Canadian filmmakers Bruce LaBruce and Louise Weard, both known for pushing boundaries in the LGBTQ film space, are set to be honored by Italy’s Sicilia Queer Filmfest that will run in Palermo from May 25-31.
LaBruce, whose most recent thought-provoking feature “The Visitor” — a London-set reimagining of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film “Teorema” — premiered positively at Berlin in 2024, will receive the fest’s career award dedicated to avant-garde Sicilian multi-hyphenate Nino Gennaro. The fest praised LaBruce, who is also a well-known photographer and artist, as a “master of queercore cinema and of New Queer Cinema — a movement that revolutionized contemporary cinema, spreading from the Americas to the rest of the world.”
LaBruce’s body of work comprises his first feature “No Skin Off My Ass!” (1991), followed by “Super 8½” (1994) and “Hustler White” (1996). There’s also “Skin Flick” (2000),”The Raspberry Reich” (2004), “Gerontophilia” (2013) and “Saint-Narcisse” (2020).
The Sicilia Queer fest will also honor Weard — who is best known for the “Castration Movie” anthology that follows a trans woman named Michaela “Traps” Sinclair, a sex worker in Vancouver played by Weard — with the director’s first European retrospective. The “Castration Movie” anthologu, which is largely shot on Hi8 camcorders, has been making a splash on the queer festival circuit, including at San Francisco’s Frameline, the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival and the Scottish Queer International Film Festival. The first part, “Traps,” was released in 2024, and the second, “The Best of Both Worlds,” bowed in 2025. The premiere of the first episode of the third part, “Year of the Hyena,” will run at London’s upcoming BFI Flare Festival.
Weard was praised by the Sicilia Queer fest for pioneering a “radically nonconformist — but also rebellious and romantic, comical and humanist” body of work that “can truly be called ‘New Trans Cinema.’”
The fest added: “Through these two figures, the SQFF confirms its role as a hotbed of exploration and discovery and will host an unprecedented intergenerational dialogue, a symbolic passing of the baton from a director who has helped shape visions of freedom and revolutionary fantasies to a filmmaker who today explores the contradictions and paradoxes of the queer community with pathos and humor, highlighting the need for new forms of freedom.”
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