Coming Out

Dear Friends,

Kinovykhod and Infovykhod Projects are taking time-out till 28th of March 2009.

Meanwhile we are going to collect your points of view regarding these projects and are glad to invite you to think about the conception of their further development.

To understand community demands we’ve made up a brief and simple questionnaire.

On 28^th of February, at 19.00 in the frame of ComingOutCinema Project the film “Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema” will be shown.

It is one of the few documentary films to reflect the development of LGBT Cinema and its meaning for LGBT activism. Along with History of Queer Cinematography the film tells about homophobia issues and well-known actresses and actors’ coming-out.

The original name: «Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema», directors Lisa Aids, Lesley Kleinberg, documentary, USA, 2006, 82 min.

Our next ComingOutCinema takes place on Valentine’s Day, February 14. As always, we invite you to join us to watch a movie, this time about the vicissitude of love and sex.
“Happy Endings” (USA), 2005, director: Don Roos, genre: drama, comedy, 128 min.
Ten parallel stories about the oddities of love. One of the short stories deals with a father and a son dating the same woman. Another story is about a girl who gave up her child for adoption and later meets a guy who warns her that he knows where her offspring lives now. Two lesbians made use of a gay friend to get pregnant and told him it didn’t work out, but their two-year-old son looks just like him. These and other intricate stories about love and sex only mean one thing: All’s well that ends well.

In poems Marina pictured roundly the story of her love for the woman. So, now we not only read over the cyclus “Girlfriend”, but also appeal to this fact proving our “normality”: “If Tsvetaeva herself was…” (and Tchaikovsky was as well…). Actually, the example of non-heterosexual famous persons, who are talented and respected and who has truly established themselves as personalities, inspires and convinces even the most inveterate skeptics.The heated discussion began after the film. The agenda “Coming-out of famous LGBT persons both in Russia and abroad” has been discussed with the participation of experts and guests.

You are invited to the ComingOutCinema (KinoVyhod) on January, 31 (6 p.m.) to see the film “Passion for Marina” (Russia), 2004, 55 min. Director: Andrei V. Osipov.

“Passion for Marina” (“Strasti po Marine”) is a biographical documentary of Tsvetaeva Marina’s life. The film is an artistic re-creation of one Human’s life and one Poet’s fate, it is a kaleidoscope of old photographs, poems, letters and newsreels of past years.

On December 20, 2008, our project ComingOutCinema presented a documentary film Fish Can’t Fly, shedding light on negative consequences the attempts to cure homosexuality had on the mental health of the “diseased.” After the film we proposed to our guests to discuss the topic of homosexuality and religion. In particular, to make an accent on reparative therapy – a whole collection of various pseudo-scientific programs used at one time in the west to try to “correct” the orientation that was unacceptable from the point of view of religion or in the eyes of the relatives.

Three experts were invited for the discussion panel: Valery Sozaev, Chairman of the organization Coming Out, poet and performer Olga Krauze and psychiatrist Ksenia Pavlovna…

Dear friends!

Project ComingOutCinema and the LGBT Film Festival Side by Side, are happy to invite you, from the bottom of our rainbow hearts, to our celebration of film and love!

We prepared for you films you have never seen. These are winners of Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival (http://www.teddyaward.org).

Yet another session of ComingOutCinema, on December 20 (Saturday), will be dedicated to the questions of religion and homosexuality. We will show the documentary film Fish Can’t Fly (USA, 2005, 83 min.).

Main theme of the film is “reparative therapy”, which is offered by several Christian and some near-religious groups as means of curing homosexuality. The film tells the story of several religious gays and lesbians who at one point in time decided to cure their sexual orientation and sought help from religious “specialists.” These stories can’t leave you indifferent, as people tell about years of their lives spent “tilting at windmills.” Through the prism of their lives the viewer sees the lies that entangle the ex-gay industry in the West.

Dear friends,

On December 13, 2008, ComingOutCinema showed a film called A Love to Hide. This evening was dedicated to all the gays and lesbians who suffered from repressions based on their sexual orientation at the time the Article 121 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, passed in 1934, was still in existence. Up till the abolition of this article in 1993, gays and lesbians in the USSR and Russia were persecuted: men were thrown in jail, women were “treated” in psychiatric institutions.

The Russian LGBT Network (www.lgbtnet.ru) declared 2009 to be Memorial Year for the gay and lesbian victims of political repressions.

Read on about how the ComingOutCinema evening, dedicated to the memory of the victims, went…

Sorry, but this post is not available in English