‘Fiction becomes a great way to externalise and understand these issues’: Sullivan LePostec, MIDPOINT Focus Queer lead tutor

MIDPOINT Institute’s Focus Queer lab began in 2023 as a four-day workshop titled Intensive Queer. Now, it has expanded to a comprehensive project development programme as part of  MIDPOINT’s Works in Development – Feature Launch selection, where 14 projects in total are developed over several months. This year, Focus Queer began in March, followed by online consultations and workshops, and later concluded with pitches at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival as part of the event’s industry programme, KVIFF Promises.

At the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary, we had the opportunity to sit down with screenwriter and director Sullivan LePostec, who has been working with MIDPOINT Institute’s Focus Queer lab for three years as the lead tutor. In conversation with him, we were able to dive into his role in the programme, his perspective on its impact, and its role in a broader ecosystem of queer cinematic work.

Purple Hour: In your opinion, what is distinct about the Focus Queer lab?

Sullivan LePostec: I think what’s interesting about such a programme is that it creates a space where people—even if they are very different and from different parts of the world, they have different stories, they are different parts of the LGBTQ+ identity—have a certain level of shared experience and understanding. When you try to create stories about these types of characters, it’s always interesting to think about the intersection between those identities and the storytelling. It creates an interesting space to think about that, to think about tropes, and to think about how to create storytelling that is authentic.

You’ve had many different lives before joining the team of the Focus Queer lab. How do you see them as fitting together?

That’s the kind of question that makes you think, because you don’t think every day about your own life. You’re right, I’ve had many lives—I was an activist. I was always passionate about stories and storytelling, so that’s why I created a website talking about European TV series. I spent a long time doing that, and then I moved on. I started creating my own stories, first as a screenwriter. Then, I became a director on the third season of my show.

Certainly, all of these lives have influenced each other. It’s also interesting that my first TV series was about an LGBT centre and being an activist—my former life. As thrilling as that life was, it was also a complicated life. It’s always challenging to find a way to work together as a group and work for a common cause. Fiction becomes a great way to externalise and understand these issues, reflect on that time, and try to think of a better way to do things. Being a journalist interested in fiction and drama became something that was very helpful at the start of my career. I had a good understanding of the players in the industry. I had seen tons and tons of stuff, and it helped me have a frame of reference—you gain a sense of the shape of stories.

What is a key element to your approach as the lead tutor for Focus Queer, and has it changed over the years？

It’s very important for me that it is a group experience. That’s why I really want them all to give feedback on each other’s projects—to read them, to be very involved. I want them to start the conversation. I point out that I don’t necessarily have all the answers. When you hear someone give one piece of feedback, it’s something, but when five people tell you the same thing, it’s different. Maybe they don’t give you a solution, but they certainly point to where there’s a problem. That’s also why the group element is very important to me.

What’s been interesting is to see the programme grow. It was a fairly new thing when I came on board. We started seeing the number of applications go up, which was very rewarding for us. It was also proof that the programme was needed and fills a gap that was not necessarily filled before.

The concept of queer cinema can be very fluid and malleable. When you’re assessing a project and how it grasps queerness—whether form, style, content, or otherwise—what are you looking for or looking at?

I try to be very open with that idea of queer cinema—I think it can take many shapes and forms. We have a project this year called Unholy, which is a Greek project set on Mount Athos. When I read it, it was a queer project in the same sense that I truly believe that Tootsie (1982) is a queer project, even though everyone in Tootsie is cisgender. But it has, in a very smart way, a question about gender identity, about gender performance, and how it changes your relationship to society. We are about 40 years after Tootsie, I guess, so it also goes further. It’s possible now to develop queer themes further in mainstream cinema. It’s a question of point-of-view, so what a queer film has many very diverse answers. It can have many kinds of stories, characters, and storytellers behind them. 

MIDPOINT’s programmes also inherently create an alumni community. Do you follow the projects that have gone through the programme, even informally?

The Focus Queer lab is run alongside the Feature Launch programme, so they share the same experience. We go to the same hotel, have the same lunches, and os on. They pitch during the same pitching session at Karlovy Vary, and we don’t have a special block of queer pitching. We create a pitching event where we want a diversity of stories, so it’s all communal in that way.

MIDPOINT is very efficient in creating a space where these storytellers—writers, directors, producers—come together for a week and have nothing to think about but their stories. We are taken care of like babies for a while, but it’s good for the creative people to have a space where, mentally, they are fully available to tell their story. It creates this network of people who have been part of the big MIDPOINT family.

There’s an event every year called Homecoming, where everyone can kind of come back and see what’s been happening. Nowadays, there are all these WhatsApp groups, and the groups from last year will still get updates—when someone has a new draft, when shooting is coming, and so on. It’s a way for us to keep in touch over time. This year in Karlovy Vary, we also had a participant from Focus Queer last year, Šimon Holý, who has a movie in the Crystal Globe Competition here at Karlovy Vary [read our review with the filmmaker here]. There’s always something we can talk about and have an opportunity to reconnect about.