Ten drag performers from Athens come together in rebellion against an oppressive reality and those who seek to control them. United, they deconstruct gender, nationalism, belonging, and identity, confronting police brutality, transphobia, and racism along the way. Avant-Drag! is a bold, innovative, and thought-provoking documentary that challenges social norms and dominant representations of LGBTQ+ culture, offering a deeply intimate portrait of a tightly connected group of performers. The film is dedicated to murdered drag performer and activist Zak Kostopoulos (Zackie Oh), a friend and collaborator of the film’s creators.
Avant-Drag! captures Athens’s underground drag scene, discarding mainstream depictions of drag (and the Hollywood world of RuPaul) in favor of radical, explicitly political, and authentic performances. At once a multimedia tribute to Athens – a city that is both oppressive but also offers refuge to art misfits and nourishes their creativity – the film explores public space and street performance as tools of protest and visibility within the drag community, while also tackling the issue of gentrification, which continues to displace underprivileged Athenians. Drawing inspiration from the Greek Weird Wave, Avant-Drag! adopts an avant-garde, hybrid cinematic language. It refuses to be just another “pride” documentary of imagined talking heads, instead merging magical realism, political commentary, and provocative performance. The film interweaves staged sequences with scenes from everyday city life and personal testimonies. The kaleidoscopic world of the performers unfolds in a psychedelic mix of imagery and post-digital reality references, offering an intersectional take on the many layers of oppression in contemporary Greece and the toll of decades of austerity.
The film follows the principles of the Q*inoGlaz Manifesto, which you can read here.
*A conversation with one of the film’s performers, SerGay Parakatyanov, will follow the screening.
Awards and Festivals:
International Film Festival Rotterdam – World Premiere, Critics’ Choice; Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival – Special Mention; Wicked Queer Boston – Best Documentary; EDOC Ecuador – Youth Jury Prize; OutWest – Best Feature Film; PFFBerlin – Best Documentary; MixNYC – Special Mention
Fil Ieropoulos was born in Athens in 1978 and raised in northern Greece. He studied film, cultural studies, and communications in the UK and earned his PhD in 2010 with a dissertation on film poetry at the University of Kent. Since 2003, he has taught video art, film theory, and animation at Buckinghamshire New University. His first film, ORFEAS2021, premiered in Thessaloniki, and his second, Avant-Drag!, had its world premiere in Rotterdam. As a media artist, he has exhibited and spoken at events in Greece, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S., collaborating with institutions including the Greek National Opera, Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Athens Biennale, Onassis Foundation, Freud Museum, and the Athens School of Fine Arts.
