“It is our 35th anniversary, so there’s a lot to celebrate,” Elie Chivi, executive director of Toronto’s Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival tells POV. “The fact that we’re still here to begin with is incredible.”
Inside Out enjoys a milestone year in its journey for holding space for queer cinema. The festival, as Chivi notes, began with plastic chairs and a bedsheet on the wall, continues to elevate queer stories, albeit in cushier surroundings, but also to foster the environment in which LGBTQ+ films are made. This milestone year also arrives amid political turmoil and heightened concerns for LGBTQ+ rights that reiterates its relevance. “Now more than ever” serves as an overused phrase these days, but it proves more appropriate than ever for this particular festival.
This year’s Inside Out kicks off May 23 with the drama Outlerlands, director Elena Oxman’s acclaimed story a San Francisco gig worker juggling jobs, financial precariousness, and thrust-upon parental responsibilities. “Outerlands is a really beautiful story about chosen family and what that looks like for members of the queer community,” says Chivi.
Chivi says that other highlights include the Iranian drama The Crowd, whose production circumstances illustrate the necessity of creating spaces and support networks for queer storytelling. “It’s an incredible story that was shot in secret and speaks to a community of friends who are hosting a going away party for their friend,” says Chivi. “It again speaks to the concept of community and chosen family. The fact that it was shot in secret and smuggled out says a lot about the state in which many members of our community still have to live or how places in the world treat members of our community.”
On the documentary front, Chivi cites Enigma among the festival highlights. The doc by Zackary Drucker, who previously co-directed The Stroll and played a pivotal role in Framing Agnes, screens as the RE:Focus Gala—a spotlight for docs developed through Inside Out’s industry components. “The RE:Focus Fund and the RE:Focus Residence Program were developed a couple of years ago to support removing barriers of access for women, trans, and non-binary filmmakers,” explains Chivi. “That’s post-production grants so that they can finish their work, but also travel grants to the festival.”
Enigma, which screened to great acclaim at Sundance, explores the stories of entertainers April Ashley and Amanda Lear, the parallel journeys in their respective careers, and the public discourse surrounding their identities. “It asks a lot of important questions, but think people will come out of it forming their own assessments of what is the appropriate way of one can lead their life,” adds Chivi. “What I’m most excited about is the conversation we’re going to have afterwards because it does pose some really interesting questions.”
Other documentaries at Inside Out include Speak, the sure-fire crowd-pleaser about students vying in the national public speaking competition. The doc sees a handful of captivating young voices deliver personal stories about coming out experiences, developing their own self-worth, or navigating the politics the genocide in Palestine during a climate of censorship and hostility. Others include Unlabelled, which explores lives within Canada’s trans community, and Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, which chronicles a history of funky beats.
The festival also gets an overdue Toronto premiere for I’m Your Venus, an unofficial follow-up to the groundbreaking queer documentary Paris Is Burning. The film by Kimberley Reed revisits the legacy of ballroom performer Venus Xtravaganza, who was tragically murdered in 1988 during Paris’s production. I’m Your Venus follows members of Venus’s biological family as they fight to have her case reopened and for her true identity to be put on official record.
“I’m Your Venus is like the epilogue to that story [from Paris Is Burning], which contains quite a bit of tragedy,” says Chivi. “But it is the reality and is true to Inside Out’s mandate, which is to showcase our stories on screen, however which way they transpire. Venus’s story is, unfortunately, not rare. As much as we celebrate the genius of Paris Is Burning, the reality is that so many people in that movie, and people whose names we will never really know, have faced really sad tragedies.”
Chivi says that’s another reason that makes films like the aforementioned The Crowd equally significant. “It’s not all sunshine and rainbows for folks in the community, especially now more than ever south of the border. And here politically, it’s very precarious for us.”
Chivi adds that Inside Out feels the chilling threat to LGBTQ+ rights rising back to the surface in the increasingly polarised political climate. With the Trump administration’s war on gender identity and rollback on initiatives to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Inside Out celebrates its 35th anniversary with a strengthened mandate to deliver for the LGBTQ+ community, but also a tougher culture in which to do so.
“It is actively impacting us right now,” Chivi admits. “From a financial perspective, we’ve lost between $150,000 and $175,000 in sponsorship.” Chivi says he can’t directly state cause and effect with certain administrations, but can’t deny the temperature of the water.
“Cuts to DEI are real, especially if you’re a company that is based in the States, but also the economic uncertainty and the overall turmoil does cause people to not want to spend as much money on marketing or sponsorships, especially in the arts. It becomes one of the first things that people cut,” says Chivi.
Beyond finances, though, the effect of rolling back progressive policies, like allowing people to change their gender identities on official documents, has a real impact on the festival and its guests. “We’ve had filmmakers who don’t feel comfortable leaving the States,” shares Chivi. “They don’t know if they’ll be allowed back in or if they’ll have issues of the border, especially if they’re trans and their gender marker on their passport is different than what they were assigned at birth.”
Besides the Trump effect, Chivi can’t deny that Inside Out shares challenges that most, if not all, festivals in Toronto are facing right now. While Inside Out has seemed relatively immune to the financial difficulties when other major festivals like Hot Docs and CONTACT have both lost main sponsors, Chivi says it’s time for the festival to be more transparent to the community it serves. “Box office hasn’t actually returned to pre-pandemic levels of revenue, so we thought we’d maybe give it some time. But five years later, we’re still not quite there,” he says. “Which was one thing on its own if we weren’t also seeing cuts to DEI and seeing people really tightening their belts.”
With the theme of this year’s festival being “unlocking community by unlocking queer film,” Chivi hopes that getting people together in the cinemas, whether for a doc like Enigma or an in-theatre screening of the season finale of Hacks, can remind audiences of the role that Inside Out and queer film play in shaping society.
Part of that recognition extends to the festival’s industry side, which plays a more significant role in shaping and financing these movies than audiences may realise. Besides the Re:Focus Fund, the festival has an Industry Day that’s open to the public. Interested cinephiles and the next generation of filmmakers can network, learn from filmmaker panels, and take in perspectives from many self-made talents. This year’s festival also marks the ninth anniversary of the Finance Forum—the world’s only financing forum for queer film. “We’re really proud of that. But also it’s really sad that we’re the only one,” says Chivi. “We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of submissions, which again speaks to how much there is a need out there for this kind of program.”
Regardless of the climate here or elsewhere, the anniversary year for Inside Out poses a worthy reminder of the queer community’s resilience in the face of adversity. “This festival survived 35 years of uncertainty and progress, but then we’re seeing rights being stripped away. And we will continue moving forward,” says Chivi. “It’s about the community coming together to watch our stories on screen, and nothing’s going to change that.”
Inside Out runs May 23 to June 1 at TIFF Lightbox and online.
