Inside Out
16th Annual Toronto Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival

- Amy Cheatle

Film lovers and the queer community came together this weekend to celebrate the sixteenth year of Inside Out, Canada's wildest film festival honoring queer cinema.

Inside Out began in 1991 as a one-day festival, emerging from the grassroots effort of community artists and activists living in Toronto. In its sixteenth season, the festival has blossomed into eleven-days and nights of national and international film and video exploring aspects of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender life. This year movies were screened at the Royal Ontario Museum and on the University of Toronto campus, and represented were documentaries, fictitious works, both feature length and shorts, and experimental artist videos. Over 30,000 people were expected at the fest to screen the 275+ works representing 82 countries that played.

Though the numbers were impressive, by the end of my stay in Toronto I had come to the conclusion that queer cinema is still very much a segregated and closeted art form. There are numerous challenges a GLTB filmmaker must face that straight cinema is exempt from, and queer cinema is hardly represented at straight fests. These facts make the celebratory nature of queer cinema all the more abundant and apparent. Fans and filmmakers come to encourage and congratulate themselves. They come to relax and see themselves and their stories represented on the big screen in ways that they never have before. They come to feel safety and strength in numbers, and yes, they come to party and mingle and meet new friends and allies.

Also represented in the festival this year was a full spectrum of fact and fantasy film. Issue-based documentaries such as Tori Foster's 533 Statements and Meth by Todd Ahlberg intertwined with lustful comedic love stories such as opening-night's Boy Culture by Q. Allan Brocka and the cleverly satirical Another Gay Movie by Todd Stevens. It seemed that every sexual persuasion was represented in multicultural style. Highlighted this year was a strong collection of Latino Queer film and video, including The Butterflies by Vagner De Almeida, and Night Watch by Edgardo Cozarinsky.

Boy Culture, the sold-out pre-gala movie screened at Isabel Bader theater at the University of Toronto to an excited audience, most of whom stayed after the film to partake in a fun but rather shallow Q and A with it's maker, Q. Allan Brocka. The film, based on the book of the same name written by Matthew Rittenmund, had the audience laughing out loud throughout in spite of the film's flat and clichéd characters and drawn out story line. The world of Boy Culture was an isolated gay world comprised of beautiful rich men whose only concerns revolved around the plots love/sex dichotomy-which, following numerous soft porn sex scenes-was in the end resolved in a fairytale manner. Still, despite its fantasy nature, the movie had its moments- both humorous and enticing- and scenes with lead Derek Magyar were smoking enough to allow one to forget his uninspiring diatribes (AKA "confessions"). Boy Culture was definitely screened to put its audience in the mood for fun, and despite its weaknesses, did. Where Boy Culture existed in a world where little to no consequences were faced, Loving Anabelle by XXX seemed to have nothing but consequences. Taking place in a Catholic School for troubled yet gorgeous girls, a dramatically-scarred soul of an English teacher is pursued by a strong-willed self-identified lesbian student. When at last the teacher gives into her longing for Anabelle, she is caught and arrested and Anabelle faces being sent to a military school by her absent parents.

Over the years, lasting pursuits of the festival have been located in queer rights, activism and community outreach. By screening documentaries such as Meth, which focuses on the rampant and dangerous use of Crystal Meth in the Gay Male party scene, and Little Man, which documents right-to-life issues and surrogate parenting, the fest makes its mark by exposing the realities faced by gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender folks.

Awareness raising is only half the activists battle for the folks running Inside Out. Their commitment to building community and offering opportunities to Queer filmmakers is apparent in the wildly successful Queer Youth Digital Video project. The project uses volunteers from the community to teach basic filmmaking techniques, from storyboarding to shooting to post-production. Teens, once accepted into the program tell their own stories and screen them on the last day of the festival.

So what does a festival successful in both programming, activism and outreach plan to do during it's maturing teen years? Scott Ferguson, the new programmer of Inside Out is again hoping to break down boundaries- this time by opening the fest up to print media. By selecting appropriate artists installations, both in the traditional (painting and drawing, printmaking, photography and sculpture) and experimental (installation, sound, new media) genres, Ferguson hopes to blend expressions in queer culture. At next year's fest, we can also hope to see more artist's experimental video.

So congratulations to Inside Out for its genuine desire to improve the GLTB community through the forces of art. I can only hope that next year's fest will see an increase in the number of large-scale queer productions and film premieres. Inside Out deserves to be recognized within the film community as a powerful, useful and successful case-study of how film fests can encourage and empower communities ignored by large Hollywood studios.

Press contact for Inside Out:

Ingrid Hamilton - h/o: 416-482-6142; c: 416-731-3034 - ingrid@gat.ca