Queer, still here, and living with no fear
Trans teens push to play their way in festival’s featured Youth Gala documentary
It’s so important for us to have youth-focused programming.
Anoushka Ratnarajah, film festival artistic director
This year’s theme for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival (VQFF) is, rather fittingly, Still Here, and interestingly it wasn’t chosen because of any COVID-19-related realities.
It seems long before March, when the pandemic pulled the curtains on our regular lives, VQFF artistic director Anoushka Ratnarajah had noticed the films she was looking at for inclusion into the programming for the Aug. 13-23 VQFF had common threads.
“The idea was pre-COVID,” Ratnarajah said in a recent phone interview.
“The films that I was seeing were really all exploring transformation, resilience and survival. Those themes were echoing throughout all of the work I was seeing from all over the world. I really was feeling queer filmmakers were determined to depict the ways in which our lives are worth living, worth fighting for, worth celebrating, worth mourning and really making a statement that we are still here and we’re surviving and in some cases thriving.”
The idea of thriving is crystal clear in the festival’s wonderful Youth Gala film Changing the Game (streaming Aug. 15, 5 p.m.). The film, which follows the lives of three American, teenage trans athletes, is the headliner for another year of strong, essential youth-focused programming for VQFF.
“It’s so important for us to have youth-focused programming and for us to reach out to young queer trans and twospirit people because for many of us who are older we never saw ourselves on screen when we were young people,” said Ratnarajah.
Thankfully through programming at festivals like this they are given many chances to see protagonists that reflect their desires, their interests and their identities.
The young athletes in Changing the Game are those types of protagonists.
Their stories are inspirational and not just for the kids who are athletically inclined.
These kids (Mack Beggs, Sarah Rose Huckman, Andraya Yearwood) are voices in the larger conversation on gender and sexuality.
Changing the Game was directed by Los Angeles filmmaker Michael Barnett, who decided he needed to educate himself about trans issues when close friends told him their own young child was going to be transitioning.
“When they were leaning into me for love and support I felt an immediate need to do better, to educate more without the intention of making a movie, but then when I ran into Mack’s story the filmmaker in me also was here; he is a really captivating young man whose story deserves to be shared,” said Barnett.
Through Beggs’s story, Barnett discovered more trans youth athletes who were fighting for inclusion.
Huckman, a cross-country skiing competitor in New Hampshire, is a typical teen — she likes “makeup, shoes, the whole shebang you see on reality TV,” but she also says the main thing she wants to acquire are equal rights. “Being transgender is not a choice,” Huckman says in the film. “I knew from the very beginning I was a girl.”
The three kids focused on in this film are in states with varying guidelines for trans youth in sports
“We really wanted to show the confusion when it comes to policy or law in regards to trans youth being included in sports,” said Barnett. “It is a real mess. We have no leadership from the federal level.”
Beggs and Yearwood are still figuring out what their personal fight means to the bigger picture of inclusivity.
Yearwood questions the idea that she is accepted as a girl all day at school but after school when she runs track there are those who expect her to be a boy.
Beggs says: “I do train as hard as a man. I fight as hard as a man. I am a man and I am the state champ of female high school wrestling.”
This year, 60-plus films from 10 countries will be showcased at the VQFF.
The Centrepiece Gala Film (Aug. 19, 7 p.m.) is Lingua Franca, about a trans Filipina migrant in Donald Trump’s America. B.C. talent is once again celebrated in The Coast is Queer programming. Nine short films will screen Aug. 15 at 7 p.m.