The beginning was humble. We had one telephone number to one distributor and one catalogue from which the movies were selected. The first festival was set up in three months with a meagre budget of FIM 20,000 (about 3,200 euro) in spring 1992.
The festival was named Lesbian and Gay Film & Culture Festival. As the name suggests, in addition to movies we offered art exhibitions, theatre and panel discussions. The festival was an instant success, so we decided to have another go the following year.

The first years went by in a flurry, and the venues changed frequently: we hopped, skipped and jumped about the town from one place to another showing movies e.g. in the University auditoriums and a couple of theatres (Ylioppilasteatteri and Åbo Svenska Teater).

We also had our share of difficulties with the films themselves: they would snap or wound off the spool to the floor a minute before the showing or fail to materialise to begin with. In the latter case we often managed to trace the whereabouts of the movies, but due to circumstances i.e. the film being in Turkey or Addis Abeba we were sometimes forced to make minor adjustments to our programming. To top it all, our team of volunteers changed annually, so we had to train our crew and go through the same tedious practicalities each and every year. That is until we brainstormed the idea of writing the basic instructions down...

As the years passed, the festival grew and matured, and meanwhile the gay movies were also undergoing a through and through change. During the first years the program consisted of mainly documentaries, gay and lesbian classics and heart-rending coming out stories. Today the coming out stories are growing rarer and their style has changed. The focus of the films has shifted along with the queer movement: in new queer cinema sexual identity is no longer central to the theme of the movie, the gay culture itself provides the viewpoint from which the surrounding society is observed.

As our festival aspired to integrate to the queer movement, we changed our name to Pervoplanet. The name was self-ironic and proud, and our aim was to determine our queer setting in the universe. However queer translates to Finnish poorly, and queer was too queer for our audience. After a few years and several requests by our friends, we arranged a competition for a new name, where the winning suggestion was Vinokino, which translates roughly to Tilted Cinema. For us the screen is not straight, because we offer films that the audience can watch from its own queer angle.

As the general appetite for a wider variety of films has grown, the commercial movie business has recognised the gay potential of the markets. As a result there has been an accelerating growth in mainstream films directed for gay audience. Nonetheless, Vinokino still holds its ground among Finnish film festivals by concentrating solely on the movies aimed at sexual minorities. Yet, it is not only a forum for lesbian and gay film lovers, it offers every movie aficionado an interesting glimpse of what is happening outside the mainstream: how radical (or conformist) are the new independent director's depictions of gay, lesbian and transsexual experience; is there such a thing as a distinct queer viewpoint; and how does queer cinema differ from mainstream gay movies.

1997		1998		1999
2000		2001		2002

Pervoplanet 1997

Vinokino 1998

Vinokino 1999

Vinokino 2000

Vinokino 2001

Vinokino 2002