Queer/ing film festivals: history, theory, impact

Abstract

This article traces the history of queer film festivals, from their beginnings to the present day, while offering socio-political and cultural reasons for a range of trends in festival name, location, and programming choices, before outlining the relatively late emergence of Film Festival Studies, including queer festival studies, within Film Studies and Queer Studies in the academy. It then uses the Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF) as a case study to demonstrate the increasing focus on diversity and inclusivity in queer film festivals, especially more grass roots ones, and the social impact of this.

Ecological Aesthetics of Intimate Otherness in Swedish Trans Cinema

“…10. New Queer Cinema of the 1990s was marked by queer community-embedded filmmaking and was supported by the parallel rise of global queer film festivals (Dawson & Loist 2018).…”

Queer Film Culture in the Covid-19 Era

“…Making visible non-normative lives and alternative audiovisual cultures, they create counterpublics: spaces and communities where transgressive notions of "identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex" (Berlant & Warner 1998, 548) are envisioned, imagined and enabled. At the same time, LGBTQAI+ festivals -like all film festivals -are an integral part of cinephilia and venues for challenging mainstream cinema cultures (Loist & Dawson 2018). As cultural events, they serve as both meeting points for filmmakers and audiences and as social movements and market niches.…”

“…MIX Copenhagen was founded as early as 1986, but even earlier, gay and lesbian film weeks and one-off events took place in contexts such as film clubs, cinemateques, gay and lesbian associations and women's film festivals. While linking to the international gay and lesbian film festival movement that started in the 1970s (Loist & Dawson 2018), today's festivals use different naming strategies, highlighting "queer" or "trans" -or choosing names that indicate a broader sense of alternative cinema culture (Mix, Fusion, Vinokino, Side by Side). Various acronym combinations, such as LGBTQAI+, are used by festivals as well as in academic research (including us here) as a broad categorization of this festival culture.…”

Being Seen Making Scenes: An Archival Exploration of Ottawa's First Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival

“…The NQC content that was shunned from corporate and hetero focused spaces in the 1990s was starting to bleed into the mainstream. 65 As global awareness of queer issues grew, so did that appetite for queer content within mainstream television and films. This led to a fundamental change in the distribution model that existed in the 2000s.…”

“…I rely on film scholars Leanne Dawson and Skadi Loist's work on LGBTQ festivals, specifically their comprehensive work on these festivals in Europe, as it helpfully identifies trends and overall trajectories of these types of film festivals. 3 Additionally, Antoine Damiens' newest work LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness helps untangle some of the challenges of researching festivals with relatively small and at times ephemeral archival presences. 4 Within Canada, Thomas Waugh's comprehensive work The Romance of Transgression, a true pillar of documentation of queer film in Canada, provides the only academic reference that mentions Making Scenes (though only one paragraph).…”