Ciao, friends! Ana Kala’s first short film, In Passing, premiered at Belgrade’s Merlinka International Queer Film Festival in December of 2014. Gay – hurray!

We were the first short film screened on Sunday 14 December at Dom Omladine Beograda, the culture and arts centre in downtown Belgrade. The film seemed to be well-received, and several festival-goers approached us during and after the screening to thank and congratulate us. We were happily called “naughty” by the festival director, who is a friend of Ana.

A few days prior, Ana was interviewed on N1 TV and she spoke about artistic expression through erotic film. She has primarily been a plastic artist, a painter, but after writing a book in 2013-2014, her creativity was piquing in other areas.

We had been talking about this for a few months, about the scarcity of lesbian erotic film. I shared with Ana how I found independent lesbian films tend to overly romanticise lipstick lesbians or demonise butch dykes, and how lesbian erotic film is either ultra soft/light or just heteronormalising 😉 eye candy.

Ana wanted to experiment. I totally backed her vision. We wanted to put ourselves out there and say, “hey world – there are lesbians having sex in Belgrade!”

I think the message got across.