Heartefact Pride Theatre Festival

Heartefact Pride Theatre Festival is an annual event that takes place every year during Pride Week in Belgrade, Serbia. The festival seeks to shed light on various aspects of the LGBTQI + community’s struggles in an artistically relevant way and make them more accessible and clearer to a wider audience, and, furthemore, to find space for solutions and dialogue. So far, five editions of HF Pride Theatre Festival were organised including guest plays from the US, Britain, France, Sweden, Croatia... This year's festival will be held from 2 to 7 September 2024.

Some of the notable European and world plays that Heartefact hosted on the festival in the previous years are "Gipsy Queen'' from Manchester that deals with homophobia in sport through the story of two kickboxers that reveal that the fight with their own identities is a much bigger fight than the one in the ring. "The Baby Monitor“ from New York that explores the stances the society has about same sex parenting and the deeply inborn prejudices the LGBTQ+ community still faces. "An Ongoing Song“ from Poland that deals with HIV from the position of meeting, facing and accepting the aforementioned health condition. "Four Weddings and an Iranian Funeral“ is a monodrama performed by Nasim, the narrator, Iranian and a gay man, that had to leave Iran because of his sexual identity, etc.

Aside from plays, the Festival also hosted works of many notable local and queer artists whose art we put in an European context. The most comprehensive cultural-artistic programme Heartefact organised was two years ago during the Fourth Pride Theatre Festival as part of EuroPride 2022 when the programme, aside from theatre plays, included around 10 exhibitions of local and European queer artists dealing with topics of drag culture, toxic masculinity standards, (in)visibility of trans and gender diverse persons in the Balkans, the marginalised immigrant queer culture, etc.

In September 2023, Heartefact initiated and organised the first meeting of Another Queer Theatre Network during the Pride Theatre Festival. This initial meeting was used to share ideas and perspectives of creating Another Queer Theatre Network. Our vision is to establish and organise the 1st conference of the AQTN in September 2024 with more than 10 partners joined in. The Network should empower and strengthen capacities of organisations for networking exchange, developing projects of cooperation between partners etc. Once created, AQTN should be functional with annual conferences, mutual coproduction, exchanges of queer artists, touring etc.