The Pride of Queer Cinema
By Jordan Beuckx, Box Office Manager
Pride is here, with all of its joy, frustration, and copious sunscreen application. Pride is a loose name that can be applied to a wide variety of events and gatherings. What is constant is that every person that attends Pride will have their own perfect vision for what Pride should look like. It can be a protest over access to gender affirming care, an all-night rave, a vigil for those that can’t be with us, or, all of the above on the same day. It’s busy, exciting, and potentially exhausting. That’s where the movies come in.
When your voice is hoarse from protesting and your feet are sore from dancing, queer cinema offers a way to relax, broaden your horizons, and potentially deepen your understanding of yourself. But where to start? AIFF has presented an electrifying array of queer titles over the past few years, THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS, WILDHOOD, SOMETHING YOU SAID LAST NIGHT, and CLOSE TO YOU, cover just a few of AIFF’s queer selections. All of these films dig deeply into a polyphony of queer experiences in Canada. These films are beautiful individually and rhapsodic when seen together in the condensed timeline of a film festival or a pride-themed binge session from the comfort of your own home. Roger Ebert once said that cinema was “...a machine that generates empathy” and if that’s the case, queer cinema is a polished, well-oiled machine that is able to represent a collective by tenderly examining the individual. It can make you feel the love and warmth of your community even while shivering from the icy air-conditioning of the movie theater.
CLOSE TO YOU
Pride is not just observed for a few weeks in the summer, it is a continual celebration that can be seen through the whole year. During my first year at the festival I was working at the Box Office desk when a timid teenager asked me how much a ticket was. I told them our student rate and was greeted by a loud thud as a plastic bag of change landed on my desk. As we began to count change I asked what they wanted to see and they told me they were there to see SOMETHING YOU SAID LAST NIGHT, a moving drama about a trans woman trying to parse the difference between how she perceives herself contrasted with how her family sees her. They told me they’d been waiting all week to see it. Part of why I love my job is being able to offer movies like SOMETHING YOU SAID LAST NIGHT to teenagers who pay for things with bulging bags of coins. To help make queer art accessible to an audience that is obviously hungry for it is a blessing and there’s no joy like witnessing the fire that queer cinema can ignite in an audience that arrives excited, ravenous, and open to a story both new and familiar.
As everyone has their own version of what Pride should look like, there is no definite version of what queer cinema can be. To me, being queer is to embrace potential, in yourself and in those around you. Queer cinema offers a vocabulary to navigate the difference between what has been and what can be. It helps keep the spirit of pride alive all year around. If you want to find some queer cinema that does just that, be sure to check for our full program on August 14th and see what queer films AIFF will have this September. Until then, if you find yourself burnt out this pride season, pick a film mentioned above and open your heart and your mind to it. You might be surprised at what you find.