting with some gay mates," Weiwei explained. "Their stories thrilled me and I tried to express the Chinese queer society … I chose a tragic and passionate love story, with a bitter taste, very similar to every gay or straight love story. The protagonists are two young guys. In China, things are changing also in the queer community, nowadays teenagers … coming out are growing in numbers."
David Bonneville's short film Heiko tells the story of the fetishistic relationship between a 70-year-old aesthete and a young man named Heiko.
Jacques Molitor's short En compagnie de la poussière / The Good-Fellow-Ship of Dust chronicles the emotional travails of a young
med student trying to come to terms with a tragic event in his past.
Kristian Petersen, one of the directors of Fucking Different New York.
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Photos: C. Celano (Greyson, Molitor), L. Gallizio (Weiwei), R. Hermann (Peters, Bonneville)