Film Set in Worlds Largest Female Exclusion Zone Among Queer Projects in Development in Karlovy Vary Spotlight

TheKarlovy VaryInternationalFilm Festival(KVIFF) international industry program kicked off on Monday with a focus on new film projects in development, including a spotlight on selected queer stories.

In collaboration with theMidpoint Institute‘sMidpoint Focus Queer, a program supporting filmmakers exploring queer narratives, KVIFF Industry Days showcased four such films in the works, which cover a range of genres and geographies.

Check out a closer look at the four queer film projects pitched on the KVIFF Industry Days stage on Monday.

Nuusiku
Directing debut
Writer and director info: Laudika Yandangii Hamutenya, a Namibian filmmaker from Ohangwena whose work explores identity, masculinity, and belonging in contemporary Africa.
Producer: Jérémie Palanque
Production company: Woooz Pictures (France)
Language: Oshiwambo
Genre: action, drama, queer romance
Countries: Namibia, France

Pitch highlights:
“Through this film, I want to say that for us to change the future, we don’t need to go back in time, we just need to live, love and fight in the present, and hopefully the future will change with us,” Hamutenya told the KVIFF Industry Days audience.

And he shared about Namibia: “It has only been two years since [being gay] has been decriminalized in my country, but even until today, there are a lot of people who believe that queerness is a myth or is un-African. I’m here with this film to challenge that myth.”

Synopsis:
Nekomba, a 21-year-old performance artist, attempts to recreate a childhood dance she once performed with her aunt, one believed to summon physical ancestors. She hopes this act will slowly reconnect her now westernised Owambo culture to its spiritual roots. Instead, she is transported to a precolonial village, where she encounters both the beauty and shock of a way of life vastly different from her own. There, she falls in love with Nuusiku, a young woman who embodies a sense of queer freedom within her culture. But this world holds contradictions: Nuusiku has been chosen to be sacrificed as a companion to a dying king. While Nuusiku accepts her fate, Nekomba struggles to save her, forcing her to confront the violence within a past she once romanticised.

Creator’s statement:
“Nuusiku, meaning ‘within the night’ or ‘born from the night’ in Oshiwambo, is a deeply personal meditation on memory, longing, and the danger of romanticizing the past. As a queer Oshiwambo filmmaker raised between tradition and modernity, I am drawn to the tension between reclaiming culture and questioning it. Through Nekomba’s journey, the film explores a pre-colonial world that is both beautiful and unsettling, where belonging and exclusion coexist. While she seeks spiritual truth, she is confronted with practices that challenge her ideals, including the sacrifice of the woman she loves. Nuusiku asks whether we would truly feel free in the past we glorify, and whether modern, often Western-influenced ideas, especially around queerness, have also created necessary space for us to exist. Ultimately, it is a reflection on culture as something evolving, not fixed.”

Selamlik
Writer and director info: director Jerry Carlsson, a Swedish director and screenwriter who has directed shorts and two episodes of Netflix’s Young Royals season 3; writer Khaled Alesmael
Producer: Frida Mårtensson
Production company: Verket Produktion (Sweden)
Languages: Arabic, English, Spanish, Swedish
Genre: drama
Countries: Sweden, Denmark

Pitch highlights:
“When I was at Damascus one night, the war xxxxx to the edge of our apartment,” Alesmael shared. “My boyfriend and were not afraid to die. We were afraid not to see each other again, not to be together. Also, we were afraid … everyone and queer people [would] forget about our story, … so we grabbed our phone and started taking photos of ourselves and recorded a video kissing. Really, in that moment, we wanted our love to survive.”

Carlsson told the audience: “When Khaled shared this story with me, I immediately connected with the shared queer experience of searching for love, freedom, finding a place in the world to call home.” And he explained that the end of the film would take audiences to “New Year’s Eve 2011, at the dawn of the Arab Spring, the night when [th etwo] first meet each other, filled with young love and this great hope for freedom and a possible future.”

Synopsis:
In Damascus, two men hide beneath their bed, not afraid to die but afraid to die apart. After years of separation, Furat (37), now a writer exiled in Sweden, travels to Córdoba to reunite with Pierre (27), the love of his life whom he left behind when fleeing the war in Syria. Furat hopes to revive the love they once shared. But Pierre arrives guarded, carrying a secret that will change everything. During this tense and intimate weekend, memories of their relationship begin to resurface: their farewell, their shared home, a beloved dog, demonstrations for freedom and the night they first met at the dawn of the Arab Spring, when love and freedom still seemed possible. As past and present close in around them, they must face the truth: their love is still alive, but they are no longer the people who once dreamed of freedom together.

Creator’s statement:
“Furat and Pierre exist between who they once were and who exile has turned them into. Furat lives in Sweden and Pierre in Canada, yet neither fully belongs to the lives they have built. They reunite in Spain, carrying different versions of the same loss. Córdoba holds this tension in its stones. Built by old Syrians, it is the closest living echo of a home that no longer exists as they knew it. The city mirrors displacement, beauty and loss, making it the only possible setting for this story. The film unfolds across two timelines: a reunion in present-day Córdoba and a love story in Damascus told in reverse. The structure reflects how trauma works: we return obsessively to the last moment, then unravel what came before. As Córdoba moves toward goodbye, Damascus moves back toward the night they first met, when freedom and a future still felt possible. It is a love story told forward and backward, about what remains when love survives but the lovers do not.”

Skeeter
Writer and director info: Dylan Mitro, a queer independent filmmaker based in London, Ontario, Canada.
Producer: Taylor Nodrick
Production company: Ghoul Nexus (Canada)
Language: English
Genre: queer horror
Country: Canada

Pitch highlights:
Mitro described Skeeter as “a queer psychological horror exploring true Canadian events.” After all, the project is set in “Canada’s largest gay resort in the ‘90s that became a refuge for people living with HIV and their loved ones.” But there is more: “The local residents became paranoid that the gays were going to be in town, because they were afraid that the mosquitoes would bite the gays and fly across the lake and give them all AIDS.” Ouch!

“Reclaiming the monster genre through body horror, we reveal that prejudice and misinformation can spread like a virus and be twisted into our personal opinions,” he added, concluding: “We hope that Skeeter gets all the buzz it needs to bite.”

Synopsis:
Davey (27), a charismatic go-go dancer, is caring for his sick roommate Joe. Joe (31) was an outspoken gay activist but has been in and out of the hospital, suffering from several HIV complications including memory loss. After losing many friends to AIDS, Davey fears Joe is next. Seeking escape from this fate, Davey brings their chosen family together for one last weekend getaway to a remote lake cabin in the forest. The group arrives at the lake during mosquito season, triggering a buzz of paranoia amongst the local lake residents, fearing that Davey’s friends will expose them to contracting HIV from a mosquito bite. In the isolation of the cabin the group tries to find some peace,but when Joe goes missing in the woods, the group need to decide where they find help, testing what lengths they will have to go to for the ones they love.

Creator’s statement:
“For Skeeter, the story emerged from my investigative research in Canada’s 2SLGBTQIA+ archives, diving into real life accounts of what it was like to be a homosexual on the front lines of the AIDS crisis in the 1990s, and how the gay community took care of each other and fought for survival, to still live life to the fullest. Between funerals, rallies, parties, and community organizing, I want their triumphs celebrated, and their struggles to be remembered. For Skeeter, I was drawn to exploring the classic horror trope structure of the ’Fate of death by a monster in the woods,’ to critique and flip on its head. The mosquito becomes a vessel to symbolize the connection between the buzzing of the characters’ internal fears about death with their external fear of being viewed as a threatening monster.”

Unholy
Writer and director info: Phaedra Vokali, the former editor-in-chief of Cinema Magazine, head of programming at Athens International Film Festival and general director of the Hellenic Film Academy is now turning her attention to her first feature.
Producer: Hermione Efstratiadou
Production company: Foss Productions (Greece)
Language: Greek
Genre: comedy
Country: Greece

Pitch highlights:
“I grew up in a conservative religious family,” Vokali shared, highlighting that the film is set in Mount Athos in northern Greece, a 130-square-mile autonomous monastic state that is “the world’s largest female exclusion zone.” She called it “a place that will not change in another thousand years.”

“We are not allowed to film in the actual peninsula,” but are the first-ever feature filming around Mount Athos, explained Efstratiadou.

Synopsis:
Irene has spent her life saying yes to everyone. Until her father– the guy who left them ages ago to become a monk– drops off the map with her life savings. Irene’s solution? She shaves her head, buys a mustache and practices her deepest “blessings, brother.” Her destination? Mount Athos: the only place on Earth where women– and female animals– have been banned for over a thousand years. Her boyfriend comes along because he is terrible at saying no. Her estranged sister and her girlfriend invite themselves for the chaos. This drag fellowship begins to wreak havoc in the secluded state that echoes medieval times. Inside the labyrinthine monasteries, Irene finds not just a missing dad but the absurd rulebook of patriarchy itself. To get her money and her life back, this people-pleaser must finally become the woman they never saw coming.

Creator’s statement:
“Unholy uses a high concept to ask: what happens when a woman stops following the rules? Mount Athos, where women have been banned for a millennium, becomes the perfect setting for Irene’s rebellion. Blending comedy, drama, and mystery, the film mirrors its protagonist’s journey, refusing to sit still: It steals from heist movies, then wanders into a forest where time slows down. It borrows the rhythm of a screwball comedy, then stops for a quiet confession. It turns laughter into silence and then cracks open into something tender. This is not genre-bending for its own sake. It is the only way to tell a story about a woman who has never been allowed to be her whole self. My personal history with Orthodox Christianity informs every frame, as does my belief that liberation is funnier, messier, and more sacred than any sermon.”