Stéphane Gérard

Daily spleen, drunkenness among friends, conversations and the passage of time: the video diaries composed by Lionel Soukaz chronicle the early 1990s, the comet tail of those never-ending winter years and the nightmare of the AIDS years. But edited thirty years later with Stéphane Gérard, they are also a tribute to Hervé Couergou, the beloved partner at the center of all the filmed scenes. Slowly, in conversations between couples and friends, the dandy spirit and intimate confession overlap. What emerges is a portrait of a way of dealing with the times and their pain, which, beneath the act of commemoration, seeks to inscribe a living presence.

The “Journal Annales” consists of almost 2.000 hours of video footage collected by filmmaker Lionel Soukaz since 1991. For “Carottage”, the idea was to take a random sample from this vast volume, like a geological core sample. The result is a condensed history of political struggles and radical cultural experimentation spanning two decades.

In 1991, Lionel Soukaz initiated his Journal annales, filming his "community of fags, poor people, and drug addicts" confronted with the AIDS epidemic, in 2,000 hours where public events intersect with the intimacy of his daily life. Faced with the impossibility of making a montage that would reflect the richness of this approach, Stéphane Gérard and Lionel Soukaz, for this project, focus on associations, mobilizations, meetings: the collective forms of commitment among the diversity of the fronts of struggle.

Today is the "day for the elimination of violence" but Julia, a nonchalant high school teacher, is not paying attention when Ethan tries to confide in her.

An epic anthology feature film event combining 25 shorts from different queer directors worldwide, each telling a story based on a color/fetish of the infamous hanky code.

A story of a machine that won't identify itself and produces images that can make you sick and give you nausea. Swallowed by some of the authorities, media makers and cultural dealers, it reproduces its stereotypes and teaches it to generations of young eyes. But not everyone is equal in front of these images. Black French youth can't find any answer to their questions in them. By hiding their reflections in the big cultural mirror, this swallowed machine feeds our anger. Could it actually be working at its own destructio

The epidemic isn't over yet, and new transmissions strongly concern trans, gay and Afro-descendant people. How is the Parisian ballroom scene, whose members are at the intersection of these categories, dealing with this reality? What knowledge can be transmitted across oceans and decades?

The Stonewall riots of 1969, an iconic moment in gay liberation, took place in New York City. In 2012, forty-three years later, History doesn't have to repeat itself is an attempt to find the community born from these riots and how the wide project of transformation that inspired this movement is being continued and transmitted. Seven conversations about the politics of sexual minorities and the fight against the AIDS epidemic are combined in order to present their various perspectives, experiments and ideals. Their projects include archiving, video, activism and the creation of community spaces. They share a deep desire for justice which travels across decades : they have learned the lessons of the past and look now towards the future, craving utopia.