Lesbians, In the first Person: Lesvia & Old Lesbians

There’s something really powerful and a little emotional about sitting in a cinema screening room surrounded by Old Lesbians, in their two’s.

At BFI Flare, I found myself in such a situation, watching two stellar Documentaries, back to back. I will give each of them a moment, and then get to my unified thesis thereafter.

Old Lesbians is a quirky, light, beautiful and detailed view of the “Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project”, and the Old Lesbians that make it tick. Aside from the beautiful framing, easy-to-follow timelines and facts, warm and personable filming style, engaging animations, and incredible attention to detail - what struck me was that this was praxis in process.

I think the internet talks about ‘Knowing Your History’ constantly, about a myriad of topics, but merely shunts people off to Google Searches, hoping that the Alphabet corporation algorithm will give people a good enough education. This was a film about Lesbians, by Lesbians, directly and in the first person, communicating what Lesbians would want to know — what history they would want to pass down.

This isn’t a textbook parading as a Documentary - what comes through and forward is as if you are sitting in the room with all sorts of voices and experiences. The fights for liberation, of course, are all in there, but also, people’s first knowing, their stories of discovery, their love stories. This is always left out of the Google search - the humanness. Looking for these stories, you need to look no more — Old Lesbians of generations past are passing them down, and ensuring their preservation.

Lesvia might be the most stunningly shot documentary I’ve ever watched. Turning on the Fulcrum of Director Tzeli Hadjidimitriou (who, coincidentally, sat a seat away from me during the screening - I wonder if she could see how her work captivated me, even under my Mask), it covers the undiscussed and absolutely fascinating history of Eresos, Lesbos - the potential birthplace of Sappho, where up until the 70’s, rural Greeks lived ‘undisturbed’, until which time the global Sapphic community reclaimed it as a safe-haven for both freedom and a little good-natured debauchery. The tension between the two populations is compassionately and meticulously charted, as Tzeli herself was and is both Local and Lesbian. Talk about the first-person Lesbian perspective.

To hear Tzeli herself talk of the film is truly a delight — and to realise I was in the room with a lot of contributors to the film, who had come to support the screening, was yet more of a delight. Tzeli’s cinematography alone is so inspiring to me, and it’s a story only she could tell. She’s deeply articulate about it, as she not only lived it but took almost a decade making the doc itself.

This is a film, dare I say it, for fear of losing it to some Big Studio somewhere who will steal it out from under my feet — that is ripe for a “Love Lies Bleeding”-esque Fictional Adaptation, replete with Retro-Sapphic aesthetic. The pictures from the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00's even, my god — I could hear the Motion Picture soundtrack in my head.

I do not identify as a Lesbian (shall we say, yet?), but simply just to be a producer on a film like that would make my head spin. It would chronicle a brazen but community-driven history not yet depicted in full color on film, and start to untangle this puritanical, sanitised, quiet stereotype in the culture.

As a bystander, I’ve only been privy to Lesbian stories in a limited number of formats — glossed over and placed into a Hollywood box, all the pun intended, being the most likely format. Some cult classics, like Bound, managed to escape the gravitational pull ever so slightly, but the mainstream modern consensus on Lesbians in culture was abundantly clear — it’s giving ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, or it’s simply not there.

There are too many pins holding mainstream Lesbian storytelling down, the primary of which is that very few Lesbians get to tell their own stories. Their stories are picked from them, or picked for them. Recently I’ve noticed a beautiful and more textured expression of Sapphic storytelling in ‘Bottoms’, and what I hear of ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ which I haven’t seen yet, and even ‘Drive-Away Dykes’, I mean, ‘Drive-Away Dolls’, which, for all the kitsch, got the job done. It did still feel a little less…a little less, I’ll say, than what I felt I witnessed that night at the BFI Flare.

In short, more films about Women with open and proud Sex Drives, please.

When Lesbians tell their own stories, when they structure them, when they decide what to include and what to leave out - you get a very different view of womanhood than what is usually depicted. It feels like Mainstream Sapphic stories are approached from a traditional Womanhood side first, and then are modified, whereas the Lesbian approach is distinct.

Outside of the confines of gender, you find Lesbian, which exists within it all the kinds of person someone can be. There are no tropes, simply commonalities. In Eresos, especially, I felt this — a literal island away from it all, for a little while, unhassled.

Old Lesbians, a crucial watch, if I remember correctly, will be released via ‘The Guardian’ this summer, likely during Pride.

Lesvia — needs to win awards. It needs a large and extended global release, and I think a ton more people need to know all of what it contains. When it turns up somewhere you can grab it, please, please, go watch it.

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