Over the past nine years there’s been a quiet revolution happening across the globe. Queer film stories have been playing on laptops, phones and big screens in some of the world’s most surprising, most anti-LGBTQ+ places.
It’s thanks to Five Films for Freedom, a joint programme between the British Council and BFI Flare, London’s LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Launched in 2015, it sees five short films from BFI Flare made accessible around the world during the festival each year. So far, it has pulled in 23 million viewers, some of whom are online, while others attend screenings that take place everywhere from the UK’s Houses of Parliament to a Ugandan garden in front of a small group of secret queer film fans.