JAMES DEMERS
When the Fairy Tales Film Festival was first held at The Garry Theatre (now The Ironwood) 20 years ago, legal gay marriage seemed an almost-impossible dream and the AIDS crisis was still a painfully fresh memory. The LGBTQ-focused film fest has faced protests and received plenty of ignorant hate mail in the two decades since, but it has also become a much-anticipated event on Calgary’s cultural calendar. And it’s grown into the third-largest LGBTQ film festival in the country. Lisa Wilton spoke with Calgary Queer Arts Society executive director and Fairy Tales programmer James Demers about the festival’s 20th anniversary.
This year’s festival opens with the Calgary
Queer Arts Society-produced Outliers: Calgary’s Queer History, which is the first historical documentary about the city’s LGBTQ community. How difficult was it to research that information and track down the people and history of Calgary’s gay community?
Kevin Allen (lead researcher of the Calgary Gay History Project) is one of the founders of Fairy Tales, which is super convenient. He came on board and provided us with the research background, and then we hired a historical researcher and they sort of went to town. Finding information is very indicative of the era. People were incredibly closeted in the ’60s. They weren’t making bar posters and flyers and pamphlets, because you didn’t do that when it was illegal. Those clandestine elements have been hard to track down. Of course, the AIDS crisis took a lot of the early activists, so it was challenging to find people. But we did find people from every era, which was really inspiring.
How do you ensure the festival is inclusive and intersectional?
We have a unique structure compared to a lot of festivals in the city, and that’s not shade. I work with all those festivals and they’re lovely. But we’re dealing with LGBTQ identity, which is complex and ever-evolving. We run a civilian programming committee for six months and the purpose of it is to get a diversity of voices. We want to program with an eye to who is being represented and who is being left out, and what kind of stories are we seeing and what is the quality of the stories, and how do we handle stereotypes? It’s fairly extensive.
What are the 20th-anniversary highlights?
Well, we made a movie (laughs). But we’re also doing an entire night of Indigenous and queer identity in Canadian art called Kinship and Kindness. We’ve brought in a bunch of artists to do a panel afterwards. We’re also doing a Rent singalong on May 31 in partnership with The Men’s Chorus. We encourage people to come to sing, so it’s just going to be a High School Musical disaster, but super fun. This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed for length. Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival: Friday, May 25 to Saturday, June 2 at Plaza Theatre, 1133 Kensington Rd. N.W. Full festival, $90; single films, $10 - $14. calgaryqueerartssociety.com.