Avant-Drag!

Fil Ieropoulos – Director’s Statement

In the poetic documentary Avant-Drag!, we follow the lives of ten Athens-based drag performers as they create their own temporary worlds as a refuge against a hostile reality. By watching closely the lives and modes of expression of the protagonists, we get in touch with a new scene that has been blossoming in recent years and discover through them how the art of drag can transform reality and create safe spaces for people marginalised by Greek society.

The protagonists of Avant-Drag! raise a series of questions about gender, ethnicity, religion and sexuality in the contemporary Greek context. Following a modular structure, Avant-Drag! presents a series of artists with different gender identities, backgrounds and approaches to life, but all of whom express their creativity as a political act. They demand an equal and safe existence while exploring innovative ways of artistic expression. The film culminates with the participants meeting at a dinner party where a series of conversations are held concerning the art of drag, the integration of queer representation into the mainstream and the impact of Athenian drag queen Zackie Oh’s murder on the local queer scene.

Avant-Drag! breaks the conventions of queer/identity documentaries that at times take a journalistic/cinematically minimal and distant, ‘objective’ approach, choosing to create instead a surreal collage in which narratives and images are built alongside the very subjects presented. A community speaks for itself without the mediation of an outsider’s gaze.

At the same time, the film’s cinematic kaleidoscope draws inspiration from post-digital reality to create a multimedia, hybrid cinematic language for the future. Performance art scenes meet everyday moments in the city, as well as personal testimonies. The colourful world of the protagonists intertwines in a psychedelic assemblage of images and references, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary, literal and metaphorical, the filmmaker himself and the protagonists.

The film was made following the principles of the Q*inoGlaz manifesto, as originally presented in 2022 on the special edition “Post-Reality” by the 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.