Reel Pride film fest set to celebrate 35 years

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This article was published 13/10/2020 (1800 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the oldest queer film festivals anywhere, Reel Pride is celebrating its 35th anniversary of the founding of the Winnipeg Gay and Lesbian Film Society this year. And a little thing like a pandemic isn’t going to stop it.

But like many festivals facing this particular crisis, it is going online, with a selection of 23 films that span from local/contemporary (Madison Thomas’s feature Ruthless Souls) to venerable European groundbreakers (the 1974 Dutch film A Very Natural Thing) with numerous, decades-spanning docs in between, such as the 1992 National Film Board documentary Forbidden Love and the recent Sex, Sin & 69 (2019), a look at how homosexuality was de-criminalized in Canada in the year 1969.

Festival programmer Derek Bowman says the selections reflect the diversity of a very diverse audience, interested in both classics and new discoveries, such as the documentary Pier Kids (2019), about homeless queer and trans youth living on the Christopher Street Pier in New York City.

Bowman, who works in the library system by day, is a cinephile who just joined the programming committee this year.

“And I’m delighted to be doing this right now,” he says.

The planning of the festival followed in the footsteps of this past summer’s Gimli Film Festival in its approach of assembling films and presenting them with different levels of availability. Most of the films are geo-blocked to Manitoba only, while the selection of short films and a program of queer-targeted commercials will be accessible across the country.

“(Gimli) is like our sister film festival,” says Bowman, 40. “With the films themselves, I don’t think the process of gathering them was any different really than any other year. It’s just that formatting them into an entirely virtual event with something else. And it’s going very well. All of the films would be available for the duration of the festival starting at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct.13 going to about 11 p.m. on Sunday, Oct.18.”

Getting to help program the films has been a joy in an otherwise grim year, he says.

“It’s a nice time away from watching what’s going on — the daily inundation of some of the news we’ve been getting,” he says, adding that having an all-encompassing taste for cinema was helpful in choosing films such as Forbidden Love, which looks at the pulp fiction sub-culture of lesbian life centred in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s.

“Even though I’m a queer man, I quite like lesbian pulp novels, so that’s a personal favourite of mine,” he says.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing