Biography
Lionel Soukaz was a trailblazing filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work left an indelible mark on queer and experimental cinema in France. Emerging from the post-1968 countercultural wave, he was a key figure in the radical queer movement, aligning early on with the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR) and collaborating with influential theorist and activist Guy Hocquenghem. Their 1979 film Race d’Ep is considered a landmark in queer cinematic history: a vibrant, defiant, and musical reimagining of gay life that blends archival footage with fictional reenactments, featuring friends and fellow visionaries such as Copi, René Schérer, and Michel Journiac.
Censorship, illness, and marginalization shaped much of Soukaz’s output, which never ceased to affirm the urgency of living, loving, and creating. His response to censorship was Ixe (1980), a rebellious visual explosion that turns rejected footage into an ecstatic affirmation of sexual and artistic freedom. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, his work increasingly turned toward the autobiographical and diaristic, notably through his Journal annales, a vast and intimate film diary of over 1,000 hours that documented the AIDS epidemic, personal loss, activism, and everyday survival from within a community devastated by neglect and stigma.
In the 2000s and 2010s, Soukaz became a mentor and collaborator to a new generation of queer artists and filmmakers. His films were reintroduced to younger audiences through festivals, exhibitions, and institutional partnerships, including a major retrospective project with the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His collaborations with artists like Stéphane Gérard, Rémi Lange, and Tom de Pékin attest to his enduring influence and generosity as a creative companion. His work was celebrated in exhibitions such as VIH Sida: L’épidémie n’est pas finie! at Mucem and Exposé·es at Palais de Tokyo.
Lionel Soukaz’s legacy is not only in his films but in the ways he championed a queer, poetic, and insurgent way of seeing the world. Fiercely independent, unapologetically political, and endlessly curious, his cinema—like his life—was a space of transmission, friendship, eroticism, and resistance.
source: liberation.fr