Queer Night

Queer Night is back! On Friday 27 March, we’re presenting a double bill with La Petite Derniere and The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo. Two films that move you, surprise you, and stay with you long after the credits roll. And the night doesn’t end there: a DJ will close the evening in style in the café of Filmhuis Den Haag. Stick around, talk it over, and dance into the night.

La Petite Derniere

It is springtime, and Fatima is in her final year of secondary school. She has a warm relationship with her parents and her two sisters. At school, she has a close group of friends – mostly boys, as she feels comfortable with them. Fatima is smart, likes books, football, freestyling, and running. And she likes girls, but she’s keeping that a secret.

When Fatima downloads a dating app on her phone, she starts covertly experimenting with gay hookups. As she begins university in Paris and explores a whole new world, she has to confront a timeless and heartrending dilemma: how can you stay true to yourself when it feels impossible to reconcile different parts of your identity? Actor turned director Hafsia Herzi adapted her first feature film from the novel La Petite Derniere by Franco-Algerian author Fatima Daas.

The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo

In the early 1980’s, in the Chilean desert, 11-year-old Lidia grows up with her trans mother Flamingo, in a loving queer family pushed on the edge of an unwelcoming dusty mining town. They are blamed for a mysterious illness that’s starting to spread – said to be passed through a single gaze, when one man falls in love with another. Because of this, Lidia is bullied by the children of her village.

In this modern western, Lidia leads a quest for vengeance. She faces violence, fear and hatred, with family as her only refuge and with love as maybe the real danger. She finds out that contained within every human being, there is the capacity for both love and violence. The debut feature of young Chilean director Diego Céspedes is gentle, funny, passionate and occasionally absurdist, packing, according to Variety magazine,  ‘an enormous emotional punch’.