• Mezipatra QFF’s 24th edition will introduce 69 films, including those that scored at the prestigious festivals in Cannes, Venice, Locarno and Berlin.
• The filmmakers themselves will come to Prague to present many of these films in person.
• The highly anticipated guests include Diego del Río, Fabian Stumm, Gaël Lépingle and Hannes Hirsch.

Filmmakers from all over the world traditionally participate in Mezipatra film festival. We can therefore look forward to interesting guests who will personally introduce their films and will be available for audience questions after the screenings or at the discussions featured in the accompanying program.

One of these quests is the director and creator of the unique All the Silence (Todo el silencio), a film about coming to terms with the loss of hearing, Diego del Río. Interestingly enough, apart from being a theater and opera director, he is also an acting professor. He has directed or translated over 30 plays by major Mexican and worldwide playwrights. In 2021, he won a METRO award for his auteur project of Coordenadas Sutiles in the category of the best theater project released in a digital format.

Fabian Stumm will also personally introduce his feature debut in Prague. This versatile talent and trained actor performed on such renowned stages as HAU Berlin and Tate Modern London. And in Names and Bones (Knochen und Namen), he even portrayed one of the main characters.

The French filmmaker Gaël Lépingle will also compete for the award in the main feature films competition with his drama Smalltown Boys (Des Garçons de province). Throughout his career, Gaël has been switching between documentary and feature film, as illustrated by his films’ victories at the FID competition in Marseilles – first with his documentary Julien and then with his feature The Time of the Pirates.

This year’s Queer Mixer section includes another esteemed guest – Hannes Hirsch. The movie Drifter, which premiered at Berlinale, is his feature debut. Hirsch studied directing at the Filmarche film school in Berlin. His mid-length film Beach Boy was screened at numerous festivals and won the Best Film award at the Achtung Berlin festival. In 2009, Hirsch together with Diemo Kemmesies established the Milieufilm production company.

The challenges of the short format will be presented as a part of the Queering the Industry accompanying program by the directors of the most distinctive films in this category during a unique Sunday brunch in Langhans café. You can also look forward to the Making Queer Movies Matter: Distribution Insights panel discussion, ​​Queer & Able: Portraying Disabilities in Cinema debate, and Artists' Insights: Navigating the Future of Queer Cinema lecture. The biggest party of the festival will take place on 4th November in Planeta Za with the headliner Violet. And the closing of the festival’s Prague part will be in the hands of the trio of DJs, the pop star Princezna Víčko of viah, Pablo Gardú, and Vitaminu Nill Garçon.

In Brno, the festival starts on 10th of November in the Art cinema with an opening party and a performance by drag queen Ivory Divine. The accompanying program will offer V tranzu talkshow by Lenka Králová, and Soul Care – a discussion featuring the researcher and psychologist Marcela Macháčková and researcher Michal Pitoňák from the National Institute for Mental Health. The grand finale will be in the rhythm of disco with the Night of Freedom in Fléda, starring DJs KISTENN, Juan disc, Vojtik, VIET B and A:TARRO YAN.

This year’s main jury of the International Feature Film Competition features Zita Hosszúová, the manager of Lumière cinema in Bratislava and director of Festival Inakosti. Other jurors include Stefan Schweigler, a media, queer and cultural theorist at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care at the University of Graz, Austria, and Jakub Mróz, the director of the Tongariro Releasing, an LGBT+ film distribution company in Poland Jakub personally introduced his feature debut, Elephant (Słoń), at last year’s Mezipatra, and won the award for the best micro budget film at the Polish Feature Film Festival in Gdynia.

The best short film will be selected by the student jury consisting of Valerie Coufalová, Lukáš Valíšek and Světlana Malinová.

Representatives of the short films competition

Abel Rubinstein - Mars (Opravdu po svém) - UK 
Ivana Hucíková - House of Velvet (Srdečné pozdravy z Evropy) - Slovakia
Leandro Goddinho, Paulo Menezes - Super, top, ideál (Srdečné pozdravy z Evropy) - Germany              
Philip Embury - Rok ovesného latte (Rozkoš z análů podivností) - USA
May Ziadé - Neo Nahda (Milovat bolí) - UK
Francesco Manzato - Letizia (Milovat bolí) - Italy
Tam Dan Vu - Bezesná noc (Nauč mě lítat) - Canada
Xinyi Cao - Hrátky na rodinu (Rozkoš z análů podivností) - China