Sundance 2021: B. Ruby Rich to host Barbed Wire Kisses Redux panel with LGBTQ+ filmmakers

The Sundance Film Festival, which runs January 28th to February 3rd, has just announced this year’s series of talks, panels, and events including the lineup for The Big Conversation, discussions that explore what’s fuelling the imaginations of today’s independent artists. Among the program is Barbed Wire Kisses Redux which will see film scholar B. Ruby Rich, who coined the term New Queer Cinema in 1992, return to the festival three decades after the landmark queer film panel, Barbed-Wire Kisses: Contemporary Lesbian and Gay Cinema. The original panel took place in Park City on January 25th 1992 as a generation of irreverent queer independent filmmakers with disruptive aesthetics was emerging, and featured Derek Jarman (d. 1994), Isaac Julien, Todd Haynes, Tom Kalin, Sadie Benning, Lisa Kennedy, Simon Hunt and Stephen Cummins (d. 1994), with B Ruby Rich moderating.

This year’s edition of Barbed Wire Kisses “to look back and imagine forward” will virtually reunite moderator B. Ruby Rich with filmmakers Gregg Araki and Isaac Julien, who will be joined for the conversation by Andrew Ahn, Lisa Cholodenko, Cheryl Dunye, Silas Howard, and Rose Troche.

All Sundance Film Festival 2021 talks and events are free to view globally. For more information head to Festival.Sundance.org.

Main image: Isaac Julien and Derek Jarman participate in the Barbed-Wire Kisses: Contemporary Lesbian and Gay Cinema panel at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. © 1992 Sandria Miller for Sundance Institute.