Last January, the 12th Pink Life QueerFest, a queer community festival organized with the theme of returning to Ankara, was banned by the Ankara Governorate Legal Affairs Branch Directorate. The indefinite ban on LGBTI+ events in Ankara, which was imposed in 2017 and then lifted twice by court decision, had started with the 7th Pink Life QueerFest.
The theme of the festival, which will open its curtains for the 13th time in 2025, was Aslına Rücu. The social media hashtags are #AslınaRücu and #ÖnceUğursuzGelecek. Making historical references to the number 13, which has been associated with bad luck and bad fortune for centuries, the edition questions the established negative narrative of the number. From Western mythology to modern superstition, the edition looks backwards at its uninvited arrival and its destructive historical potential: What if this destruction contains within it a radical and reconstructive potential?
Based on this potential, the theme of Recourse to the Original rewrites and reminds the history involving LGBTI+ existences that are pushed to the margins, criminals and inauthentic in today's geography. It realizes its subversive potential against the dangerous, western imported and underground narratives of lubunyas who are institutionalized by reactionary movements in power and seen as dynamite of the order.
It exposes and threatens to destroy the hatred built on the lubunya life, which is common in Farsi, Kurmanji and Zazaki cultures and which means returning to the original, to its original position: From the representations of LGBTI+ in Anatolian and Mesopotamian myths to the repositioning of the other in the modern age, from its place in the Abrahamic religions to its religiously instrumentalized position in today's politics, QueerFest is recourse to the original in a wide range.
QueerFest, the film-centered culture-art festival of queers, which aims to advocate through artistic intervention, is preparing to open the curtain for the thirteenth time!
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