Inside Out film festival celebrates 10th annual screening
From Nov. 11 to 13, the National Gallery of Canada played host to Inside Out’s 10th annual Ottawa LGBTQ+ Film Festival.
Inside Out is a non-profit charity, whose main objective is to challenge the stereotypes perpetuated about the LGBTQ+ community by promoting and enabling the production of queer cinema and videography.
With this goal in mind, Inside Out offers diverse workshops about films and screenings at events such as the Rainbow Youth Forum, the More Play Screening initiative, and different LGBTQ+ themed film festivals in cities like Ottawa and Toronto.
The 2016 Ottawa edition of this festival featured 13 full-length productions, as well as a collection of eight short films hailing from across the globe.
These entries include the French film Being 17, which explores the struggles faced by two adolescent boys in the realms of love, desire, loss, and self-discovery.
Hailing from Argentina comes Papu Curotto’s Esteros, where two childhood friends reunited at random are faced with the difficulty of confronting their past and the repercussions that come along with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_osXosA30yE
Carly Usdin’s Suicide Kale served as an impressive entry from the United States, thanks to its ability to comically depict a lunch between friends where Murphy’s Law makes an appearance.
Andrew Murphy, Inside Out’s director of programming, shared that the visibility and accessibility of alternative media is integral to the development of this community.
“It empowers voices that are underrepresented, allowing them to tell their stories.”
Brittani Nichols, one of the stars of Suicide Kale pointed out the struggles of queer artists in the film industry.
“Often, when content creators are gay, the heteronormative nature of our society expects the story to be about being gay when, in reality, the story doesn’t have to be about singularly being gay,” she shared.
“It is important to encourage telling the story that they want to tell (and) let their identity fill it in and give it more texture, therefore allowing it to broaden what would traditionally be LGBTQ+ content.”
Inside Out will be returning to Ottawa next year, and they are currently accepting submissions for their 2017 film festival in Toronto.
For more information or to adopt a film, you can visit Inside Out’s official website.
