The end of May is traditionally becoming the time to grab some popcorn and gather with friends to check out the annual FairyTales Film Festival, this year running May 26th to June 1st at the Uptown Theatre on 8th Avenue. The festival continues to grow, and this year is no exception with lots of exciting films in this uniquely Canadian event.

Last year saw the Festival expand to seven days, including highly popular and stunning films such as Raspberry Reich, Beautiful Boxer and Mysterious Skin. All the hard work paid off, leading to more opportunities for the 8th year of the event.

“We felt great, it was an amazing success from our perspective because expanding to seven days was a leap of faith and a risk that turned out to be financially self-sustaining. The fact that everything worked out the way we wanted to for a longer festival was a really significant thing for us,” Gordon Sombrowski, FairyTales President for the past two years told GayCalgary.com.

“This year we have received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was a really fantastic thing to happen for the festival because it allows us to focus on things other then just trying to sell tickets to make the festival go. What the grant allows us to do is to focus on the esthetic of queer film and queer expression in the Canadian context. What we have done is we have created a special day on Saturday May 27th. It will be a ’Canadian Freedom of Queer Expression Day‘ which will start with a program of Canadian short films that we have selected from past festivals that we felt reflected queer Canadian esthetic. We will follow that with a panel discussion with four artists who will be focusing specifically on Queer Expression, and after that comes a retrospective screening and an artist talk with Thirza Cuthand who is a Cree filmmaker and artist from Saskatchewan. …We are going to be asking people to look at the Canadian Films throughout the festival to inform themselves about the matter of queer expression in Canada and how it compares to elsewhere in the world. That is a whole new curatorial aspect that we have never had before and are excited to be able to offer to the Calgary artist and film community.”

This years festival is also expecting higher numbers due to the success of Brokeback Mountain which brought gay themed cinema to a major stage.

”This year we have capitalized on the success of Brokeback by having the poster and marketing materials reflect the Brokeback theme. Some of our ads have two cowboys from a Heritage picture on it. We are looking for inspiration from that film in some ways this year. What we think is that the Brokeback experience has opened the genre to all types of people. We are going to see more people taking an interest in the festival than before because they have been exposed to this kind of film on a mainstream level. We think there will be a lot less fear and a lot more interest in seeing other films that tackle similar subject matter.”

Also returning this year is a local short film contest, where local filmmakers submit their own pieces to be shown to festival attendees. This year will also mark more social events at a number of different venues including The Twisted Element, Mango Shiva and Escoba.

“We are very pleased to be able to say that we are oversubscribed for the short film contest, we had eight spots in the program and twelve applicants, so unfortunately not all of the applicants got into doing it this year, which tells us we will have to make it bigger next year. We will see what they come up with and we are looking forward to receiving at least as many if not more of the caliber of what we saw last year.”

The selection and programming committee spends hours watching movies and making choices as to what will finally make it to the 12 feature film spots. How does the festival narrow it down?

”It is really a result of what we get submitted, and as a result you are never quite sure what you are going to get. What we are seeing in this year’s festival is a more mature type of film in terms of the Canadian and International films that we are seeing. The films are looking at things in a less obvious way, and there is a blend of issues that come up in a number of the films that we are going to be showing, so that the issue of being queer isn’t the only thing the festival is about. We have films dealing with issues such as immigrants in a different society, of multi-generation relationships... This year’s films are a little more challenging and open eyes to the many issues that people face, whether they are queer or not.”

Each year it seems that one or two films especially resonate with the audience – in 2004 it was the comedies Eating Out and Latter Days, while the 2005 edition saw people buzzing about Mysterious Skin and Beautiful Boxer. Expect the same this year as Sombrowski has high praise for many of this years films.

”The films we have are pretty impressive. We are opening with Small Town Gay Bar, which is going to be a Canadian premier. It is more a documentary style film dealing with the issues that gay people in small towns in the deep southern USA deal with, and is supposed to be both interesting and quite fun. The Canadian film Whole New Thing (May 27th) is an encore performance that has been picked because of the Queer Canadian Expression theme. It is one of the most amazing films dealing with the subject of a young gay man who develops an attraction for an older man who is his teacher. It is brilliantly handled and one of the best Canadian films I have seen in a long time, and one of the really great films we are going to be showing. Whole New Thing is an extremely well done film and is not controversial in the sense of what happens. It is an extremely intelligent piece of film and I hope people will respond as well to it as people who have already seen it have.”

Another film that will be popular is Eating Out director Allan Brocka’s Boy Culture, which closes the festival on June 1st. Boy Culture is the story of a successful male escort and describes in a series of confessions his tangled romantic relationships with his two roommates and an older, enigmatic male client.

“I think the Audience is also really going to respond to Boy Culture and Allan Brocka’s filmmaking and his ironic understanding of American Culture. That will be a very popular film. One of the other very strong films is Unveiled – a German film about immigration and being queer which is very moving. My bet is those three – Whole New Thing, Unveiled and Boy Culture are going to end up somewhere in the top of the audience selections.”

8th Annual FairyTales Film Festival
May 26th – June 1st, 2006
Uptown Theatre
612 - 8th Avenue SW
www.fairytalesfilmfest.com