Location Dublin, Ireland Festival date July/August Website gaze.ie | Founded 1992 Language English and others | |
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Gaze International LGBT Film Festival Dublin (typeset as GAZE and formerly known as the Dublin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) is an annual film festival which takes place in Dublin, Ireland each Bank Holiday weekend in late July and early August. Since 1992, it has become Ireland's largest LGBT film event, and the country's biggest LGBT gathering outside of Dublin Pride.
Contents
People attend from across the world, with a footfall of at least 9,000 expected over the 2015 festival weekend.
Premise
Gaze's organisers seek out educational and entertaining LGBT cinema which members of the Dublin gay community may not have had the opportunity to view anywhere else. However, the programme also includes films by gay artists which don't contain any gay themes, and films which have inspired or are inspired by gay artists.
History
The festival began life as the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 1992, founded by Yvonne O'Reilly and Kevin Sexton, and was held in the Irish Film Centre.
Over 3,500 people attended in 2006, the last year before the rebranding as Gaze.
The Dublin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival was renamed Gaze in 2007. Over 4,000 people attended the 2007 festival, the fifteenth edition. The festival also obtained a new director—Michele Devlin, the programmer of the Belfast Film Festival—in 2007. An updated version of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, with the story set in New York in the 1980s, was one of the festival's highlights.
The 2008 event, the sixteenth edition, lasted from 31 July until 4 August and included screenings at Dublin's Project Arts Centre and the Winding Stair, alongside its usual venue the Irish Film Institute.
Gaze 2009, the seventeenth festival, took place over five days at the Light House Cinema in Smithfield from 30 July – 3 August. Grey Gardens, which stars Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange and depicts relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, received its European premiere when it opened the festival on 30 July. Over sixty-seven films, including premieres, documentaries and shorts featured at the 2009 event.
Gaze's 23rd programme of features was scheduled to be announced on July 25, 2015, with screenings taking place from July 30 to August 3 at the Light House Cinema in Dublin's Smithfield.