Fairy Tales 22 Launches

Readers of the Calgary Gay History Project know that we are fans of the fabulous queer film fest, Fairy Tales. The annual event produced by the Calgary Queer Arts Society is now in its 22nd iteration. The Festival often takes a special interest in our community’s history and resiliency. That resilience is being tested in 2020 with the global pandemic, yet impressively the Festival has pivoted to offer all of its films online.

{They also have a fun magpie theme for 2020 – very YYC – Join the Digital Flock!}

Check out the entire festival schedule; running from May 14 – 24, 2020. There are 38 films from over 14 countries to see, but here is a list of ones with historical interest.

May 14 at 7:00 PM (tonight). Fairy Tales launches with

Stonewall: Paving The Way For Gay Pride.  Every year in June, the Gay Pride parade is a wild party. It hasn’t always been like this. While 2020 marks the parade’s 50th anniversary, it was originally the first time gays and lesbians walked the streets in New York, claiming publicly to be out, and this procession was intended to commemorate the Stonewall riots that had occurred a year earlier.

May 20 at 7:00 PM

Sex, Sin, and 69. This is a historical, retrospective film about the 1969 legislation to ‘decriminalize’ homosexuality in Canada. Told through contemporary voices including queer academics, historians, activists, educators, artists, and community builders, the film attempts to challenge our understanding of queer history by shining a light on widely adopted misconceptions surrounding decriminalization.

May 22 at 7:00 PM

Button OUT! A short film that is a lively animated personal homage to the filmmaker’s own history of protest and the wider story of the LGBTQ2S+ experiences contained in the collection of over 1200 buttons housed at the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ archives in Toronto.

May 22 at 7:15 PM

Bitter Years. This feature film retraces the life of Mario Mieli, among the founders of the Italian Homosexual Liberation Movement, created at the beginning of the Seventies. Born in 1952 in Milan, Mario killed himself in 1983, before he was 31. He was an activist, an intellectual, a writer, and a performer: a key figure in the Italian cultural panorama at that time.

May 24 at 7:00 PM

Take Me to Prom. This short film traces the evolution of queer acceptance in society by asking a multigenerational selection of people to recount a story from their high school prom. It notably includes Marc Hall, whose 2002 court case over his school’s refusal to allow him to bring a same-sex date to his prom, became a landmark LGBTQ2 rights case in Canada.

{KA}