
Breaking the silence
Juanjo Peris. Breaking the silence is this year’s theme for the day against biphobia, homophobia and transphobia which is being celebrated this coming May 17th. With the help of cinema, I would like to reflect upon the contributions from social movements in general, and specifically the LGBT community, and how they could help us through changing times.
“Moffie” (South Africa/United Kingdom, 2019) is a film which tells the story of a young, white gay man who hides his sexuality during his obligatory military service during Apartheid in South Africa. “Moffie” (“Maricón” in the Afrikaans language) is based on field diaries during military service on the border with Angola, and the subsequent autobiographical novel of Andre Carl van der Merwe. The film, which combines beauty and tenderness with violence and homophobia addresses the issues well, but one of the things which impacted me the most is how the homophobic discourse, (and in this case using the word of God to justify it), ends up becoming a totalitarian and dominant ideology which represses and punishes that which is different. (more…)

Antidote for a sterile world (in relation to the movie “Children of Men”)
Xavier Casanovas. Dystopian fiction is in fashion right now. You don’t have to be particularly learned in the subject area to realise that it is simply a projection of what frightens us most: the end of time – or at least, the end of normality as we know it- it is a fiction that has become more credible now than ten or twenty years ago. Ecocide, the collapse of civilisation and epidemics are all over the headlines and are helping us to believe that for our society, in its current form, time is running out.
In 2006, Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning director of Mexican cinema, made an untimely dystopian movie. Let’s just say it went too far. Although it is true that the fall of the twin towers, Islamic terrorism, and the start of the war in Iraq made people think of the collapse of civilisation, the dynamics of our model of progress and economic growth remained sufficiently unchanged so that we did not need to question any cultural assumptions of our Western society. Maybe this is why the film was not a box office success and went largely unnoticed. We were not ready to listen to what Cuarón wanted to tell us. Yet over time, it has become a cult film and now appears in several lists of the best movies of the first twenty years of the twenty-first century. We are talking about “Children of Men”. (more…)