Controversial gay film festival making stop in Saskatoon
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By Betty Ann Adam
The Queer City Cinema film festival that drew criticism from Saskatchewan Party MLAs last May is going on the road this month with stops in Saskatoon and Winnipeg.
All Queer, All Canadian, All Night Long 2001 Tour: a gay and lesbian film and video festival will be in Saskatoon Feb. 8-10. It will be in Winnipeg Feb. 15-17.
The 45 short films and videos will be screened at the Mendel Art Gallery auditorium, with shows starting at 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. each night. It is presented in Saskatoon by Video Verite, a non-profit, artist-run production co-operative.
The festival here will include works by two former Saskatoon residents, Thirza Cuthand, who lives in Vancouver, and Nikki Forrest, who lives in Montreal.
Missing from the lineup will be an American film about lesbian bikers who use children as sex slaves.
That was one of several films criticized by Sask. Party MLA June Draude, who objected to the Saskatchewan Arts Board's $5,000 funding to the festival, which she said celebrated child pornography.
That film and others are not included in the tour because the Canada Council, which is supporting the tour with a $20,000 grant, specifies only Canadian works be included.
Including international films would have required finding an additional funding source, said the festival's artistic director and curator, Gary Varro.
Varro focused on experimental and conceptual works for the festival. Most will be at the shorter end of the three-minute to 65-minute time range of the films being screened.
"It's about the process of creative, artistic endeavour. . . . There isn't a lot of narrative work, meaning there isn't a lot of story," he said.
The festival itself is staged every two years in Regina. Varro hopes to continue touring it to western Canadian cities that do not have their own queer video and film festivals.
Festival organizers consistently use the term queer rather than gay or some other term that might sound less disparaging, Varro said.
"It's taking a word that has pejorative meaning to it and reclaiming it, using it to diffuse the negative aspect of it," Varro said.
The term has lost its offensiveness for most gays and lesbians, he said.
"Another thing about queer is it encompasses more," he said.
"Lesbian and gay are gender-based. Queer covers women and men and transgender, transexual people and it can go into the realm of including straight people who also think of themselves as being queer. Perhaps cross-dressers, bisexual people who aren't lesbian or gay. Queer is an all-encompassing, broader term to describe sexuality that doesn't fall within a very specific place. You can be straight and be queer." |
