I’ve been blessed to be making a living following my passions for film and social justice advocacy in my hometown of Kingston, Ontario as the executive director of the Reelout Arts Project. Representation, Respect, Inclusivity, and Education are pillars of my practice as an artist and as an advocate. Over the past 22 years, Reelout has given audiences a chance to see under-represented communities in the spotlight; it has also raised challenging dialogue amongst the LGBTQ+ communities and the larger community. People are always surprised to learn that Kingston has sustained a large-scale queer film festival all these years. Here are my top five reasons why Kingston’s Reelout Queer Film Festival continues to dazzle.
The 22nd annual Reelout Queer Film Festival kicks off with our Reelout/Three Things Consulting Opening Selection films…
Posted by Reelout Queer Film + Video Festival on Monday, January 11, 2021
1. Local Business
Reelout’s sponsors are all locally owned businesses, many of which have supported the festival since its inception back in 1999. Even our current presenting sponsors are locally owned: Three Things Consulting and the Queen’s Positive Space program (through the Queen’s Human Rights Office). Our loyal family of sponsors and advertisers includes Novel Idea, The Optical Factory, HARS, Luce Hair Studio, Tir Nan Og, Shiva’s Delights, Sarah MacInnis Real Estate Team, Annie Clifford Barrister & Solicitor, and The Grand Theatre, just to name a few.
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2. Collaboration and Inclusivity
Reelout collaborates with Kingston City Hall, Tourism Kingston, Kingston Film Office, Downtown Kingston BIA, Queen’s University, and other arts and service organizations in many ways. The most important connection for all parties is to promote inclusivity. We all share the desire to reach out and acknowledge our region’s diverse populations; Reelout’s mission is to serve audiences focusing on films focused on age, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and health. We all recognize that together we can achieve social progress by learning from our history and building a future that is inclusive and conscientious of its privilege. Kingston’s cultural communities and institutions work stronger in tandem and it shows.
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3. Volunteerism
For the 2021 festival, Reelout received seven times our usual number of submissions, with roughly 1020 titles submitted between May and September. The festival is programmed by a committee of 12 local volunteers who represent a microcosm of our diverse audiences. It was their daunting task to review all the submissions and then make their official selections. Our board of directors includes artists, business owners, administrators, health care workers, and students and we have roughly 40 volunteers (who we’ll miss in 2021) many of whom return year after year to help put smiles on faces.
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4. The Films
In 2021, we ended up with 68 films from 18 different countries. It is important that our festival represent the vast diversity of the LGBTQ+ communities but also that the films themselves include a wide variety of styles and genres. One of my favorite highlights for this year would be the shorts program, She’s Realing Out: Documentary Shorts by Women. It features some intimate, experimental storytelling but also more traditional-style documentary shorts, including Sarah Wylie’s The Garden Collective, about formerly incarcerated women of the Prison for Women Memorial Collective as they work to build a memorial garden on the grounds of the former prison in Kingston, Ontario.
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5. Good Vibrations
It’s no accident that the festival reels out in the dead of winter. Yes, the weather at the end of January/early February can be frightful; we’ve felt it was important to create a space that promotes good vibrations during the darkest period in many of our lives annually. Film has a transformative power to help us escape from our troubles or even just the cold, grey environment around us. We take pride in our welcoming, inclusive environment and we know that many friendships and relationships have been sparked at our festival. We know that kindling that type of community will be difficult this year, but we are busy at work creating virtual chat spaces that will go online after several of our programs so that people can connect and chat about the movies they’ve just watched. Now more than ever, Reelout wants to give our audiences a reason to smile and to add some warmth to their hearts.
To view all films playing at Reelout 2021, please visit their website.
