LGBT film festival Side by Side goes ahead despite pressure to cancel

Annual LGBT film festival Side By Side has gone ahead in St Petersburg despite pressures from Russian authorities to cancel the event. Earlier this year, Side by Side’s director Manny de Guerre told The Calvert Journal that event organisers received five bomb hoax phone calls at last year’s festival in St Petersburg, with its 2012 Novosibirsk festival disrupted by a mob chanting homophoic slurs and threatening violence.

Among the 15 foreign guests this year was Gus Van Sant, who presented his film Milk, a biopic based on the life of American gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk. Finnish director Kanerva Cederström also attended, presenting a collection of films about Tove Jansson, a Finnish author and painter.

In a statement for the festival, Cederström wrote: “It is not so long ago that homosexuality was also regarded as a crime and disease in Finland, and Tove and Tuulikki lived most of their adulthood through these times in our country.”

The screening of Cederström’s film was accompanied by a lecture by Katrina Rosavaar, a Finnish artist, who spoke about Jansson’s life and work.

The topic of transgender rights was also discussed by a panel featuring Maria Anholm, who was Sweden’s minister of gender equality until last month, and CEO of the Swedish Film Institute Anna Serner.

Source: The Moscow Times