The Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, or GSRC, is hosting their annual Q-Fest film festival at UW-Eau Claire to share films from around the world with the campus and the community.
Q-Fest is an annual film festival curated by the GSRC. A group of students attend Frameline, the world’s oldest LGBTQ+ film festival, to bring a curated list of films back to UW-Eau Claire.
According to Emily Luebke, student services coordinator for the GSRC, nine students traveled to San Francisco for two weeks this past June for Q-Fest. Each viewed and took notes on 25 films to potentially bring back to campus.
The rest of the summer was spent organizing the final list of films. Each member of the student cohort presented the films they viewed and the entire cohort whittled the list down to the top 20 films.
Makayla Rhodes, a third-year psychology and sociology student and one of the members of the student cohort, said the process involved a lot of heartbreak when the cohort had to let go of some of the films.
“After watching at least 40 films there, we all sit down and give a brief overview of what we thought of the movie and if we believed it would fit well with the community here on campus. This, of course, comes with varying opinions and compromises. Some films were amazing but unfortunately, we just have room for the ones we feature,” Rhodes said.
The films the cohort chose will be showcased from Oct. 15-19 in The Davies Center Woodland Theater. The entire film schedule with times is located on Q-Fest’s website.
“It’s really just an opportunity to show our students LGBTQ+ representations in films,” Luebke said.
One film being played is “Outcry: Alchemist of Rage,” a short film following Whitney Bradshaw as they traveled around the country and interviewed people after Roe. vs Wade was overturned. The film will be shown at 12 p.m. on Oct. 18 and Bradshaw will be attending the viewing and hosting a Q&A afterward with viewers.
Along with the films, the student cohort has put together student presentations to share their experiences planning Q-Fest and attending Frameline.
According to the website, the student presentations are set to cover topics like the creation of queer spaces, queer elders and the gentrification of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The film line up has more documentaries than previous years according to Luebke. The films shown at Frameline are from around the world and the student cohort wanted to share stories of a variety of people.
“In mainstream media, there is a very limited idea of what being an LGBTQ+ person looks like, and it also can kind of be the same two or three storylines,” Luebke said. “What we try to do is, through the films that we see, share those important stories but make sure that we also include as much representation as we can.”
According to Rhodes, the films this year are not straightforward and the cohort hopes viewers will gain new insights into the queer community.
“Since Frameline’s theme this year was intersectional, we managed to get a ton of vastly different cultural movies as well as different religions and different topics that I personally haven’t seen before,” Rhodes said.
To learn more about Q-Fest and find their schedule, check out their website or stop into The Bridge in Davies.
Fisher can be reached at [email protected].
