Cinema Q coming film festival reels in the highlights of edgy queer cinema

Keith Garcia, program manager at the Denver Film Society’s ‘Cinema Q,’ has his eye out for the cutting-edge.

“We all know from watching queer film in the last decade, it’s been increasing in quantity, but not necessarily quality,” Garcia said. “There’s been a lot of films that fit the ‘formula’ – but, in the last three years there’s been a lot that’s new.”

Garcia, who runs the program that promises the Film Society will highlight one LGBT-themed film per month and a full film festival each summer, has been busy choosing the films for the fourth annual Q Film Festival, July 19-22 at the Denver Film Center, 2510 East Colfax Ave.

Garcia said he looks for documentaries on topics that haven’t been covered extensively in the past, for variety within the Festival’s 14-film set – he says festival-goers definitely won’t be watching the same type of movie twice there – and the best of the best new LGBT films of the year.

“That’s not to say I won’t look at a film if it’s a cookie-cutter – or what we call a ‘crowd pleaser,’ but I try not to have too many of them,” he said.

For opening night, it’s Gayby, a film set in New York City about a straight woman who wants a child, and asks her gay best friend to impregnate her.

“They do it the old-fashioned way,” Garcia said. “It’s well-written and really funny.”

The festival will be wrapped up by Cloudburst, a lesbian film starring Olympia Dukakis, in which an aging couple tries to stop one partner’s family from separating the two by putting her in a nursing home. Instead, the two women make a break for it – fleeing to Canada.

In addition to the films and documentaries – one on HIV/AIDS activist organization Act Up, another on trans issues, and more – confirmed guest Christeene Vale, “Kind of a drag terrorist,” Garcia said, will present music videos at a live performance.

Vale is a “singer who does drag a little differently,” Garcia said, “a very unique mix-up of genders – and morals.”

He’s excited about an especially edgy new release, I Want Your Love, a feature film about a young gay man who’s preparing to part with his close friends as he plans to leave their world in San Francisco. The part that’s so controversial about I Want Your Love is the sex – real sex between the actors, all of it taking place on screen.

“It’s not necessarily porn, but looking at intimacy and keeping it on camera,” Garcia said of the feature-length version of an explicit 2010 short. “It’s an examimation of gay intimacy that hasn’t been seen on film in a long time. What makes this film seem more genuine is that there really isn’t a wall.”

Since June 15, Cinema Q has featured Wish Me Away, a documentary about country singer Chely Wright as she came out as the first openly-lesbian artist in her industry. That, and the others in Cinema Q’s lineup, is all to give moviegoers at Denver’s only LGBT film program an opportunity for an experience they wouldn’t get anywhere else.

Garcia said, “People don’t often get a chance to see these films on a big screen.”

More about Cinema Q at http://denverfilm.org