A Eurostat reference book published in 2004 inexplicably omitted Wales from its front-cover illustration, a map of the continent. Though the country might sometimes disappear geographically, the inaugural Iris Prize Festival put Wales very visibly on the world map of LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender) cinema and scores of film-makers from across the globe managed to find their way to Cardiff, despite European cartographers’ occasional uncertainty about the existence of Wales. A global network of LGBT festivals nominated the 30 short films that formed the bulk of the programme, supplemented by seven features. The international scope of the nominating festivals was reflected in the programme with entries not only from Britain and Europe but also from the Far East, Canada, Australia and the United States. Promising a bounty of £25,000 ($50,000) for the winning film, the prize is claimed to be the most important internationally for LGBT film-making. The jury included film-makers, producers and well-known figures from the British arts and media, including Andrew Pierce, assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph, and Ceri Sherlock, commissioning executive for BBC Arts Wales.

Frances Hendron, the jury chair, said that finding a winner for the prize – to be spent on making a film in the United Kingdom – had not been easy when each of the short-listed films had something to commend it. For special mention, the jury picked out four films: Hello, My Name is Herman, a film from Canada exploring intergenerational and interracial relationships through a focus on a young lesbian woman’s relationship with her 91-year-old Jewish great-grandfather; Peace Talk, a film from Sweden exploring tomboys and military role play; Le Weekend, a sly soft-focus film from the United Kingdom pretending to be a student film from France; and For the Love of God, a British stop-motion film with echoes of Jan Svankmajer and voice-overs by Steve Coogan and Ian McKellen. From the same animation school as Nick Park, Joe Tucker’s debut suggests that stop-motion-land is home not only to eccentric inventors but one or two other oddballs.

As the overall winner, the jury chose Pariah, Dee Rees’s film about the stresses of managing multiple personas and being black, young and lesbian in New York. Berwyn Rowlands of the Festivals Company (responsible for bringing the Iris Prize to Cardiff) said that Rees managed in Pariah to map someone’s journey of coming to terms with her identity in a remarkably innovative way, giving a fresh twist to the coming-out genre. Frances Hendron singled out Rees’s ability to tell a story cinematically and to portray a dramatic turning point without need of superfluous dialogue. Festival blogger David Llewellyn wrote after the announcement of the winning film: ‘It will be interesting to see how [Rees] adapts to shooting a film in the UK with a presumably British cast, given that the context and setting of her winning short were so exact, even if the themes were universal.’

If there were some predictable themes running throughout the programme – youth, rejection, closets and coffins – there was also what the organizers of the event described as an unexpected coalescence between production and performance, calling on the versatility of the LGBT community in both creating content and bringing it to the screen. Audiences were surprised by how often a single individual had acted not only as director but also as producer and performer (Brent Gorski’s Holding Trevor is one of several examples). While financial support for the prize from exhibitors and cinemas, as well as from government agencies, points to an acknowledgement of LGBT cinema’s commercial potential, the gay film-maker’s jack-of-all-trades function suggests a continuing marginalization expressed in budgetary constraints.

The event brought together a community of LGBT film-makers the likes of which Wales has probably not seen before. The closing ceremonies competed for attention with a rugby match between New Zealand and France at the nearby Millennium Stadium, making for a vivid contrast of interest groups. The sequin-spangled fifth Marquis of Anglesey evoked in Chris Morris and Marc Rees’s Dancing Marquis Diaries (a contender for the short-film prize) might have looked out of place among the noisy crowds of face-painted supporters in tribal regalia, but in the midst of 70,000 fans blowing horns and wearing silly hats, he might equally have gone unnoticed. Hywel James, of ITV Wales, who introduced the awards ceremony, quipped that anyone who had travelled to Cardiff for the Iris event and had felt a lack of hospitality should blame the French.

The festival closed with the world premiere of Fel Arall (Another Way), a feature-length documentary about being gay in Welsh-speaking Wales, directed and presented by Nia Dryhurst. Using personal stories interwoven with landmarks in the history of gay liberation, Fel Arall sought to take ownership for the Welsh-speaking community of the struggle for gay and lesbian visibility. The personal stories included a moving account of one man’s experience of being sent in the 1970s to a Denbigh mental hospital for aversion therapy. It didn’t work: the film shows the contented gay partnership in which the former patient now lives and his readiness to move back to Wales after years of exile in England. The film briefly returns us to the scene of this horror, a gothic cathedral of homophobia, now going to wrack and ruin but still with the power to upset someone scarred by prejudice. Stories from a younger generation spoke of a marked change in attitudes but also of the continued presence of obstacles to assuming visibility as gay men and lesbians.

As George Mosse suggests in his seminal work on nationalism and sexuality, homosexuality and discourses of resurgent national identity rarely make good bedfellows. If Fel Arall were to be faulted, it might be on account of its sidestepping of difficult questions about the incorporation of minorities, especially gay minorities, within a Welsh-speaking culture that is sometimes perceived from outside as being based on exclusion and on a cohesion dependent on strict conformity. Many of the historical landmarks that punctuated the personal narratives referred to a British and international context – British anti-sodomy laws, the Kinsey reports, reform of British anti-gay laws in the 1960s – something that underscored the tendency of LGBT discourse to transgress national boundaries in a way that could be troublesome within another minority discourse based around the sharply defined borders of Welsh-speaking communities.

At intervals throughout Fel Arall words from the Welsh gay lexicon are written as graffiti across the screen to suggest the role of language in creating either acceptance or prejudice. But do rugby culture, the idea of Welsh nationhood as patriarchal inheritance and a recent social and industrial history defined by the need for a particular model of robust machismo also determine attitudes towards homosexuality in Wales? Does the film omit this query to suggest the question is one better addressed to anglophone Wales? The national anthem says that Wales is ‘the old country of my fathers’ to which Dylan Thomas’s tart rejoinder was: ‘And they can have it.’ It would be interesting to know how those who told Nia Dryhurst their personal stories see their relationship with the paternalistic vision of Wales satirized by Thomas. Dryhurst’s juxtaposition of personal and historical timelines brought to the surface the paradox of a strong tradition of political liberalism existing alongside social conservatism in Wales. While Welsh politics produced in the 1960s liberal progressives like Leo Abse and Roy Jenkins (architects of reform of homophobic legislation in the United Kingdom), the individual stories recounted in Fel Arall suggest Welsh society was slower in its desire for change than its illustrious Members of Parliament.

Dryhurst told the audience after the film’s screening that she had initially sought a Welsh-speaking broadcaster to front the film but hadn’t been able to find someone who would agree to take on the role, a fact at odds with the film’s upbeat and optimistic conclusions about the acceptance of gay minorities in Wales. Like other film-makers represented in the festival, Dryhurst was obliged to take on multiple roles in her film and as a subject herself describes a coming-out journey of exile and return. Responding to an intervention from a film-maker from Texas who found that Fel Arall spoke very directly to his own experiences in the American South, Dryhurst observed that whilst she had been happy to be out as a lesbian in Afghanistan, she had felt more cautious in Louisiana. As she conceded to a member of the audience, there are still other stories to be told about the LGBT experience in Wales. Perhaps someone who shares Dee Rees’s ability to mix the universal with specific contexts and settings, as recognized in the award of the Iris Prize, could fill some of these gaps in Welsh and British cinema.

Ryan Prout teaches film and literature in the Hispanic Studies Department at Cardiff University.