Films of the Queer Film Festival

This article has been peer reviewed

 Queer cinema exists on a spectrum, with films that have crossover appeal to mainstream audiences (such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)) on one end and niche films for queer audiences—from Fig Trees (John Greyson, 2009) to Another Gay Movie (Todd Stephens, 2006)—on the other. This dossier presents an array of case studies of films that rely heavily on the queer film festival circuit for reaching their audience. This mode of distribution does not necessarily seek interest or approval from heteronormative film culture. In this dossier, we propose that this mode of queer spectatorship mobilises and draws value from its own marginality. Through several case studies, we argue that the curation of these events are affective experiences that momentarily bind queer histories and audiences together in the moment of their projection. 

We have both written extensively on the queer film festival as a cultural phenomenon. Stuart Richards has analysed the queer film festival as a social enterprise to examine how these festivals need to consider social, economic and environmental sustainability.¹ Antoine Damiens draws an alternative history of queer film festivals to question ‘the theoretical and political narratives implied in current festival scholarship.’² We both advocate for queer film festivals to ensure that transgressive film practices flourish. The values of such film are core to the queer film festival’s social mission. 

 Even though many festivals use a variety of labels, such as lesbian and gay (Hong Kong), LGBTQ (San Francisco’s Frameline) or none at all (Montreal’s Image+Nation, London’s BFI Flare, St Petersburg’s Side by Side), we will, be using the label of queer and its association of inclusion and activism to label this festival economy. We are primarily interested in films that circulate along these festivals rather than crossing over to general audiences at international film festivals. There are, however, a number of films highlighted in this dossier that crossover to multiple circuits, such as The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland 2014). In these instances, unique meaning arises in these queer screening events. 

We argue that there can be radical potential in remaining on this circuit. Indeed, several scholars have emphasised how some queer films may find success beyond queer film festivals.³ Countering discourses that would define queer cinema as “niche” or of only being of interest to queer audiences, these scholars highlight the popularity of queer films at major international film festivals. The success of these films, in turn, enable us to further examine queer cinema’s complex relationship to the art house circuit. 

This dossier can be taken as an attempt to theorise queer films that may never cross-over. Moving away from success stories and mainstream appeal, we aim to assess the programming of queer film festivals on its own. While some queer films will be seen at international festivals, a sizable portion of queer films do not crossover and stay in the queer circuit. These films are quite diverse, in terms of aesthetics, budget, form, and generic affiliation: they include among others experimental independent films, activist documentaries, as well as popular romantic comedies. 

Queer film festivals as industry

To some extent, queer film festivals have historically served two functions: exhibition and distribution. This can at times be a paradox, but it need not be. First, these festivals must provide space for the exhibition of films and associated events that focus on queer themes. They are, as is often reiterated in program notes and opening night speeches, by/for/about queers.⁴ A significant focus of scholarship on the queer film festival has implemented the counterpublic as a conceptual framework.⁵ Second, there is an industrial component to the queer film festival’s purpose. For most films exhibited in a queer film festival, these spaces are a significant opportunity to reach a queer audience.⁶ Indeed, festivals historically, writes Julianne Pidduck have been ‘part of a concerted political project to seize the means of self-representation in the face of widespread cultural invisibility and stereotyping.’⁷ At queer film festivals, notes B. Ruby Rich, we ‘fix memory and reclaim history’.⁸ This effort for professionalisation and distribution should not come at the expense of the cultural project of the queer film festival and its social mission.

As Damiens has argued, the importance of the queer film festival circuit can be traced back to a post-Cruising (William Freidkin 1980) era, where there was a noted push to ‘counter the negative representations of homosexuality depicted in Hollywood films.’⁹ These festivals were about more than social capital:

While the festival format first emerged as a solution to bring more patrons inside the theatres, it quickly helped remunerating filmmakers and circulating their films – sometimes through the creation of full-fledged distribution divisions. This is itself not surprising: early LGBT festivals struggled to find films; their catalogues often included a list of distributors and sources.¹⁰ 

 In that context, queer festival scholars generally argue that it is impossible to theorise queer film festivals without paying attention to the economy of queer cinema and its distribution. Since their humble beginnings, queer film festivals have simultaneously tried to create an alternative circuit of distributions for films that would otherwise never find their audience and to serve as a launch pad publicising the work of emerging queer artists. Significantly, this led many organisations to professionalise their operation  – which in turn participated in legitimising queer cinema and in popularising it beyond the queer film festival circuit.¹¹  

 This crossover between general and queer circuits rose to prominence during the much-famed New Queer Cinema movement in 1991 onwards, where several queer themed films generated a lot of buzz at major film festivals, particularly Sundance. Scholars such as Michele Aaron and B. Ruby Rich contended that these films, which included Paris is Burning (Livingston, 1991), Poison (Haynes, 1991) and Swoon (Kalin, 1992), were in many ways defiant and challenged aesthetic, narrative and political conventions and sensibilities.¹² While Damiens argues that the queer film festival event is shaped by identity building and cinephilic values, these same values allow these films to travel across many different types of festivals.¹³ This strategic interplay between festival circuits is at the core of Lisa Henderson’s concept of queer relay, where this movement of:

queer cultural production at the crossroads of industrial and queer independent sectors – that figurative port of entry for much queer work that is later taken up in mainstream form and whose mainstream expressions flow back to queer cultures… Relay is a term designed to capture the movement of cultural producers and production practices across such zones of imagined and theorized opposition [between queerness and art cinema], recalibrat[ing] cultural political possibility beyond the claims and counterclaims of the queer-mass culture critique.¹⁴ 

Following Lisa Henderson, scholars have generally argued that queer film festivals increasingly function across many circuits, with its networked connections to many other festivals.¹⁵ Indeed, festival programmers are in constant contact with other queer festival directors and non-queer festival programmers, particularly in relation to securing films that have received considerable buzz. For instance, Teddy Award winners at Berlinale, such as Hard Paint (Filipe Matzembacher & Marcio Reolon, 2018), Nasty Baby (Sebastián Silva 2015), Absent (Marco Berger 2011) and The Way He Looks (Daniel Riberio 2014), have received notable acclaim at both queer and non-queer festivals as a result of their prizes.

The centrality of the interplay between queer and non-queer circuits in the literature on festivals should not be surprising. Scholars generally argue that international festivals act as a “cultural gatekeeper”: in selecting a limited number of films each year, they dictate taste and assign cultural value to the film they program.¹⁶ In that context, scholars’ focus on queer films that cross over to the international festival circuit fundamentally aims to legitimise queer cinema through the rubrics of art cinema: in this framework, the popularity of queer cinema at international film festivals is often perceived as indicators of the vitality and quality of queer film production. 

Damiens recently outlined the role played by international film festivals as cultural gatekeepers: while festivals grant cultural capital to films, films may also grant cultural capital to festivals.¹⁷ In other words, film festivals fundamentally select films that reflect their own cultural positioning: their film selection can be understood as an exercise in branding, strategically mobilising the cultural discourses associated with various films in order to position themselves in the cultural economy of taste. Distributors for notable queer Indiewood films, such as Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2017), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee 2005) or Carol (Todd Haynes 2015), seem to be quite aware of this interplay between international film festivals and cultural capital: they typically choose to screen these titles at more prestigious A-list festivals. For most of these major Indiewood films, they already have this cultural power established during the pre-production stage, with directors, actors and notable literary paratexts already attached to the title.  These Indiewood titles strategically position themselves to be picked up by major independent labels, such as A24, or speciality divisions owned by major media conglomerates.¹⁸ As such, this cultural power is already established by the time they screen at major A list festivals and move on, bypassing queer film festivals for general international ones. There are exceptions, however, where programmers can strike it lucky. In 2017, for instance, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival screened a special preview screening of Moonlight. This is, however, still outside the festival calendar. In the same year, Frameline secured a one-off screening of God’s Own Country (Francis Lee 2017) during their festival.

Appropriate Behaviour 

Significantly, the films that cross over are not necessarily the same in different geographic markets. As Damiens argues, we need to take into consideration the unique configurations of queer and art cinema in each market.¹⁹ For instance, Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour (2015) ‘crossed over’ in the North American markets while it remained closely associated with the queer film festival circuit in France. Conversely, films that tend to adopt the codes of art-house cinema, such as Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways (2012), may downplay their associations with the queer circuit in some markets in order to appeal to broader audiences. 

The fact that these queer Indiewood films often premiere at international film festivals has many consequences for the economy of queer film festivals. Indeed, most film festival programmers prefer exclusivity for films within their city. If a film is being programmed in a general international film festival, a programmer of a queer film festival may not choose to program it as the audience might be exhausted. Occasionally, a queer film festival programmer might consider including a film with a significant draw. Such a film that had a prominent run on both general and queer film festivals was Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute: the film screened at general international, French, and queer film festivals. This example remains rare: Loist and Zielinski note that queer films that cross-over may not premiere in the queer circuit.²⁰ Similarly, queer festival programmers have long complained about the unavailability of some films.²¹ 

The diversity of the queer circuit

While on one spectrum we get queer Indiewood films that strategically position themselves for a wider audience, there are many others that gain significance on the queer film festival circuit. It’s these films that this dossier intends to focus on, in how they traverse the festival circuit and engage with contemporary queer politics. As highlighted in Richards,²² films that fall on this spectrum are a mix of gay male oriented faire, i.e. bums on seats films, and those that actively challenge homonormativity. Within this mode of film, Damiens sees queer cinematic production as structured on a similar spectrum with one extreme pole being creators of self-referential art that challenges aesthetic and sexual conventions.²³ Queer politics, therefore, becomes symbolic capital. On the other end of Damiens’ spectrum is the cinema-as-profit pole, where queerness is understood as an economic capital, with films that are made for a narrow audience. Examples provided by Damiens include the Eating Out franchise (Brocka 2004, 2011, 2012; Bartell 2007; Gaylord 2009) which became a staple of the queer film festival circuit in the noughties. 

While focusing on films that cross over certainly enabled scholars to gain a better understanding of the economics of some queer films, it may have unintended consequences: films that do not cross-over and that stay in the queer circuit are often ignored or labelled as “less successful.” Conversely, queer film festivals have been defined as “niche” or as a “ghetto”²⁴ (for instance, Xavier Dolan’s use of the term in Marques 2014;²⁵ see also Zielinski 2008 for a discussion of “negative capital”):²⁶ rather than understanding queer festivals as unique sites that refract queer film culture in its diversity, expressions such as “niche” suggest a form of cultural inertia and closedness that would ultimately not be beneficial to filmmakers and cinephiles. In focusing on films that do not necessarily crossover, we take seriously the economy of queer cinema and its unique relation to queer film festivals. Most importantly, we argue that queer cinema is in itself a fundamentally eclectic and diverse category – i.e., a stark contrast to the idea of such queer titles existing primarily on the margins. 

Fig Trees

For all the films that made waves during the aforementioned new queer era, or during the rise of queer indiewood,²⁷ there were many in recent decades that exhibited these same tendencies of the aforementioned acclaimed films but remained primarily on the burgeoning queer film festival circuit, such as John Greyson’s 2009 Fig Trees. While the film premiered at Berlinale and won the Teddy Award in 2009, the film was primarily screened at queer film festivals, including Frameline, Image + Nation in Montreal, and queer film festivals in Hamburg, Paris, Melbourne, and Sydney. The film is an operatic documentary that follows the lives of South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat and Canadian AIDS activist Tim McCaskell. Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts is used to structure the film’s narrative. Fictional representations of Stein and Thompson write an opera about Achmat and McCaskell that is narrated by an albino squirrel. Similarly, short films, activist documentaries, and many romantic comedies all find strong audiences on the queer film festival circuit yet don’t consistently ‘cross over’ to broader distribution networks. 

Queer film festival audiences respond to films differently to broader (i.e. straight’) international film festivals. In GLQ’s seminal queer film and video festival forums, French directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau highlight the different directions their films Jeanne et le garçon formidable (Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, 1998), Drôle de Félix (The Adventures of Felix, 2000), Ma vraie vie à Rouen (My Life on Ice, 2002) and Crustacés et coquillages (Côte d’Azur,2004) have taken.²⁸ While Jeanne and Crustacés circulated primarily on the international film festival circuit, Ma vraie vie à Rouen and Drôle de Félix relied significantly on the reception of queer film festivals. Outside of France, their experiences demonstrate that, for their films, queer audiences were much stronger than language communities. Ma vraie vie à Rouen, for instance, is more experimental in form and was received warmly by queer audiences. And yet, their warm reception at queer film festivals is heavily shaped by winning Teddy awards at Berlin, demonstrating the intersecting nature of the film festival circuits. They concede, as do other directors in the forum, that queer audiences are vocal in their desire for films that are ‘queer enough’ to feature in a queer film festival program. In other words, films that aren’t explicitly ‘queer enough’ tend to ruffle audience feathers. 

Since publishing The Queer Film Festival, the creative industries continue to be driven by a neoliberal logic, which makes the landscape a challenging one for arts organisations. As Dhaenens also notes, for many queer film festivals, this sees a rise in these festivals being profitable organisations and a downplaying in their activist agendas.²⁹ There are films that have a desire to prosper under neoliberal conditions and those that embrace being alienated from it and are less audience friendly as a result. These latter films are often the ones that fulfill the queer film festival’s social mission. Embracing this transgressive nature of these events, and allowing for transgression to thrive, is important for supporting the socio-cultural aspects of communities.³⁰ This community engagement is simultaneously local and global. Further, ‘while being site-specific,’ Binnie & Klesse write, ‘queer film festivals take place within a transnational public sphere, which further takes recourse to a transnational (globalising) discourse of queerness.’³¹ 

 These circuits are, of course, porous. Damiens draws on Zielinski and Henderson to argue how the ‘industry’ of queer film lies at the intersection of different fields, where staff and audiences traverse across different festival-scapes.³² This is, of course, not just one festival circuit. Queer film moves across different circuits. Like many Indiewood films, cultural value is inscribed alongside major contemporary canons of art cinema. Stringer argues that festivals are situated between a ‘zone of speculation and a zone of legitimation’ through which ‘film genres mutate and cross-fertilize as a result of their … circulation.’³³ As Damiens also argues, these different circuits ‘may not obey the same regimes of taste and [their] cultural currency is fundamentally unequal.’³⁴ This is not to say that art and queerness are divided through these zones. The queer film festival circuit reproduces and amplifies the queer political value of a film. This dossier explores several films whose value is truly realised within these queer circuits. What is it about these films that allows them to resonate with audiences in queer ways?

Proyecto Fantasma

 An interesting case is the 2022 Adelaide Film Festival, which featured a particularly strong queer line-up. Paul Struthers was a guest programmer for this year’s festival, who has previously been the director of Queer Screen in Sydney and director of San Francisco’s Frameline International LGBTQ Film Festival. Struthers’ talent for queer programming is indicative in the offerings in this year’s program. There were the big events with Bros (Nichola Stoller 2022) and My Policeman (Michael Grandage 2022), starring Harry Styles. There were also many smaller queer films that one would expect from a queer film festival, such as Will-O-The-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrigues 2022) and Uyra: The Rising Forest (Juliana Curi 2022). A highlight from the queer slate was Proyecto Fantasma (Phantom Project, Roberto Doveris 2022), a small Chilean film dubbed as an urban gay ghost story. While Will- O-The-Wisp featured at many major film festivals, from Cannes to Sydney, other films, such as Phantom Project and Uyra: The Rising Forest were more likely to screen at queer themed film festivals. Uyra, for instance, won the Audience award for Best Documentary at Frameline and a Special Programming Award at Outfest. The reason for these films to be included in the Adelaide Film Festival is that there is no dedicated queer film festival in Adelaide. As such, this slate of queer content is an opportunity for dedicated queer screenings within a bigger festival. This allows for these films to reach an audience that would otherwise be unavailable. Films, such Will- O-The-Wisp premiered at Cannes before screening at both queer and non-queer festivals. A film such as Uyra has also screened at a mix of documentary, human rights and queer based festivals. Many of these festivals share ‘resources, personnel, expertise [and, as is often the case] films’.³⁵                  

 This dossier addresses the diversity of films that rely heavily on the queer film festival circuit for meaning and legitimacy. Damien O’Meara defines the queer romantic comedy as its own subgenre and emphasises the role of the queer film festival in creating space for these queer-specific stories. In moving beyond Western-centric notions of queer audiences, Nashuyuan Wang looks at the creation of Chinese queer spaces with the films Farewell, My Concubine and East Palace, West Palace. The importance of queer film festival programs and how they shape viewing experiences are explored in a number of other case studies. Heidi Ka Sin Lee analyses The Duke of Burgundy (Strickland 2014), and how the film draws on the viewer’s social and/or cinematic knowledge to remould the age-old perceptions of sexploitation, film genres, and queer desire. Sam Broadhead looks at how Daughters of Darkness (Kümel, 1971) was reframed as part of the Leeds International Film Festival’s Queer Fear program. David Wingrove advocates for Guiseppe Patroni Griffi’s Il Mare (1962) to be reconsidered as an important queer classic. Gary Kramer interviews Everett Lewis, a mainstay of the queer film festival who directed several gay romantic comedies. Through this array of research into the films of the queer film festival, we hope that this dossier challenges the notion that crossing over into broader circuits is not the only way a film can be deemed a success. We hope that this dossier continues much needed research of queer resonances that occur at queer film festivals.

Endnotes