BFI Flare: LGBTQIA+ Film Festival celebrates audience increase
The festival hosted 6 World Premieres, 13 International Premieres, 4 European Premieres, and 18 UK Premieres.
The latest edition of the BFI Flare LGBTQIA+ Film Festival has seen audiences continue to grow.
57% of people booking tickets for the 37th edition, which ran from 15-26 March, were new to the festival in amazing news!
As a whole audiences grew by 16% with an 85% occupancy rate at screenings during the festival.
The 2023 festival saw the introduction of BFI Flare Expanded – an immersive VR experience that allowed around 800 visitors fresh perspectives on queer narratives.
BFI Flare Expanded ran from 16-19 March and after a successful debut, is hoped to return for a longer run in 2024.
Over the 12-day festival, there were 58 feature premieres and 90 shorts screened from 41 countries. 280 filmmakers were able to attend the festival, including the creators behind the opening and closing night films, The Stroll and Drifter.
The festival also hosted 6 World Premieres, 13 International Premieres, 4 European Premieres, and 18 UK Premieres.
Two intersex-focused stories – Who I Am Not and XX + XY – were also among the many highlights this year. The former was BFI Flare’s Centrepiece Presentation and was an intimate portrait of the lives of two intersex South Africans and the challenges they face navigating binary sex and gender systems. Meanwhile, Soh-Yoon Lee’s South Korean coming-of-age comedy, follows an intersex teen and their friends navigating the complex feelings and urges that come with adolescence.
Big Boys, Kokomo City, Le Beau Mec, Kenyatta: Do Not Wait Your Turn, and Polarized were also highlights.
BFI Flare also continued its long-running partnership with the British Council with the Five Films for Freedom programme. Five LGBTQIA+ short films from the Flare programme were made available to global audiences for the duration of the festival. This year, over three and a half million people from around the world viewed the films. A quarter of views came from parts of the world where freedom and equal rights are limited. Figures from international content partnerships are still to be counted.
The festival also returned with many of its mainstay events such as the Big Gay Film Quiz. This year special events such as Remembering Ron Peck and Bisexual Visi-Bi-lity in Film and Television also sold out.
While Flare welcomed new programmers Rhianna Ilube and Wema Mumma, as well as Ulrich Schrauth as BFI Flare’s Expanded Programmer, a fond farewell was wished to Senior Programmer Michael Blyth.