Film review: Prejudice & pride - a queer film history

A lot has happened

since homosexuality was a crime in official Sweden.

Now LGBTQi is a word on everyone's lips

(well, at least many).

At the presentation of this spring's upcoming Swedish films in January, we were able to establish a queer theme - including this documentary made by Eva Beling, who has previously drilled into film history with, among others, Kvinnorna and Bergman.

Beling and her staff serve generously with clips from what is considered to be the first queer film, Hollywood Swede Mauritz Stiller's Wings to My Mother Marianne and further into the contemporary more and more films on the theme.

A long line

of well-known talking heads, such as Harriet Andersson, Jonas Gardell, Stina Ekblad, Gösta Ekman, Richard Wolff and a whole host of others, testify about their own experiences and / or formulate themselves around this part of cultural and film history.

Not least about how you as a queer / homosexual through the ages have had to struggle to find your own entrances in the thoroughly, on the surface, heterosexual film world.

Interpret and decode.

Screw and file - to give the works relevance even for those who do not sign the current cohabitation contract.

First hated and hidden, then portrayed as sexual predators to warn the 50s youth.

Then given victim roles and only after that, sometime towards the Fucking Åmål era portrayed as ordinary people, who are not

their sexual orientation.

Development has

progressed rapidly, or at least in principle in one direction.

Well, it probably depends on who you ask, but we can probably agree that it has sprinted in recent decades - from just Fucking Åmål onwards.

At least in Sweden and large parts of the western world.

But for that reason, success is not cast in future-proof stone.

Which, for example, the demonstrations in Georgia against Levan Akin's Golden Beetle Award-winning, Swedish-Georgian dance drama And the we danced testify to.

It is only when a film, which houses homosexual characters, does not have a conflict that is about sexuality, that we got somewhere, someone says in the film and states that we are there now.

But then we have only covered up for the first two letters of LGBTQi.

Much remains to be done, says actor Saga Becker (Something must break).

Prejudice and pride

should be seen for its interesting theme and detailed film history.

Educational and educational, no doubt, but far from queer, in the sense odd.

* It probably took quite a long time between filming and subtitling of this movie.

The term LGBTQ is often recurring, but when the interviewees use that particular term, a friend of identity order has added an "i" - LGBTQi - to the Swedish subtitle.

A funny detail that partly speaks to the anxiety of our identity political time to use wrong terms, and partly how quickly these change.