‘To Be a Human Being Is to Be a Sexual Being’: Zurich Film Festival Invites its Audience to letSEXplore
In its fourth “Hashtag” section, #letSEXplore,
Zurich Film Festival will explore sexuality and desire. Through films that have already generated heated discussions (Ninja Thyberg’s “Pleasure,” Radu Jude’s Berlinale winner “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”) as well as those that deserve to be rediscovered, starting with Alex Liu’s documentary “A Sexplanation” (pictured), set to celebrate its European premiere at the festival. Other titles include George Peter Barbari’s “Death of a Virgin, and the Sin of Not Living,” Jacques Audiard’s Cannes title “Paris, 13th District,” Maria Finitzo’s documentary “Dilemma of Desire” and Hadas Ben Aroya’s “All Eyes Off Me.” “When it comes to sex, people are very interested, but they are also a bit wary,” says programmer Christine Albrecht. “There is this duality, because almost everyone has done it but people have a hard time being open about it. It’s 2021! Maybe we can finally talk about sex.” Instead of focusing on explicit scenes, the festival team decided to spotlight films that normalize sexuality. “Healthy. Reflective. Normalized – those were the words we have been using the most when discussing the ways in which directors approach sex,” says Albrecht, mentioning the selection’s diverse approaches and characters “we don’t necessarily think about when we think about sex and desire.” Just like the protagonist of an Italian doc “Because of My Body” – a young woman suffering from spina bifida, who learns how to experience her physicality in a new way with the help of “love givers.” “We tend to forget that people with disabilities also have desires,” notes Albrecht. “When you are a kid, asking your parents about sex, they tell you to wait until you are older. But then it can be too late. I am just re-watching [the original] ‘Gossip Girl’ and for its female characters, their virginity is something you ‘give’ and then you just lose it. It’s such an old-fashioned way to approach it and yet it’s still valid today,” she adds. “Cinema used to be dominated by the male gaze. Female bodies used to be so exposed and as a woman in the audience, you felt that. I think that has changed. After #MeToo, there is a place for all gazes to exist.” The screenings will be accompanied by a workshop about intimacy on set with intimacy coordinator Chun Mei Tan, hosted by Focal, as well as a ZFF Talk “Let’s Talk About the Female Sex,” inspired by “The Dilemma of Desire.” Taking place on Sept. 27, it will feature such speakers as medical historian Sarah Scheidmantel and Annemarie Schumacher Dimech of the Women’s Brain Project. “We were almost stunned to learn that the mission of #letSEXplore aligns perfectly with ‘A Sexplanation’: to normalize conversations around sex,” director Alex Liu tells Variety. “We also wanted to highlight that the complexity of your sexuality just won’t fit neatly within the categories the society has constructed. Gay, straight or bi? Kinky or vanilla? This thinking is reductive – it causes us to hide, repress or fear so much of our humanity.” With his film, in which he depicts his own journey, Liu wanted to coax audiences into feeling more comfortable discussing sex and empower them to take ownership of the joy their sexuality has to offer, he says, mentioning that a lot of progress has been made since he first started filming. “People have become savvier, more open and increasingly accepting. Overall, they have become more sexually literate and I mean this in a literal sense: we have a better vocabulary that makes these types of conversations possible, partly due to the work of social movements around sexual health which have rippled into representation in media, politics and ultimately everyday discussions,” he says, calling humor “a powerful tool to diffuse tension.” “When it comes to discussing sex and sexuality, people tend to get awkward and feel shame. Instead of validating these scary feelings, we wanted to grant the audience permission to laugh at the absurdity of humanity. Embrace the awkwardness and demonstrate that this type of exploration, including speaking with your own mother and father about their sex life, isn’t catastrophic,” he adds. “By nature, to be a human being
is to be a sexual being. It’s unavoidable. And that’s beautiful.”
Big pharma fuelling human rights crisis over Covid vaccine inequity – Amnesty Amnesty International has accused six pharmaceutical companies that have developed Covid-19 vaccines of fuelling a global human rights crisis, citing their refusal to sufficiently waive intellectual property rights, share vaccine technology and boost global vaccine supply. After assessing the performance of six Covid-19 vaccine developers – Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Novavax – Amnesty International claims that all are failing to uphold their own human rights commitments and warns they should not be putting profit before the lives of people in the world’s poorest countries. Less than 1% of the almost 6bn doses of Covid vaccine administered worldwide have gone to low-income countries, with almost 80% delivered to wealthy countries. Despite calls to ensure a fair global vaccine supply, some companies have continued to disproportionally distribute vaccines to wealthy countries, according to Amnesty’s report, published today. Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said: “Big pharma’s intentional blocking of knowledge transfer and their wheeling and dealing in favour of wealthy states has brewed an utterly devastating vaccine scarcity for so many others.” Callamard said: “[These companies’] actions are plunging parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia into renewed crises, pushing weakened health systems to the very brink and causing tens of thousands of preventable deaths every week.” Among its findings, the report states that Pfizer and BioNTech have so far delivered nine times more vaccines to Sweden than to all low-income countries combined. Both companies revenues have increased substantially in 2021 compared with 2020 due to sales of the Covid-19 vaccine, which is sold at a high price, the report said. In a letter to Amnesty, Dr Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, wrote: “We established pricing principles for the Covid-19 vaccine which are consistent with Pfizer’s commitment to the right to health.” BioNTech told Amnesty that it was working to provide 2bn doses to low- and middle-income countries in 2021 and 2022. Moderna has not yet delivered a single vaccine dose to a low-income country and will not deliver the vast majority of its promised supplies to Covax – a worldwide initiative aimed at equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines – until next year. Moderna told Amnesty that it would be supplying up to 500m doses of its vaccine to Covax, including an initial 34m doses at the end of this year. Higher prices mean the company received revenues of $4.4bn for the second quarter of 2021, up from $67m for the same period in 2020, the report said. Johnson & Johnson, which has manufactured a single-dose vaccine, has refused to grant a licence to a manufacturer offering to make millions more doses. Johnson & Johnson told Amnesty it had established 12 manufacturing and supply partnerships across four continents. While Novavax, which has yet to be approved for use, plans to provide almost two-thirds of its production supply to Covax, the report claims it has refused to share its knowledge and technology. Silvia Taylor, senior vice-president of global corporate affairs, told the Guardian: “Novavax is committed to ensuring equitable global access to our vaccine.” Although AstraZeneca, which has committed to selling its vaccines at cost price, has provided the majority of supplies for Covax to date, and has shared knowledge and technology with 20 supply partners, the company has refused to share its intellectual property more widely, the report claims. When approached by the Guardian, AstraZeneca claimed waiving intellectual property rights would not help meet global demand. A spokesperson said: “IP is not the limiting factor but the time it takes to transfer the technical knowledge using a 1,000 page ‘recipe book’ to produce the vaccine, as well as the lack of specialised producers that can quickly set up the industrial capacity to make a safe and effective vaccine.”
As of September 2021, Covid-19 has led to more than 4.5m deaths and 220m cases worldwide.
China's Guangdong reports human case of N5H6 bird flu Chickens are seen in a livestock market before the market asked to stop trading on March 1 in prevention of bird flu transmission, in Kunming, Yunnan province, China, February 22, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer BEIJING, Sept 22 (Reuters) - The health authority in southern China's Guangdong province said on Wednesday that a single case of a human being infected with the H5N6 strain of bird flu has been reported in the city of Dongguan. The infected patient, a 53-year-old male, is being treated in hospital, the Health Commission of Guangdong Province said in a statement, adding that experts considered the risk of transmission to be low at this stage. (This story corrects headline and paragraph 1 to read H5N6, not N5H6) Reporting by Colin Qian and Tom Daly, Editing by Louise Heavens Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.