Welcome to The Queerest Year Roundtable as we have a conversation with a friend about queer art, media, and/or culture. Today we are talking with our friend and Ghoulette, May Santiago, about the 2018 French queer horror film Knife+Heart directed by Yann Gonzalez.
May Santiago is a doctoral candidate in cultural studies, focused on the Puerto Rican film industry to reveal, as she says, the “power of cinema in shaping social relations and perspectives.” May is also a teacher, a researcher and writer, a filmmaker, and a podcast host. It’s not hard to see why we admire May so much and why we were eager to kick off The Queerest Year Roundtable with her.
In this chat, we talk with May about:
What we love about Knife+Heart including the queer utopian world; messy, sexy (#sessy) lesbians; the beautiful aesthetics and style; and all the liminality and layers
How art and life reflect each other in Knife+Heart, especially through director Yann Gonzalez’s inspirations and perspectives
What Knife+Heart might say about queerness, including love and tenderness
Why it could feel different for queer spectators to watch a slasher in which queer people are killed when it is directed by a queer person versus one that is directed by a cishetero person, such as Cruising (1980)
FLAGS & NOTES:
~ This conversation warrants a spoiler alert… If you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to know what happens, go watch it before you listen to what we have to say.
~ The film (and thus this chat) also call for a content warning. Knife+Heart is a horror slasher, so there is violence (within the queer community), gore, sexual assault, all kinds of sex, and other horror tropes and vibes. If even hearing about these movie elements is not your thing, we understand if you choose to skip this one. Join us for the next Roundtable because we are going to be talking with all different kinds of people about all different kinds of art and media.
~ This is our first time doing an audio recording like this, so forgive any quality issues or blips as we learn best practices and audio editing software—it’s not bad, but we’ll get better at it!
His life was nothing but faraway desires.
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