May. 11, 2011 - Issue #812: Food
Queermonton
Gays on film
Film festival delves into queer consciousness
Queer film fans in Edmonton will receive an early Pride present this year as 28 shorts arrive at Metro Cinema at the end of May. The films are a part of Queer City Cinema's Wide Open Wide, a festival touring coast-to-coast showcasing movies made by (mostly) Canadian queer filmmakers.
Created and curated by Gary Varro, the biennial festival was launched in 1996 in Regina. Wide Open Wide is the first of QCC's touring components to travel beyond the prairies, but when Varro started the festival, he didn't envision it becoming as big as it has.
"The first 'festival' was actually presented as an exhibition as part of Regina's Dunlop Art Gallery's programming for 1996, and was never conceived as something that would continue on," he says. "The early-'90s saw the start of numerous lesbian and gay film and video festivals worldwide ... Regina, I felt, needed a queer presence, specifically something that was artistic, political, theoretical and entertaining all at the same time."
Queer art, he explains, brings a whole new way of looking at the world that is less straightforward or easy to categorize. It presents a challenge for viewers to interpret and forces them to think outside the box. Varro sought films with queer dispositions while not exclusively showcasing queer subjects. "I like to think that this is partly what sets Queer City Cinema apart from most queer film festivals," Varro says. "The festival is not that interested in straightforward narrative, or work that is always identifiably queer, or showing films in programs that divide strictly by gender, or having audience awards, or world premieres."
Offerings range from sci-fi stories to music videos. The former is one of Varro's favourites: "Galactic Docking Company" by Clark Nikolai. "There is something about this very short film that makes me happy, and it's not just the cocks-a-docking," he says. "It reminds me of when I first starting looking at queer film and video at film festivals way back in the mid-'90s. There was this new irreverence, subversiveness and a celebration of queerness that said that being 'gay and lesbian' wasn't just about personal or political struggles."
When asked which film he thinks is the most powerful, Varro mentions a hand-processed, 16mm short by Gina Carducci and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. "'All That Sheltering Emptiness' is a film about a male prostitute reflecting on a recent trick and so much more," he says. "It is the grainy abstracted images of a high-end hotel lobby, its the chandeliers, combined with the narrator's questioning of his own identity and position of living in a world of desire and intimacy that poetically sets a tone that is remarkably tender, sad and poignant."
I asked Varro if it was hard to be taken seriously creating a queer film festival on the prairies. "I completely understand the perception of cities like Edmonton and Regina not being taken seriously as places that produce quality or thoughtful art programming, but as I have lived most of my life in Regina, it has actually been the inspiration for doing the kind of work I do at Queer City Cinema. It would be very easy and perhaps expected to program a more conventional film festival, but it's that very expectation that has prompted me to try and turn things on their head a bit, with the result being, I like to think, artful, thoughtful programming."
Wide Open Wide lands in Edmonton May 26 and 27. Each program is different so you best be attending both. With titles like "Butch Tits," "Vomit Star," and my personal favourite, "Tears from My Pussy," how could you miss this? V
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