LGBT film festival to draw a diverse crowd

The Southwest’s premier gay and lesbian movie fest is coming to UNM.
Starting today, the Southwest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival enters its eighth year as the only such film festival in New Mexico. Films will be screened at the Southwest Film Center in the SUB, as well as at Guild Cinema and the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

Robert Appicciafoco, the festival director, said more than 70 films are featured. He said has been growing since inception.

“Every year, we’ve been growing, so it’s great to see that support,” he said. “We actually did a teaser in the summer of 2003. It was just a one-shot screening. Then, from that point on, we decided to — three months after that — do our first festival right. After that, we just started doubling the amount of films we were showing and adding more days. So we went from three days to seven days.”

The festival will also feature community-outreach programs to raise awareness of issues faced by the LGBT community, Appicciafoco said.

“We try to do a lot of community outreach as part of our mission. So some of the films we have as documentaries. We’ve been talking to the ACLU. Like with the film “Two Spirits,” which is dealing with a transgender Native American dude who was murdered. The documentary deals with hate crimes, so we’ve been talking with them about partnering up with that film,” he said.

Karen Kever, the festival’s development coordinator, said the festival can benefit the LGBT community and the businesses that sponsor it.

“It brings the community together of all genders and sexual orientations. I think there’s nothing better than teaching people to get along and be together and enjoy each other. This is a really great way of doing that,” she said. “It also makes the community aware of small businesses. It increases their customer base, economically. It’s just for everybody.”
Kever said attending the festival is also a way for college students to expand their worldview.

“Everything in the festival would be great for college students. … We try very hard to get quality movies, and they can increase awareness of things that maybe college students don’t see in their microcosm world,” she said. “The world of a college student, you’ve got kind of a social world there, and I think the movies and crowd that attends these is eye-opening and enjoyable.”

Appicciafoco said the festival will feature several New Mexico-produced films, including “One Square Mile of Earth,” a short animated piece featuring Albuquerque’s own comedy duo, the Pajama Men. He said the festival’s producers scout film festivals for material and also accept online submissions.

“Film festivals, in general, have a certain formula. There’s, you know, the ‘festival circuit.’ Whether it’s a gay and lesbian film festival, a Latino film festival, an international film festival, a lot of those films have crossover potential. We just start scouting. So January kind of starts it all off with Sundance,” he said. “We put up a submission system online. So we start getting a lot of submissions sent to us, and I put together a screening committee early in the Spring and it goes through the Summer screening films because, submission-wise, we probably get close to 400 films.”
The festival has helped expand LGBT culture in Albuquerque, Appicciafoco said.

“Well, one of the things when we first started this back out in 2003 was the fact that there was very little happening in the LGBT community in Albuquerque. Obviously there’s Pride, and a certain level of nightclubs, or whatever, but there wasn’t anything as far as any sort of cultural events geared for the LGBT community,” he said. “That was the intention of starting the festival: bringing a bit more arts and culture into the stream of the Albuquerque community.”