SAVE THE DATE! The LGBTIQ+ film festival FIRE!! will take place from June 4 to 14 in Barcelona.
This year’s theme centers on Arab and Persian cinema. The festival aims to highlight the cultural and artistic richness of those regions while championing LGBTIQ+ voices emerging from contexts marked by social, political, and religious complexity. The motto is “A Thousand and One Queer Stories.” The festival builds a bridge between cultures, generations, and experiences, inviting audiences to discover stories about desire, identity, resistance, and memory.
Hadi Moussally
The visual identity for this edition was created by Lebanese director and photographer Hadi Moussally. He appears as his alter ego, Salma Zahore. The figure represents performativity, transformation, and the reclaiming of the self. Moussally’s work can also be seen in the exhibition “The Arabs Who Live Within Me” at the Institut Français de Barcelona, as well as in the performance “I Am Love,” which will be part of the festival’s opening.
The festival has announced five films that set the tone for this edition. The opening film is Bouchra, directed by Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani. It follows a lesbian Moroccan filmmaker living in New York who experiences a creative block. That block turns out to be a disconnection from her roots, her history, and herself. A phone call with her mother in Casablanca becomes the catalyst for an emotional journey about migration, identity, motherhood, and love.
On the Sea comes from Helen Walsh in the United Kingdom. The story takes place on the coast of North Wales. It follows Jack, a man who built his life within established boundaries: marriage, family, work. That balance begins to break when his son questions the future written for him and a wandering sailor named Daniel arrives, awakening a truth Jack buried for years.
Jimpa is directed by Sophie Hyde. The film follows Hannah, a filmmaker who travels to Amsterdam with her family to reconnect with her father, Jimpa. He is a queer, HIV-positive, activist, and profoundly free man. The conversations between generations touch on memory, activism, illness, and representation. Jimpa’s fragile health introduces an emotional urgency that transforms the story.
Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day comes from Ivona Juka. The story follows four gay friends who fought against fascism during World War II. After the war, they find freedom and expression in cinema in postwar Yugoslavia. They become renowned filmmakers and use their work to question society while living their sexuality with a freedom uncommon for the time. That freedom gets threatened from within the system itself.
The Meadow and the Moon is directed by Cayetana H. Cuyás. The film reconstructs the life of her uncle, Antonio Gómez, a designer associated with the house of Valentino. His career was cut short by AIDS in the 1990s. The director discovers an unfinished screenplay and decides to film the story with her own family, creating a dialogue between past and present, fiction and reality.
Check the full program, passes, and tickets at www.mostrafire.com.
