Tag Archives: CUFF

The 18th Annual Calgary Underground Film Festival opens tomorrow. Movie-lovers will be able to stream the bulk of films over ten days from April 23rd-May 2nd followed by three days of drive-ins from June 3rd-5th, 2021. CUFF is featuring a queer history documentary that Calgary Gay History fans might want to note: Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story.

This film, this artist, this music, this story: all rare gems…see this film.”

—Film Threat

Keyboard Fantasies is about Glenn Copeland, a black transgender musician, who emerges from years of isolation to find a dedicated and enthusiastic audience. Attending McGill University in the 1960s as one of the only black students, and one of the only gay students, Beverly Glenn-Copeland was a gentle trailblazer out of sheer necessity. 

Later, in 1986, Glenn-Copeland was sci-fi obsessed and living in isolation in Huntsville, Ontario. Glenn wrote and self-released “Keyboard Fantasies.” The album was recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio; the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realized far before its time. Three decades on, the musician—now Glenn Copeland—began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered. Courtesy of a rare-record collector in Japan, Glenn’s music finally finds its audience in the 21st Century. Debut feature film director, Posy Dixon, one of these fans, developed a close friendship with Glenn over Skype. The film is a love letter to the album and the artist.

Keyboard Fantasies won an Audience Favourite Award at HotDocs 2020 and will be streamed on-demand as part of CUFF from April 23rd-May 2nd (Alberta audiences only).

{KA}