This month the Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival will celebrate its 16th year of bringing queer cinema to the people of Calgary. This venerable city institution has more than two dozen films and shorts on its bill this year, spread across seven days of events.

For those of you who can’t wait for the festivities to start, our conversation with the festival’s Executive Director James Demers will have to tide you over.

Demers was hired on three years ago as the outreach and volunteer coordinator for the Fairy Tales Presentation Society. Since then, his role has shifted, first to programmer, and then to executive director, taking the helm of not only Fairy Tales, but the society’s other media projects as well. This includes the Outreels Diversity Education Program, the Youth Queer Media Project, and Q the Cultural Arts Festival. It was a de facto role in any case, made de jury by a change in title.

"I ran all of them anyway," Demers says, "so we expanded the title to acknowledge that."

GC: Which of this year’s films have you the most excited?

JD: I’m really excited about our retro films. But I’m a Cheerleader  ; we actually have the original-original 35mm film  — the director’s cut... Kidnapped for Christ and Valentine Road are both extremely strong features that I think will have a political impact.... Reaching for the Moon, our opening feature, probably has the best cinematography I’ve seen in any film in years. It’s beautiful.

GC: On your website, the acronym you have listed for the queer community is "LGBTTQIA". Which of the letters in there do you feel has gotten the most representation in film over the years you have been involved with Fairy Tales?

JD: I would say classically, a couple of years ago, it was definitely gay male film. It’s the most produced, and they usually have been produced for the longest, so they usually have higher production values and more experienced directors. However, lesbian film has really picked up in the last couple of years, and we have made a conscious decision as [programmers] to show a film for our lesbian audience and our gay male audience on both opening and closing nights simultaneously, and that’s really successful.

GC: Have you seen any other changes?

JD: We’ve actually had a reasonable amount of transgender content in the last couple of years. A lot of international trans content; so Germany, Israel, etcetera. And the trans film that we have this year, which is called Boy Meets Girl, is a step up from a lot of trans films. Boy Meets Girl is not a coming out story, and it’s not the main character’s transition. It’s actually about the love story, which is really nice, because the shock value of the transition is something that, in the trans community, you hear over and over and over. So it’s nice to have a film that is actually this really sweet love story, where the character happens to be transgendered, and you just move into the story.

Also, with trans people, the popular narrative is that trans men are usually presented pre- or right at the beginning of transition, and trans women are frequently depicted near the end of transition or around gender reassignment surgery. ... This film does the opposite. It actually breaks the stereotype, so that’s really exciting for us. Transition stories, coming-out stories, for trans people are really important, in the media, but we’ve kind of done them to death. We need to move into our actual lives now. Kind of like the gay community 15, 20 years ago.

GC: How about that B in the middle?

JD: The festival has always contained a reasonable amount of bisexual content, but there’s controversy there, right, because who the character ends up with, often people assume that that’s their true sexual orientation... The idea of falling in love on the bisexual spectrum should be relatively free of who you end up with determines what you are, so I think the bisexual content at a queer film festival is inherent, but unspoken, and that is something I would like to see improve in the next couple of years. We just haven’t had the solid content come out yet to program.

GC: Tell us about the criteria you use to select a film. What makes a particular movie queer enough for Fairy Tales?

JD: Production quality is a big one. Things that anybody looks for in a film: good acting, is the story good, what is the narrative. Then we check for things like if it’s representing a community that is typically stereotyped. How is it handled? Are the stereotypes tongue-in-cheek, are they offensive, are they challenging anything stereotypical? What is the intent behind the use of the stereotype in the film?

Is it gay enough? is certainly a content question. We have definitely had films where the protagonist is not gay, and it’s the community of queer people around them that make the story, and in that case, that makes perfect sense — it’s progress. But it definitely has to be gay enough.

GC: Queer film tends to be more sexually explicit than its straight counterpart. Is that something that you feel is important in terms of representing and validating queer identities?

JD: I think sex in queer film is expected, the same way it is expected in an action movie in a straight theatre. And the fact that it’s gay sex is what has always messed with ratings boards. I mean, you look at Brokeback Mountain, and there is maybe 30 seconds of what you could classify as gay sex in that entire film, and an 18A rating? Whereas Rambo or Die Hard, it’s 14A, and hundreds of people slaughtered on screen. So I think our concepts in North America, frankly, about what is appropriate with sexuality are really messed up... I think it’s important to be able to show gay sex, honestly. I think it is still a revolutionary concept.

GC: What is one of your favourite memories from your time on the festival’s staff?

JD: In 2011 we had an Israeli and a German and an American film director all in at the same time. And so the German guy and the Israeli guy had never been to Canada, and they wanted to go to Banff. But they kept calling the Rocky Mountains the Brokeback Mountains because all they knew about Alberta was that Brokeback Mountain was filmed here, and they wanted to go to the set. Tourism Alberta would shit themselves, right? ... They saw it as like this bastion of gay film, because we’d had one movie done here that became a commercial production.