Regina’s annual 2SLGBTQ+ film and art festival unpacks its suitcase
Art | Stephen Whitworth
Queer City Cinema
Multiple Venues
Sept. 12–14
The first thing you see when you go to Queer City Cinema’s website is a hallway in deep perspective, filled with a row of classical marble statues that recede into darkness. Splashed across that photograph is the word “Journey”, the letters built from a picture of trees darkened against a pink and purple sunset.
The juxtaposition conjures some of the dualities — art and nature, movement and stasis, past and present, and more — within this year’s theme: Journey.
“The photos were taken when I toured films to Europe,” says Gary Varro, Queer City Cinemas’ artistic director and longtime mastermind.
“The neoclassical statue one is, maybe, about the non-queer world that we queers journey through,” says Varro. “It’s statues of conventional bodies, and also neoclassical, right? There’s kind of a rigidness to it. And then there’s this dark square at the end — it just veers into infinity.
“And then the other one is a bit more about spirituality, and nature, and beauty, and maybe fluidity of identity, I guess you could say, because it’s abstract — it’s recognizably trees but there’s a sunset and all that kind of stuff,” says Varro.
“It links two opposing aesthetics — one is man-made and one is natural.”
Queer City Cinema doesn’t have the Regina Folk Festival or Cathedral Village Arts Festival’s high profile, but it has nevertheless been essential since 1997. While other arts events tend to have a range of work that leans toward crowd-pleasing (this is not a criticism), Queer City Cinema focuses on stranger, weirder and more challenging programing.
QCC is the sharp corner in Regina’s cultural scene. A city needs those. They stir the stew.
“[Queer City Cinema] does have entertaining qualities to it, but I like to think it’s an intelligent festival where the selections are made based on artistic rigour,” says Varro. “There are still silly and fun things included which anybody’s going to like, but it’s also tempered with things that are mostly experimental and unusual, sometimes challenging and very abstract.”
“Some people might find it not entertaining, but that’s not what Queer City Cinema’s ever set out to do. It was meant to stimulate and provoke, and all those sorts of things about thinking and thought,” Varro says.
As is tradition, this year’s Queer City Cinema combines the original film fest with the Performatorium festival of queer performance art. Events are organized into numbered “journeys” that include four film screenings at the RPL film theatre, workshops and roundtables, and two performances.
As for performance: U.S.-based artist and vocalist Dorian Wood performs Musa Cerdota [“Pig Muse”] — described as “a multisensory fever dream” and an “exorcism” — tonight at the Dunlop Art Gallery at 8 p.m. On Saturday, the festival wraps up with Greensboro, North Carolina-born Derrick Woods-Morrow’s multimedia piece I Believe in the Future of ‘Small Countries’. It’s also at 8 p.m. at the Dunlop.
Film screenings continue today and tomorrow at the RPL.
“Actually, the theme came out of watching one of the films,” says Varro. “I was watching it and went, “Journey”. Because it was very much about a journey, physically and otherwise. And I looked at all the other films, and I went, ‘you know Journey is very applicable to almost anything, really’.
“A queer journey is different than a non-queer journey,” Varro adds. “There are certain bumps in the road, and potholes, and avalanches, and rockslides — things non-queers don’t have to endure as part of their existence. [Journey] means a lot of things for different people, depending on your identity. Clearly people who are BIPOC or trans have an added layer of navigation.”
And that’s part of why Journey is a fitting theme, concludes Varro.
“In fact, I almost like it as a title for the festival going forward because it’s so applicable,” he says. “I mean, even the festival being nearly 30 years old, and it’s my journey. I didn’t get into that too much at all, really, in the text, right? But I could have. I could have talked about my journey with the festival, and how it’s… you know, it’s been a lifelong thing.”