Well, that was fun! A lot of movies seen, a lot lovely people met! The VQFF never disappoints. Let’s recap, shall we?
Number of films seen: 17. I’d originally planned 19, but decided to skip In-between Days and She Said Boom at the last minute.
Number of night I did not see a film: Just one: Saturday, August 17.
Length of time between the end of the festival and my last review: 20 days. Oy. In the past I’ve always been able to post reviews a day or two after each movie. This year it didn’t work out so well due to my being insanely busy right at the wrong time, and thus having little energy for blogging. To be honest that stressed me out more than it should have, and for the first time made me see writing reviews as something of a chore. That’s no good. I’ll need to plan things out better next year.
Favourite feature film: a tie between Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish and G.B.F. The former is a deep and touching tale of identity and transformation with mythological callbacks; the latter is a pants-wettingly hilarious comedy that gleefully plays with every high school and coming-out cliché in the book.
Favourite short film: Kimchi Fried Dumplings. Honourable mentions go to Bill is a Photographer and Bill Please! (also from The Coast is Queer), as well as all those amazing porn films of yesteryear.
Least favourite film: I Do. It looked good on paper, but the execution just didn’t work. On the bright side, it did convince me to go to International Village and watch In The Name Of… and Bwakaw, so that worked out all right.
Movies I would have liked to see but didn’t: R/EVOLVE, The Outs, Head of the Class and Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf?
Percentage of subtitled films I saw: not counting shorts, 69.23% or 9 / 13. Interesting. I didn’t even notice it until a couple days into the festival when it hit me that all the films I’d seen were subtitled, the first English-language feature film being Camp Beaverton on Wednesday. (Actually, Hors les murs / Beyond the Walls was missing subtitles for the first 10 minutes or so due to a technical snafu. I speak French so I didn’t mind too much.) It’s a nice reminder that queerness is not just a North American thing, and cultures all over the world have something to say on sexuality, gender and identity.