From 31 January to 2 February 2014, the Sarajevo Open Center will organize and host the ‘Merlinka’ festival in Art Kino Kriterion.
The international festival of queer film ‘Merlinka’ was organized for the first time in December 2009 in Belgrade, with the idea to promote films that deal with gay, lesbian and trans topics, and which are rarely present to the wider film public. The festival got its name from a trans person who was killed, Vjeran Miladinović Merlinka.
The aim of the festival is the promotion of the rights and culture of LGBT people through film art, which is one of the methods in the struggle to decrease homophobia. The Gay Lesbian Info Center GLIC and the Belgrade Youth Center organized the festival in Belgrade.
In the three days of the festival program, 30 short and feature films will be shown. On the second day of the festival, a discussion on the topic transsexuality in tradition will take place, and the idea is to examine transsexuality from the wider social-ideological context of countries in the region, from socialism to capitalism and everything in between, and to show how and whether political processes are connected to the legal and everyday life of transgender peopled.
Guests from Croatia, Serbia and B&H will attend. A detailed program of the films, descriptions and trailers can be seen here: www.merlinka.com/sarajevo.
(Source: radiosarajevo.ba)
