Lesvia and Old Lesbians were two documentaries exploring queer female relationships screened at this year’s BFI flare.
After the screening of Lesvia, a documentary exploring history of a Lesbian community in the village of Eresos on the island of Lesbos, its director Tzeli Hadjidimitriouproudly dedicated the film to us the audience who had helped make the community what it is was. Now I, being neither a lesbian nor a woman nor even alive in the 1990s, was likely not amongst the audience members she was referring to. However, Hadjidimitriou’s transportive and lyrical documentary left me vaguely feeling that I had been and with an odd nostalgia for the community powerfully evoked on screen.
The documentary serves as a deeply heartfelt panegyric to the lesbian communities of Lesbos and Eressos using oral testimony from the women there. These testimonies were so bountiful the film was limited to just one line of dialogue per person, and they brilliantly encapsulate the intimacy of the community and the island. Their words are played over grainy archival footage along with lingering shots of Lesbos’ sumptuous landscape, and beautiful bodily outlines swimming in its crystal waters. These images wonderfully represent Lesbos natural beauty with the beautiful naturalism of its islanders. The poeticism of the documentary also leads on so nicely from its opening evocation of the Greek poet Sappho, and her mythicised life on Lesbos. The film also rightly offers time to reflect upon the possible negative impact that such an influx of people could have had on the local villagers and the oftentimes thoughtlessness with which people acted while caught up in the heady air of their new world.
However, the film devotes most of its runtime to creating a time capsule of a bygone era that proved seminal to so many lives, and celebrating an ecosystem of people which in today’s increasingly fragmented world seems increasingly appealing.
The short documentary Old Lesbians which played before Lesvia proved an equally accomplished and heart-warming film. The documentary crafted by Meghan McDonough is a cinematic depiction of different ‘herstories’ collected by the now late Arden Eversmeyer. She traversed the USA for 25 years tracking down different lesbian stories to collate an oral history. McDonough does an excellent job combining and illustrating the varied different stories into a punchy and energetic narrative, which carefully balances the fun frivolity of its stories with the more serious and oppressive climate in which they are set.
The stories themselves are varied and plentiful, and include tales of first crushes, love stories curt short, people forced to hide themselves away, and romances that have now lasted decades. One line from one contributor will certainly stick with me for a long time, ‘I knew If I hugged you I’d never let go’.