Welcome to QCC9!
- three days of some of the most compelling, artful, thoughtful, luminous and curious queer media art from out there and around here.
Speaking of around here, Queer City Cinema is excited to be able to have two local filmmakers as part of our line-up this year. As students at the University of Regina Media Production and Studies program, Candy Fox and Noelle Duddridge have created their latest film and video projects. While their subject matters may be different, these two documentaries are both deeply personal and are expressions of their cultural and familial histories and realities. Directors will be in attendance - come out and support local image-makers!
Other highlights include several programs of shorts that will challenge, inform, impress, arouse, charm, tickle the funny bone, touch the soul and provide ways in which to appreciate the diverse and unique expressions found in queer film and video. These include the always revealing and moving Queer Youth program and the fearlessly poignant and insightful Transgender program, both being screened on Saturday afternoon and both of which are FREE.
QCC9 will be a well-textured assemblage of images, characters, ideas, and realities that collide in fantastical, personal, and playful patterns to produce a multi-faceted queer media art viewing experience. Some of the films and videos focus on image, sound and abstract narratives; others present information, facts, and queerforward realities; while others share the pleasure and pain of individual and collective experience and identification. Even though experimental and artistically rigorous artworks are in abundance, and heavy-hitting topics such as feminism, race, class, identity politics, community, colonization, conceptual art, politics, religion, violence, popular culture, gender and of course sexuality are offered for their important role in providing awareness and insight on many levels, transgressive and subversive play is also an important characteristic of several of the films and videos in the festival. In keeping with Queer City Cinema's mandate to reflect hallmarks of queer image making - in this case, film and video with a decidedly tongue-in-cheek disposition and sensibility; effectively injecting the programming with moments of intelligent, incisive humour - this is film and video that pleases while it appeases.
Three features round out the offerings this year. The festival starts off with Co-dependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same - how could you not want to see a movie with a title like that?; then it's I Want Your Love, full of explicit, honest and tender gay sex and artistic west-coast-style angst; and closing with the highly acclaimed The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, a documentary about devotion to one's art and one's true love in the most extreme and touching of ways.
After sixteen memorable years, this will be the last biennial Queer City Cinema film and video festival, as we will now be presenting the QCC Film and Video Festival on an annual basis every June, along with Performatorium: Festival of Queer Performance every January. More QCC, more queer, more of the time. Enjoy the festival(s) and enjoy the afterglow!
Gary Varro
Artistic Director
Queer City Cinema
May 2012