In celebration of Lesbian Visibility Week and their ongoing celebration of lesbian and trans-masc cinema, GAZE has partnered with Light House Cinema and the Irish Film Institute to announce a mouth-watering programme of events.

The first event of note is a preview of the highly anticipated feature, Love Lies Bleeding, starring Kristen Stewart as Lou and Katy O’Brien as Jackie.

The internet has been awash with anticipation for this sapphic romance thriller, not least with the cover shoot for Them magazine which sent fans into a frenzy with its drippingly intimate pictures of the co-stars, literally.

The film follows Lou, a reclusive gym manager, as she falls in love with Jackie, an ambitious body Builder. Lou falls hard, but things take a dark turn when they are pulled into the complex web of Lou’s criminal family.

The preview will be on April 26 at 8:45pm in partnership with Light House Cinema.

On May 4, GAZE also presents UNMASCED, a full programme of screenings and a Screenwriting Taster Workshop in partnership with the Irish Film Institute.  

Led by Caroline Earley, the taster workshop is designed to offer an introduction to the basics of screenwriting and will explore topics like visual storytelling, ideas generation and narrative structure.

With a full day of screenings to follow, there’s an incredible variety of talent from lesbian and trans-masc creators in front of and behind the camera at this year’s GAZE Film Festival.

First up is Outitude, screening at 1:30pm. A multi-award-winning documentary celebrating and documenting lesbian grass-roots activism, collectives, community, academia and politics across the island of Ireland from the 1970s until the present day, it is an essential piece of LGBTQ+ Irish history that is not to be missed.

At 3:30pm, GAZE kicks off the screening of Scannáin Sapphic, a collection of shorts made by Irish lesbians and trans-masc filmmakers. This archival collection is a rich tapestry of shorts that have been chosen as some of the best of GAZE’s thirty-two-year history.

To follow is Butches & Boys, screening at 6:30pm. Traditionally misrepresented and relegated to stereotypes by mainstream cinema, this selection of shorts sheds light on butches, studs, mascs and trans-mascs in all their spectacular variety. Still largely invisible in contemporary cinema, these ambitious shorts pull their stories out of the shadows and into the light.

The last screening of the programme is Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later at 8:30pm. This long-awaited feature revisits four original subjects from Daniel Peddle’s groundbreaking 2005 film The Aggressives — a seminal documentary focusing on the lives of masculine-presenting people of colour assigned female at birth. Centring BIPOC voices, this new film emerges 25 years later to chart how the subjects’ lives have changed. It also explores how the language, culture and visibility of the transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming community have evolved in our modern world.

 

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GAZE once again returns with so many unmissable events. The Love Lies Bleeding screening and the UNMASCED programme are a lineup celebrating trans-masc and lesbian talent which simply cannot be missed.

You can book your place for the Love Lies Bleeding screening here, sign up for the Screenwriting workshop here, and check out all the information for the UNMASCED screenings here.