• Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2018 Film Review

    November 21, 2018 - By 

    Christopher Honoré’s Sorry Angel is an AIDS film where the presence of the virus comes through in tone and colour rather than political sentiment. The writer and director bathes the interiors and costuming of his cross-generational French romance in hues of blue. It is the colour of melancholy, of the autumn sky just before the light gives out — and, crucially, of hospital wards. Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a mildly successful but emotionally withdrawn Parisian novelist (imagine!) who is HIV positive but still in reasonably good health. But it’s the 1990s, and so his condition is more or less fatal. He has…

  • Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2017 Film Review

    November 17, 2017 - By 

    With the screening of Sebastián Lelio’s Chilean trans thriller A Fantastic Women cancelled due to a logistical hiccup, it was down to Signature Move to open the film programme for the 2017 Outburst Festival, an annual showcase of international queer arts and cinema, and the film wasn’t really up to the inaugural task. Soap operas feature heavily in Jennifer Reeder’s film as a way for expatriates to connect with their homeland. Thirty-something lesbian attorney Zaynab (Fawzia Mirza, who wrote the script with Lisa Donato), lives in Chicago with her mother, a Muslim conservative who spends her days in an armchair…

  • Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2016

    November 8, 2016 - By 

    Northern Ireland’s queer creative initiative and annual celebration of “all that is bold and lovely in the world of lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer and friends’ creative goodness” Outburst Arts Festival returns to Belfast for its tenth outing across November 10-19 with a jam-packed programme with queer theatre, music, visual arts, film, spoken word, books, poems, performance, workshops and more. With highlights including This Filthy World with the one and only John Waters, a screening of award-winning documentary Kiki with Twiggy Pucci Garçon and Chi Chi Mizrahi and a global queer trad session at The American Bar, you can check…

  • HOUSE @ the MAC: From Vogue to MikeQ

    November 17, 2015 - By 

    Not only a stand-out event at this year’s Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast, the premiere of HOUSE at The MAC on Thursday night is almost certainly set to be one of the most inspired happenings of the year. Having descended from the legendary Harlem Drag Scene, the New York House and Ballroom Community is one of the most exciting underground scenes in the world. HOUSE brings three of the city’s most innovative performance makers and cultural agitators together for an immersive performance and discussion that presents a very rare and intimate glimpse into the history of the House and…

  • Preview: Outloud @ Outburst 2015

    November 12, 2015 - By 

    As part of this year’s Outburst Arts Festival, the inaugural Outburst: Outloud this Saturday (November 14) will be a day long event of stalls, talks, workshops and music all with a feminist/trans/queer slant. On the day there will be stalls, talks and workshops from Belfast Feminist Network, Hollaback, Sail, GenderJam, Anchor, Reclaim the Night, The Belfast City Rockets and more. There will also be zine-making and lyric-writing workshops, and a discussion based around the play Scorch (which is showing at the Mac). As well as all that there will be loads of bands playing throughout the day with headliners in Edinburgh’s…