DOTYK (film festival)
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| Location | Belarus (Minsk, Hrodna, Brest, Vitsebsk) |
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| Language | international |
| Website |
dotyk |
DOTYK (Belarusian: Дотык – The Touch), is an annual queer film festival held in Minsk, Belarus. The first DOTYK took place between 20 February – 1 March 2015.
History
DOTYK emerged from To Be. Queer (Быць. Квір) initiative in the beginning of 2015. To Be. Queer was a voluntary, spontaneous and flexible unity of initiatives. It served as a discussion and ideological consolidation space for activists, researchers and parties interested in issues of discrimination.
By the beginning of 2015, To Be Queer has ceased to exist and DOTYK initiative set on its feet. Initially DOTYK was planned as a cinema festival, accompanied by different events and held once a year in Minsk, for the purpose of reflection upon experience of discriminated and oppressed social groups. In the course of the year the agenda has been changed and DOTYK's team decided to organize more cinema festivals in other Belarusian cities. Wandering DOTYK (Вандроўны DOTYK) was held in Brest, Vitsebsk and Hrodna.[1]
Currently DOTYK's team is aiming at regular organization of cultural and educational events in Minsk and regions of Belarus. Moreover, DOTYK collaborates with artists regardless of the level of their publicity and experience as well as creates art projects that are applicable to Belarusian context.
Principles and values
DOTYK's values are based upon principles of anti-discrimination in the wide sense of the notion, whereas 'queer' notion can serve as a category of reality analyses and social norms critics, whatever it is related to. DOTYK does its best at spreading awareness of anti-human character of any discrimination and marginalization of social groups with a belief that human differences do not exclude the possibility of peaceful and mutually respectful co-existence. DOTYK strongly opposes xenophobia, chauvinism, racism, sexism, homo-, trans- and biphobia, militarism, colonialism and other forms of social depreciation.
Activities of DOTYK are aimed at Belarusian offline environment. This explains one of the DOTYK's top priorities that is to create secure discussion spaces for knowledge and experience exchange.[2] Another aim is to consolidate people with similar experience of social rejection, who feel lonely and are politically, culturally or socially invisible. It's important as well for DOTYK to fill in the gaps related to exclusion of LGBTQIA-people and other discriminated social groups from the world art history.
Internal structure of DOTYK is both horizontal and flexible. DOTYK builds communication using the language of liberal arts as it is a universal human language that shows true stories, not diminished to statistical data, for it reflects world's complexity and diversity.