Chicago’s Reeling fest: The second-oldest LGBTQ+ film showcase in America looks to a new era

CHICAGO — In April 1981, a year before “Making Love” and “Personal Best” ventured, cautiously, into the realm of mainstream studio dramas involving queer and bisexual characters, Chicago Filmmakers executive director Brenda Webb launched a festival known as Reeling.

By most accounts, it’s the second-oldest LGBTQ+ film festival in the U.S., after San Francisco’s, which began in 1977. At that time, Webb says, “mainstream films portrayed homosexuality in either a negative or basically pathetic light. Everyone was a victim. You always knew the gay character was going to die. The stereotypical impression was of the men as fairies and the women as predatory dykes. You know. Not a very pretty picture.”

In the intervening two generations of history, reflected by our movie history, queer representation on screens large and small has gradually broadened into a much more expansive canvas. The Reeling festival’s features programmer Morgan Jon Fox, whose own debut film “Blue Citrus Hearts” won the award for best feature at Reeling 20 years ago, sees lots of reasons for hope. “The teenager today looking to find themselves represented in the movies — there’s a film for almost everyone,” he says. Comedies. Tragedies. Horror films. Stories about every definition of family out there.

Reeling 2023 opens Sept. 21 with “The Mattachine Family,” about a gay couple played by Wilmette native Nico Tortorella and Juan Pablo Di Pace navigating uncertain emotional waters after giving up their foster child to the boy’s birth mother. Emily Hampshire of “Schitt’s Creek” co-stars.

I spoke to Webb and Fox in the Chicago Filmmakers complex, housed in a nifty renovated fire station on the North Side. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Fox: Growing up in Memphis I worked at Blockbuster when I was 17, 18. I remember stocking the shelves, this desperately closeted kid, reading the backs of the cassette boxes, looking for anything that might potentially indicate a gay film. I usually started with the foreign section (laughs). And then I found André Téchiné’s “Wild Reeds,” which was about a group of friends, and one of the characters is coming to terms with being gay. I remember taking the video home and watching it. And that was my moment. I knew who I was, and I decided to make films.

Around that time I hadn’t seen any American films that spoke to me, I guess. “Will & Grace” was on TV (starting in 1998), and I knew about the film “Philadelphia” (with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington) but I shied away from it. Back then, it was a more deliberate and public act to watch something. If I was sitting down with my family and there was anything remotely gay on TV, I’d be off and playing in the yard.

Webb: I’ve heard from so many people over the years who came to our film festival and it turned to be their first real act of coming out. Conversely I’ve heard from people who never came to Reeling because they were afraid to be there. Or from straight people who just felt uncomfortable with it.

The roots of Chicago Filmmakers and Reeling are in experimental film, and that’s really what turned me on. The first year we showed films by Kenneth Anger, James Broughton, Barbara Hammer. The American avant-garde cinema then had a highly proportionate number of lesbian and gay filmmakers doing great work. Reeling really started with me asking the question: Does Chicago’s gay community know about this work? Those movies had a following in experimental and academic circles, but the challenge was to connect with the larger LGBTQ+ community. And then we had a big success that first year, with all kinds of films. We called it the “first annual” festival in sort of a joking way, since we didn’t know if there’d be a second.

In the ‘80s, we had a hard time getting some films for our festival, even though they were queer-themed, because the distributor didn’t want to frame the movie as a gay film, with the thinking that straight people wouldn’t come to see it. When I used to go to film festivals to scout films, like Berlin, I’d end up seeing a lot of them just on guesswork based on the program descriptions. “… and then he finds something out about himself,” you know (laughs).

Fox: In not too many years, really, queer films have gone from stories defined by the pain of being who you are — whether that’s from oppression or fear or internal strife — to embracing so much more. That’s the power of this year’s Reeling; we’re getting into genres we did not see before. It’s everything from “Ganymede,” which is a U.S. premiere from Chicago-based Colby Holt and Sam Probst, real Gothic horror stuff, to “T Blockers.” That one’s the third feature from an 18-year-old Australian trans filmmaker, Alice Maio Mackay, about a teenager and her trans friends fighting off this zombie horde that’s literally spreading bigotry. Very scrappy, not polished, but incredible.

Phillips: Brenda, can you remember your first time as a young moviegoer you saw something that you couldn’t not read as gay?

Webb: It’s not really considered a queer film, but “Becket” with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. It came out in 1964, and there’s a moment in that film, which to me is really an epic love story between two men, where O’Toole as King Henry II tells his friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Burton): “I would’ve given away my life for you. Only I loved you, and you didn’t love me. That’s the difference.” I remember just weeping at that. Epic romantic love, filmed when it was still illegal to be gay in the U.K.

Phillips: Ten years from now, what do you hope for with Reeling?

Webb: More experimental films, of course! That’s the last frontier, really. For me, anyway. We see a lot of experimental techniques and aspects in mainstream films that adapt elements from experimentalism, but I’d love to see more. For me, it’s all about slowing things down. It’s about being quiet, and the act of seeing. It’s almost meditative. So much of the culture now is about speeding up, speedy images, quicker and quicker. I think that makes you a receptacle for film, not an active seer.

Phillips: I get the idea that the word “storytelling” isn’t the be-all and end-all for you.

Webb: No. Not really.

Fox: Uh, guilty! I use that word a lot (laughs).

Phillips: How about you, Morgan? In 10 years?

Fox: I just want to see more and more people in society telling their own stories. All kinds. That’s why I love “T Blockers” so much. It’s a wild genre movie with something to say. We have so much good work to show people this year. “American Parent,” Emily Railsback’s film about two mothers dealing with parenthood and much more. That’s a homegrown Chicago project. I love “All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White,” which is about two men in love. It’s from the Nigerian filmmaker Babatunde Apalowo. Every frame is gorgeous, and it’s a slow burn, really effective.

It’s amazing to me. Twenty years ago, my first film got into Reeling and won an award and changed my life. And now I’m here, helping to decide whose work gets chosen for a showcase that — who knows? — just might change theirs.

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Reeling 2023: The 41st Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival runs Sept. 21 to Oct. 8 with screenings at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St.; Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; and Chicago Filmmakers, 1326 W. Hollywood Ave. Tickets $12-$15; pick-five passes are $55; pick-10 passes are $100. Some films available for online screening. More information at 773-293-1447 and reelingfilmfest.org.

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