WELCOME TO QUEER CITY CINEMA'S WIDEOPENWIDE...
...Coast to Coast 2011 Tour - Victoria, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Halifax and St. Johns.
Wide Open Wide brings you twenty-eight queer films and videos that examine and play with notions of queer identity and that use queer experimental artistic expression to propose diverse ways of looking at sexuality, politics and queer media art itself. The films and videos selected represent artists from Victoria to St. Johns and beyond and a variety of genres that collectively profile the interests and concerns of queer media artists.
Wide Open Wide was conceived to promote the artistic vision of queer media artists whose work might not be shown within these urban centres (note: five out of the six city centres on the tour do not currently have a queer film festival). The films and videos, though falling under the banner of ‘queer’, remain relevant to the broader artistic communities in each of the six cities not only because of the subject matter broached but also because many of the artists float amongst multiple disciplines within the context of media, visual and performing arts. In this sense, artistic rigour and the fluidity of experience are paramount to the programming of Wide Open Wide as is the desire to seek out and present queer film and video that is expansive - ever redefining the notion of identity.
The films and videos in Wide Open Wide are meant to act as an antidote of sorts - a reaction against and in response to an age of increasingly marketable celebrity, the desire for quick fame, and to a queer identity depoliticized and rendered trendy and fashionable. The works provide relief from the above in the form of fantastical, fictional and experimental 'shots' and 'doses' of visual, aural and cerebral pleasure for the viewing audience.
Colorful, demanding, playful, unforgettable, unsettling, thoughtful, whimsical, non-narrative, experimental, smart, unyielding, inventive, sweet, sorrowful, joyful, kind, rude, raw, dissonant, happy, sour, sassy, personal, tremendous, extreme and queer: these are the distinctive and perhaps incongruous ingredients that make up things that will be seen, heard, and, most importantly, felt during your time at Wide Open Wide.
Queer City Cinema has always made room for abject, contradictory and against the flow representations rather than the expected and acceptable - all the while with an informed sense of understanding, humour, and humanity. Artists making queer images and suggesting new ways of looking at the world we all have to navigate, is what it’s all about.
Wide Open Wide will entertain, inform, immerse the imagination and, in true QCC fashion, disrupt perception, providing audiences in Victoria, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Halifax and St. Johns the opportunity to better understand and appreciate the unique artistic perspectives of independent queer media artists.
Gary Varro
Artistic Director
Queer City Cinema
April 2011