#02 TFI Specials | Lovers40: discovering the industry soul
Aprile 2025
The second round of TFI Specials is dedicated to Lovers Goes Industry, a partner of TFI Torino Film Industry and a b2b event organised by Lovers Film Festival. The 40th edition of Lovers Film Festival will take place from 10-17 April 2025, marking an important and significant milestone for LGBTQI+ representation in the film industry.
Lovers Goes Industry - which the festival has been organising since 2018 and has be integrated into TFI Torino Film Industry from 2023 - is a unique event in the field of LGBTQI+-themed festivals, and represents an indispensable meeting point for the industry and its protagonists, with the aim of consolidating Torino as a key networking location. As part of TFI Torino Film Industry, Lovers Goes Industry offers dedicated meetings on the production of thematic films and series, and organises a pitching session for young authors, also accompanied by a one-to-one session to facilitate international co-production and distribution opportunities.
Our "guest speaker" for this episode is Angelo Acerbi, Head Programmer of the Lovers Film Festival and Panel Supervisor of Lovers Goes Industry, who joins us to tell us more about the Festival and its industry rib on the occasion this year's 40 candles being blown out.
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Can you tell us about the birth of Lovers Film Festival?
Lovers Film Festival was founded forty years ago by Giovanni Minerba and Ottavio Mai, also thanks to the intervention of the then Councillor for Culture of the Città di Torino, Marziano Marzano, who decided to finance the event. Initially it was a programme of films, a long weekend dedicated to films with LGBTQI+ themes. It became a fully-fledged international festival in 1989, when it was recognised by the Italian Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment and developed a competitive section with competitions for feature films, short films and documentaries. The number of days also increased, and so it remained until today, changing its name twice: first Torino Torino GLBT Film Festival “da Sodoma a Hollywood”, then Torino Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and finally, in its 32nd edition, Lovers Film Festival.
When it comes to LGBTQI+ themed festivals, what is the landscape in Europe?
Lovers Film Festival is the oldest themed festival in Europe. The second oldest is in London, the BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival. The Pink Apple in Zurich is also important, and the Panorama section of the Berlinale is also worth mentioning, even though it is not exactly a themed festival. There are many with different structures, it is a sufficiently varied world: at this year's meeting of queer programmers at the Berlinale, between Europe and outside Europe, we were 250 people.
Flare and Pink Apple are close in time to Lovers: London in mid-March, Zurich at the end of April. There is a good synergy with both, with Switzerland we have also shared guests, while Flare always sends us the programme very early so that we can also network on the positioning of the films. In recent years we have also worked with Sunny Bunny in Kiev, always in accordance with this idea of sharing titles and guests.
And what about outside of Europe?
The beacon outside Europe has always been the San Francisco festival, Frameline, which was founded in 1977. Also important is Outfest in Los Angeles: when I started working for Lovers in 1993, those were the two places you had to go to get a handle on the production of the moment, which was much more independent, under the radar and quantitatively smaller than it is today.
How has the response to LGBTQI+ films and series changed from 40 years ago at production level?
It has changed a lot: there used to be far fewer films, and they were almost exclusively dedicated to one market and one sector. As the Festival, we used to deal directly with the producer or director (who was usually also a writer, producer...) to get the film, so the success rate was higher. Then the LGBTQI+ issue became more mainstream and things changed: from “Brokeback Mountain” onwards there was a turning point. On the one hand, it was a very positive thing for the community in terms of visibility and representation, but on the other hand, it made things more complicated for the Festival. Competition grew, and bigger productions went looking for bigger festivals. A topic of discussion among programmers of LGBTQI+ themed festivals around the world is that we want to make the majors understand that if they make a themed film, maybe even with an LGBTQI+ director, then giving it to an LGBTQI+ festival does not ghettoise it. But at the same time, in the last few years there has been an increase in direct proposals of important films: this means that the perception of the festival in Italy and Europe and the return on image it provides are good.
The claim of this 40th edition is To Emerge: “To Emerge is not only the infinitive of the verb 'emergere' in English, it is also Torino Emerge,” says artistic director Vladimir Luxuria. “The 40 years of the festival and the history of our movement have been marked by the emergency of emerging: from the darkness of ignorance, from every form of discrimination, from homobitransphobia, from physical and verbal violence, from loneliness”. To counter the emergency of emerging, it is necessary to have safe spaces long before you have to elbow your way through numerous titles that crowd the festival registrations. Is the creation of Lovers Goes Industry a response to this need?
Vladimir thought of this claim with a double objective: as an English verb, to emerge, because in the last few years the war against the community has reignited strongly, and we believe that the only way to survive this war is not to hide, but to be more and more visible. In addition, "TO" means "Torino", so there is a nice play on words; Turin also emerges (“emerge” is Italian for “emerges”) because it had the strength and the desire to create a festival like Lovers at a time when it was not even talked about. It is a source of civic pride.
The creation of Lovers Goes Industry was also a response to a double need: on the one hand, we wanted to be the first to do it; on the other, there was a production request. The programming department at the time had realised that we were losing projects between the creation and production of the film: we knew that the director was starting to work, but when the film was finished we were no longer in the loop and the project was lost. The first edition of Lovers Goes Industry was born from an idea by Flavio Armone, Salvo Cutaia and Valerio Filardo: a working day within the festival with a panel where we invited directors we already knew to present their project. We realised that it had a good result: for example, “About Last Year”, the documentary by Beatrice Surano, Dunja Lavecchia and Morena Terranova, which was then selected for the 38th Settimana Internazionale della Critica, was the first presented as a project at Lovers Goes Industry.*
Every year, during Lovers Goes Industry, you propose a pitching session of themed projects. What are the ingredients that bring the projects to the stage of the Circolo dei lettori?
Finding projects for Lovers Goes Industry is always quite complex: we don't have a structure dedicated to it, so we have to find the time to do it, and we don't have a dedicated budget to go around looking for projects. We work a lot with the network of contacts we have built up over the years. The important thing is that the projects are valid and interesting for us, for our Decision Makers and for the other DMs present at TFI Torino Film Industry. In fact, it has happened that DMs formally invited by other partners have also paid attention to Lovers Goes Industry's projects, in a very productive and synergistic network. So, of course, we have a structural difficulty, but the undoubted advantage is in the result, in the greater visibility and in the greater possibility of getting more meetings for the projects presented. Moreover, an event like Lovers Goes Industry gives the Festival itself further visibility in the professional world: our participation in TFI Torino Film Industry is qualifying, a bit like buying advertising pages in trade magazines.
What is the most important goal for this Lovers Film Festival edition?
Lots of goals: this year the festival is two days longer than usual, a way of celebrating 40 years. And also the madrina we have chosen, Karla Sofía Gascón. We asked ourselves how we could celebrate these 40 years cinematically, and our choice was to make specific tributes with films that have been part of the history of the festival and our community. This is the logic behind the tribute to Lucky Red, the Italian distribution company that has distributed more films with LGBTQI+ themes than any other, including “Emilia Perez” with Gascón. For this reason, in the “Lovers is Lucky” section we will show “Crossing” by Levan Akin, “Matthias & Maxime” by Xavier Dolan, “Portrait de la jeune fille en feu” by Céline Sciamma, “La vie d’Adèle” by Abdellatif Kechiche and “Velvet Goldmine” by Todd Haynes, and we will open it with the presence of Andrea Occhipinti - the same person who wanted Vladimir Luxuria to dub Karla Sofía Gascón in “Emilia Perez”.
I am also delighted to bring the restoration of Gregg Araki's “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” to the festival, presented by star James Duval. We also have Gaël Morel, the French director and actor who, when I started doing the Festival, had a film in the selection almost every year. For the opening, we chose his new film “Vivre, mourir, renaître”, which took part in the Cannes Film Festival: we also scheduled a small tribute to him for his contribution to the history of the Festival.
What's your favorite film from this edition?
Too difficult! This year we have noticed that many different things have arrived, more challenging, more independent, less controlled by market logic. This is a symptom of the fact that the community is under attack again, and it is also defending itself more strongly from a cultural and creative point of view. There are some “weird” films: less mainstream, less easy, which is a very good sign of creativity. “Drive Back Home”, the film with Alan Cumming who's coming to Torino to collect the Stella della Mole prize, was a film that, when I saw it with the other selectors, we all said “yes” immediately, without having to discuss it. The same with “A Night Like This”: it arrived two days before the end of the selection process and we loved it. Documentaries, too: the restoration of “Paris Is Burning”, which turns 35 this year, and “I Am Your Venus”, a documentary that investigates the murder of the Venus Extravaganza, which occurred during the filming of “Paris Is Burning”. Finally, “The Secret in Me”: a man born intersex, raised as a girl according to the studies of a professor who is still considered in some US states as a scientific source for endocrinological studies on the “solution” of intersex cases, tells his life story with incredible anger and discovers other people who have had to endure the same things. It is a sensational story.
*“About Last Year” by Beatrice Surano, Dunja Lavecchia e Morena Terranova was produced with the support of Film Commission Torino Piemonte - Piemonte Doc Film Fund.