Festival Director's Welcome

Welcome back to an August edition of the GAZE Film Festival! Last year we celebrated thirty years of GAZE. This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland. It's not hard to imagine that cultural and artistic expression helps set the scene for social change. I hope this is a tradition that continues and that GAZE is a part of it. To celebrate this year's milestone, you will find films in our programme that celebrate gay sexuality in many guises, from romance to kink to marriage to late-night vintage pornography. Enjoy!

Where urgent social change is concerned, trans film- making plays an essential part in our festival, and cinema is a space where we imagine better futures, push for action, honour community, and platform voices. At GAZE 2023 you will find a host of trans shorts and features reflecting on community, identity, joy, fantasy and freedom. As lesbian filmmaking takes over Hollywood it's also thriving in this year's Irish shorts with a host of truly genius Sapphic tales on offer alongside plentiful voices from across our community. And while we are thinking about our fullest community, at BFI Flare I experienced an incredible documentary entitled Who I Am Not which centres the experiences of three extraordinary individuals who all identify as intersex. It is profound story-telling, the kind film festivals are made of. Inspired by activism surrounding the film I have brought the '+' out of the shadows this year and our festival is subtitled 'LGBTQIA' for the first time. Please do watch this important film, and the Irish short Lambing, and if you are producing stories about intersex and asexual life and other less heard experiences, we would love to watch them.

This year we also have a musical bent to our programme with documentaries focussing on two iconic ground-breaking gay bands, The Indigo Girls (It's Only Life After All) and The Hidden Cameras (Music Is My Boyfriend). Inspired by these stories we've had fun theming our shorts selections around gay dancefloor bangers - Smalltown Boys, Bad Romance, and Mighty Real. You will find the cream of queer talent in amongst those. We welcome a special film selection from our friends at Queer Lisboa who have brought us a selection of beautiful shorts and whet our appetite for future collaborations. We are excited to revive our partnership with the Iris Prize, who present a medley of fantastic cutting-edge shorts this year, and will also join us for a workshop aimed at anyone who wants to work with short films in their career.

We celebrate another new partnership with Red Umbrella Film Festival who offer shorts that focus on queer experiences of sex work and are wondrous in their variety. Come and meet them and hear more about this exciting Dublin venture. Last but never least, our programming partnership with aemi enters its fourth year sharing eye-opening experimental works that will change your mind about short film. As for this year's features, go ahead and delve in, there will definitely be something to entice you - we were spoiled for choice this year, and I hope you feel the same.

Greg Thorpe
Festival Director