The Tel-Aviv International Film Festival has been a shining light for the LGBT arts community in Israel for more than a decade. The ten day annual event is held during Tel Aviv Pride.
We chatted with TLVFest Festival Producer Sonya Soloviov.
In one sentence, what is TLVFest?
In one sentence, TLVFest is Tel-Aviv’s International LGBT Film Festival, and the only LGBT film festival in Israel. There’s another one day festival for Israeli lesbian movies.
How and why was TLVFest created?
TLVFest was created in 2006, after Yair Hochner has travelled around the world and participated in 40 film festivals with his movie “Good Boys.” Yair saw the need of having a local LGBT film festival in Israel, and Tel-Aviv being the most tolerant city in Israel was chosen to host it.
The venue was fully booked throughout the five-day event; screening from noon until midnight, dozens of full length, shorts, and documentaries, which were all donated by the filmmakers and distributors.
Over 2000 people attended that first festival and it was clear we had created something that had to continue and grow.
The next TLVFest is going to be held June 1-10, 2017.
Why is LGBTQ exposure important?
The importance of the TLVFest and many other LGBTQ film festivals is mainly to give a space for LGBTQ audiences to see characters they can identify with, to let LGBTQ filmmakers tell their stories, and to educate non-LGBTQ people.
In the short history of LGBTQ film, just over 40 years, we just now start to see the abundance of the LGBTQ identities coming to the big screen. Most of us grew up trying to identify with characters on the big screen that didn’t fit our sexualities, our gender identities, or who we are. We were searching the big screen for those people to reassure us that we were “OK”, that we weren’t alone, that there were other people like us who had normal lives. We would clasp to the film and TV representations of LGBTQ people, which more often than not would not fit the way we saw ourselves.
With the LGBTQ liberation movements, which started in the 1970s, we started to see LGBTQ filmmakers beginning to tell our stories, stories that helped us educate non-LGBTQ people, firstly our families, that we were human, that we weren’t freaks, and that we had a community. This enabled LGBTQ people make many of the legal changes in the past 40 years in the western countries.
Hopefully the films that we are making now will help us to make the same changes on the countries where it is still illegal to be queer.