After 30 years, Image + Nation is going strong
Festival helps foster community and identity, Richard Burnett says.
For generations, queer filmgoers were starved to see positive images and stories of themselves up on the silver screen. We were tired of being a Hollywood punchline, of seeing ourselves portrayed as sexual predators and killers in countless films.
In Montreal, the unthinkable finally happened when Image + Nation — Canada’s first LGBTQ film festival — was founded in 1988, 12 years after the Toronto International Film Festival was established in 1976, and 17 years after the Festival du nouveau cinéma was created in 1971. At last we had our own film festival.
This year Image + Nation celebrates its 30th anniversary. That it has survived this long — not just in the face of homophobia and transphobia, but competing with boundless queer offerings in our digital age — is nothing short of miraculous.
Back in the ’80s, though, at the height of AIDS hysteria, miracles were exactly what queer people hoped for, in an era characterized by a September 1982 Gazette headline that dubbed AIDS the “gay plague.”
Image + Nation came of age during the crucible years of Montreal LGBTQ activism, after gay activist Joe Rose was stabbed to death on an STM public bus on March 19, 1989, just because he had pink hair; after Montreal hosted the landmark Fifth International Conference on AIDS in June 1989, when activists stormed the opening plenary session; and when LGBTQ activists fought back after Montreal police violently raided the Sex Garage party in the early hours of Sunday, July 15, 1990 — a moment widely considered to be “Montreal’s Stonewall.”
Many of the early films and activist videos screened at Image + Nation dealt with resistance, liberation, AIDS and HIV. During this preinternet era, though, it was difficult for festival organizers to find films and videos to present until an LGBTQ festival circuit began in the early ’90s, which coincided with the indie “New Queer Cinema” movement. Filmgoers knew we had truly arrived when the smash hit lesbian film Go Fish opened Image + Nation in 1994, and Famous Players came on board as a festival sponsor in 1997.
With my mom, I remember attending a sold-out Image + Nation screening at the Imperial Cinema of The Celluloid Closet, the 1995 documentary based on the landmark 1981 book by film historian Vito Russo that documents the generally homophobic and transphobic portrayal of queer characters on film over the past century.
After Russo died of AIDSrelated complications in 1990, LGBTQ activists continued his work, protesting everything from the “lost kiss” of the 1993 AIDS courtroom drama Philadelphia (actor Antonio Banderas said on Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio that he offered to kiss Tom Hanks on film, but Hanks declined), to the historically inaccurate 2015 drama Stonewall — filmed in Montreal — which depicts a cisgender white male throwing the first brick at the now-iconic Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village (the first-ever Pride marches in 1970 marked the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969).
But these films were not made for queer filmgoers. They were made for mainstream audiences.
Which is why the LGBTQ film festival circuit remains important. Image + Nation’s influence has been significant, especially here at home where current festival director Charlie Boudreau and programming director Katharine Setzer continue to program films created by and for queer people.
By the time I sat on the Image + Nation film jury in 2016 — alongside Roisín Geraghty of Dublin’s GAZE International LGBT Film Festival, and Kevin Stea, Madonna’s legendary backup dancer — the LGBTQ film circuit had greatly matured. Today, filmmakers reach global audiences without studio restrictions or even the support of film festivals like Image + Nation.
Yet three decades after the launch of Image + Nation, I believe seeing ourselves on the silver screen still helps foster community and identity. After all these years, there is still power in gathering together in a dark cinema.