Kristen Stewart said she’s ready for conversations about films featuring queer or female stories to move past just focusing on their marginalized aspects.
While promoting her new crime drama “Love Lies Bleeding” at the Berlin Film Festival, Stewart noted the era of queer films being “only” about sexuality or gender is over.
In the film, Stewart’s character falls for a female bodybuilder played by newcomer Katy O’Brian.
Stewart praised the film for centering “sidelined perspectives” without solely addressing why they were marginalized.
“We can’t keep doing that thing where we tell everyone how to feel and where we sort of pat each other on the back and receive brownie points for providing space for marginalized voices, and only in the capacity that they are allowed to speak about that alone,” Stewart said.
“The era of queer films being so pointedly ‘only’ — that is done,” she said.
Both she and director Rose Glass discussed the common narrative around interviews with female artists emphasizing empowerment, which Stewart said makes others comfortable despite past oppression.
She wants the characters and stories to simply be experienced rather than conversations constantly returning to identity.
“The person who we normally don’t listen to, the person that we normally don’t look at, like she’s up front and center in her [Glass’] movie,” Stewart said.
“I’m really kind of into the idea of unearthing sidelined perspectives, and not making it all about the reasons that they’re sidelined, but [about] their actual experience.”
“The kind of common conversation about women making films is that we get to empower ourselves and each other,” she said.
“The interviews that we do as artists, as female artists, are so prescriptive, pushing this idea of empowerment because it makes everyone else more comfortable about the fact that we’ve been so oppressed.”
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