Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out

As the second installment of our triptych of roundtables on queer film and video festivals worldwide, we offer here statements by eight critics and scholars from four continents. We gave participants certain trigger questions concerning their professional contexts and histories, their roles and impacts vis-à-vis festivals, and their perceptions of new trends, images, achievements, and challenges in the festival landscape, but most extrapolated their own themes. Accordingly, we are offering GLQ readers their comments in sequence as autonomous texts, which are wonderfully diverse, as befits the personalities, politics, cultures, and settings in play. As we discovered in the first curators' roundtable, queer festivals encourage multitasking, and the existence of the pure critic/scholar who has not tried curating or film/video making is as rare as the curator who has not directed a film or written film criticism (though both animals do exist, of course). That said, some of our contributors lean more toward the scholarly, grappling with historical and theoretical issues, while others tend to the curatorial, sharing their scarcely contained critical excitement—or despair—at new works and artists discovered in the here and now. In the next volume of GLQ, we will present the final roundtable in this series, and we invite artists who have reached their audiences through LGBTQ festivals—or who have chosen not to do so—and have lived to tell the tale to contact us and contribute an account of their experiences.