18th Korea Queer Culture Festival
18th Korea Queer Culture Festival
  • Reporter Kim Do-yeong
  • 승인 2017.09.06 12:58
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From Jul. 14 to Jul. 23, The Korea Queer Culture Festival (KQCF) was held in Seoul for four days. POSTECH students also marched in the Queer Parade held on Jul. 15 with QUV, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer (LGBTQ) university student alliance of Korea.
KQCF is a festival that has represented voices of sexual minority (also known as LGBTQ+) for more than 18 years. LGBTQ+ is a term meaning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer. Lesbian is a female homosexual, and gay originally means homosexual person, but it is often used for a male homosexual person. Lesbian may also be referred to as gay. Bisexual means having sexual attraction toward both male and female. On the other hand, transgender is a person who has a different gender identity from the sex given at birth. Queer is a term that embraces lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. That is, queer means sexual minorities that are not heterosexual or cisgender.
The KQCF began with an opening ceremony at Seoul Plaza at 7:30 PM, Jul. 14. MC Cha Se-vin introduced this ceremony and artists like My, Queer, Unique, DJ Lucifer also participated in this event.
On Jul. 15, a booth event progressed from 11 AM to 7 PM. The organizing committee announced that the number of booth register applications was the largest ever. The committee chose about 110 organizations which included embassies from 10 nations, Amnesty International, Google Korea and various societies of universities. Each participant interacted with other participants in various ways. Some people participated in surveys related with coming out, some people did a custom play with characters they admired. From 2 PM to 3:50 PM, a welcome performance before the queer parade was held. With MC Holic and Eddy, live performances from singers like Kuciia Diamant excited the parade participants. Then the queer parade started from 4 PM. Against a crowd gathered for opposing queers, participants marched around Seoul Plaza during the parade. After this march, congratulation performances started at 6:00 PM and continued for an hour. The end of the parade was a main party named ‘Private Beach’. Regardless of their sexual orientation, participants could enjoy the party with DJ in club PULSE, Itaewon.
From Jul. 20 to Jul. 23, the 17th Korea Queer Film Festival was held in Lotte Cinema Broadway, Sinsa. 62 films from 23 countries that were shown in the festival focused on sexual minorities’ lives in various aspects. Furthermore, the festival provided interactive events between directors and audience like Guest Visit, and movie talks like Queer Movie TALK. There were some attempts to attract a more general audience. One of them was Current Issue. Refugee, queer in Asia are themes that are deeply associated with reality. By choosing them as Current Issue, the audience could easily talk about these films. Judging domestic short films by audience was another attempt to reduce the distance between creator and spectator.
This year is the first year that national organizations participated in KQCF. Especially, societies that try to make voices heard in regard to sexual minorities has increased. However, there was a problem with the Private Beach entrance fee, and it blurred the meaning of the festival as a result. The organizers of the festival should organize the festival more carefully in response to increasing interest in the festival.