The summer festival season is in full swing and in less than two weeks, the much anticipated Prague Pride 2022 festival will start – one of the largest multi-genre human rights festivals in Central and Eastern Europe. It is a huge cultural event. This year’s Prague Pride takes place from Monday, August 8 to Sunday, August 14 and will offer dozens of musical performances, discussions, lectures, exhibitions, theatre performances and film screenings. There will be art performances, talk shows and evening parties. The festival culminates with the Rainbow Parade on Saturday, which will head to Pride Park on the Letenská plain, where it will continue with a musical and accompanying program.
The main motto of the 12th annual Prague Pride festival is #heartmatters. This hashtag reflects the festival’s new visuals, led by a heart-shaped logo that symbolizes the eight billion hearts that beat around the world. The heart is also a symbol of humanity, mutual love and life. That’s why #heartmatters.
In the shadow of the pandemic, the last two years of the festival had to do without the traditional Rainbow Parade and the music program in Pride Park on the Letenská plain. This year, the Prague Pride festival returns to the traditional full-fledged program. Both the festival and Pride Park events are expanding the program on offer, focusing on safety, accessibility of the festival and minimising the ecological impact of the festival. The rainbow parade through Prague, which will be car-free this year, will start on Saturday, August 13, from Wenceslas Square. Participants of the parade will meet from 11.30 am. The front of the procession will leave Můstek at 1 p.m. and pass through the streets of the Old Town, including the Old Town Square, then through Pařížská Street and over the Čechův Bridge to Letná. To improve ecological sustainability and safety (the parade goes through the historic core of Prague!), this year’s parade will be without motorised vehicles. Musical accompaniment will be provided by portable speakers on cargo bikes and marching bands.
This year’s star names at Prague Pride: Tom Aspaul, Girli or Adam Pavlovčin
The program of the Prague Pride festival is richer every year. This year, visitors can look forward to more than 150 events during the entire festival week. The musical stars of this year include ADONXS (Adam Pavlovčin), who will perform during the opening of the festival on Monday, August 8 on Strelecky Island. He will be joined by a popular group of performers called Pinkbus, the Berlin band Sado Opera or DJ Elskë. The musical program of the festival culminates in Saturday’s Pride Park on Letná, where British musicians Tom Aspaul and Girli, Czech bands and drag artists, as well as many DJs will perform. In total, the Saturday program will take place on six different stages.
This year’s festival will offer many events that visitors already know from previous years, such as the talk show Pride Voices, where several prominent queer personalities will share their inspiring life stories with the audience, picnics in the Pride Village, a composed evening directed by HateFree Culture, and more. The organizers have also prepared several novelties. Among them the Andaz Lounge event, aimed primarily at straight allies. The Prague Pride festival is for everyone, and inclusivity is encouraged.
The Pride Conference, a two-day human rights conference for the professional public, will focus mainly on the lives of LGBT+ people in the region of Central and Eastern Europe.
The festival will also offer a program focused on individual countries in the immediate region of Europe. The German section of the festival supported by the Czech-German Future Fund will feature several German artists and debaters. Germany will then have Friday evening at the Pride House, where the topic of the German transformation experience after 1989 will be the topic of the successful integration of LGBT+ refugees from Eastern countries. The evening itself will be part of a wider concept of debates called Pride Talk, which will gradually focus on all countries in the region from Tuesday to Friday.
Prague Pride is on the way to greater accessibility and sustainability
Sustainability is not an empty concept for the Prague Pride festival. In 2021, the festival adopted a new strategy, which includes in its priorities the adoption of systemic measures leading to greater ecological and social sustainability. At the festival, for several years now, visitors can only use returnable pre-paid plastic cups, ecological tableware for refreshments, and waste sorting, including cans, is a matter of course. The festival production also banned the use of helium and plastic confetti. As part of recycling, the festival cooperates with the global initiative Every Can Counts, which supports the recycling of aluminum packaging. Several collection points will be available at the Prague Pride festival precisely for the most used can packaging material. Promoters will participate in the Saturday parade with backpacks that will serve as mobile trash cans.
This year, the organizers have also introduced a well-thought-out festival merch strategy. Newly, festival visitors will be able to purchase socially and ecologically responsible products at the official stands – new festival T-shirts and bags with certification ranging from standard Oeko-Tex to Fair Wear Foundation to Fairtrade. Private coffee from the Czech roaster mamacoffee will also carry Fairtrade certification, and the assortment will be complemented by various gift items made from recycled or recyclable materials. Most merch comes from local Czech suppliers.
The festival is accessible to the widest possible group of people, including people with disabilities. Both Pride Village and Saturday’s Pride Park are fully barrier-free venues, the parade through Prague is barrier-free from Műstek to the steps at Čechova most, where a barrier-free bus will be waiting to take interested parties safely to Letná. The most important events of the festival will be interpreted into Czech sign language – specifically, the opening of the festival in Pride Village, the Saturday program at Můstok before the start of the parade and also the program at the main stage at Letná after it ends. All information is already available on the festival website.
Almost the entire festival program is free
Complete program of this year’s Prague Pride Festival:
https://festival.praguepride.com/cs/program
