It’s Greg Thorpe’s final year as Festival Director of The GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival and he’s aiming to go out on a high. Aaron Kavanagh spoke to him as prepped the programme and also caught up with Irish filmmaker Donnacha Gilmore as he screens his debut feature Girls & Boys.
In 1992, a year before the tort of “buggery,” to quote the then-current Irish Statute Book (which was an outdated hangover from an act that was passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1861, when Ireland was still under British rule), was finally removed and reinforcements to LGBTQ+ rights began to establish in its absence, the Irish Film Institute hosted the first edition of the Dublin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
The festival was a success and continued to expand annually, both in attendance and awareness. Whilst the festival had already begun showcasing films focusing on other queer identities (primarily trans and bisexual identities) prior, in 2007, the organisers cemented their commitment to broader expressions by rebranding as GAZE.
Unfortunately, while we’re seeing a lot of attacks on queer identities today, both systematically and individually, for some, the most frustrating to witness are the attacks coming from a loud minority of gay and lesbian people that draw a line in the sand of acceptance once they feel that their rights have been established.
As such, it’s crucial for any institution that purports to support queer rights to demonstrate that support in its tonality, and that’s certainly the case with GAZE, whose official title has consistently evolved and is currently called The GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival.
Such inclusionary commitments are what drew the Mancunian artist, writer, and curator, Greg Thorpe, to the festival as an attendee. In his motherland, Greg had been active in queer art spaces and festivals for many years, and had become friends with people of all identities.
With experience in festival programming, Greg jumped at the opportunity when a vacancy for Festival Director at GAZE cropped up in 2022. Greg and his partner, who both have family in Dublin and had been provisionally living here, thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to move to the city, but, due to the housing crisis, this didn’t happen. For the last four iterations of the festival, Greg has been remotely working on GAZE’s programme in Manchester.
“The festival has been a lifeline for me, really,” Greg tells Totally Dublin. “And it’s an amazing way to stay connected to the community, internationally, seeing the stories coming through. We programme from forty-plus countries, and film is an amazing way to take the temperature of LGBTQ life around the world. It’s been an emotional journey, not just for the films that we screen, but, obviously, we watch hundreds of films that can’t make it into the festival. So, I have this long journey of all of these global narratives, just spinning around my head, so I’m really grateful for it.”
GAZE has historically featured a wide range of media, including feature narratives, shorts, documentaries, and animation, from first-time filmmakers and Hollywood studios, and this year’s edition includes media from every continent, except Antarctica. Maybe next year.
On selecting each year’s offerings, Greg says, “I would say that my process has definitely changed over the years, but the one thing that hasn’t changed is that the films dictate the programme, and not the other way around.”
This will be Greg’s final year serving as Festival Director for GAZE, and he wanted to end his swan song on a high note. The festival will begin with the ’90s-set, Sundance-screened thriller Plainclothes, about an undercover officer in the NYPD tasked with entrapping gay men and discovering his own identity in the process, and end with the modern-day Dreams in Nightmares, an American-British-Taiwanese co-production about a queer-centric road trip through Trump’s America, to have a thematic throughline marking queer people’s history and future.
As queer representation in mainstream media persists, Greg also wanted to use this year’s festival to contrast what he feels is the unachievable sanctification of queer identities in said major releases. “I think our audiences might be just as receptive to a trans bad guy and a messy story,” he says.
“And that’s actually part of our festival this year: Let’s just be our messy selves. Something that can’t be appropriated. We don’t have to be the model citizens; let’s talk about the things that really matter to us and do it in a really frank way – like polyamory, and HIV, and friendships, and mess, you know? Just to be really real. It’s like, ‘Appropriate this, if you can!’”
This sentiment extends to Greg’s invitation to allies. “I always say to allies, the best thing you can do is come and engage in our culture. Come and see our films, read our books. So, that’s always my challenge to people, because that is where you will learn about us, and learn that we are messy people, just like you!”
Every year, hundreds of creatives submit their work to GAZE, and, as an artistic freelancer himself, Greg is aware that rejection stings, but accepts the reality that such calls have to be made. “We’ve had three hundred and sixty submissions this year,” he illuminates. “The odds of being included are just really, really narrow, mathematically. Which is why, when you do get included, I hope people understand what an amazing achievement it is.”
This is certainly understood by the filmmaker Donncha Gilmore, whose debut feature, Girls & Boys, will screen on the second night of this year’s GAZE. “My first experience with GAZE was a formative one, as in 2022, I saw the closing film, Girl Picture, which was a big reference point for Girls & Boys, particularly for my DOP and I when we were creating the visual touchstones for the film,” Donncha tells us.
“One of my favourite things about the festival is that every feature is accompanied by a pre-feature short, which used to be far more common in theatrical programming. I love the idea of pairing up the right short and feature film, and I think it’s a real shame the practice died. I’m excited to find out what short film will be playing before Girls & Boys. I was also familiar with [their Assistant Programmer] James Hudson’s work with GAZE and most recently TITE, which I think is a great new space for programming films that, ordinarily, would not be shown in a cinema in Ireland.”
Having toiled away on Girls & Boys for the better part of a decade, Donncha concludes by stating, “These characters have been with me for so long, so I can’t wait for the film to be out there and to see how it is received. I’m delighted that we’re able to have the Dublin premiere of the film at the GAZE festival in my local cinema. It seems like the perfect home for it.”
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
The GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival takes place at the IFI and Lighthouse cinemas in Dublin from July 29th to August 4th. Tickets and the full schedule can be found at gaze.ie.
