Our indefatigable intern Fleur Wooten got a crash course in festival management, and she’s sharing her perspective on this year’s event in our first Intern Dispatch blog post. Enjoy!
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2023 has been a huge year for me so far. On the road to graduating from UNCW, I’ve also gotten to actually publish and submit films to film festivals this year (a huge step on any film student’s journey), but I also got to learn about the film festival scene. I hadn’t even really attended film festivals before now, aside from visitng a friend at Cucalorus once last year. But when I heard there was a queer film festival near me, I knew I wanted to be a part of it. That’s when someone over at UNCW let me know they were looking for volunteer workers for this year’s festival. Immediately, I made it a priority to become part of QFFF’s team this year.
I can say now, coming out (no pun intended) of Queer Fear’s internship program now, that this decision paid off. It was such a joy to work with these filmmakers for the program, and having seen all of these films now that the festival has concluded I can also say it was a great inspiration. So many of these films came from all over the world. But, just as often as that, there were films made locally. Within my state, and by people I already knew in some cases. The variety of aesthetics and ideas displayed in this year’s festival reminded me just how boundless filmmaking as an art is. And, not to self-congratulate, but no one is having as much fun testing the limits of art as us queer filmmakers.
As part of the festival, I worked on a lot of parts of our production. Firstly, the marketing material (such as the trailer we distributed this year), the pre-show bumpers, and merch sales on the day of the festival itself. I had a lot of fun testing ideas out for the marketing material beforehand. The variety of films we had this year made for a lot of fun brainstorming sessions for our team during that period.
For as fun as that was, though, I am never going to forget the event itself. So many people visited for the festival, and I got to hear their reactions to just about every film as part of my work. For every time in my life I was bothered by a noisy person in a theater, I was thrilled by one during the three-day duration of the festival.
If I had to sell you on next year’s festival using just my experience working here, I would tell you that you’ll never find a crowd like QFFF’s elsewhere. Not only that, but on the way out of the screenings I had some lovely conversations about filmmaking with people from so many different backgrounds. Filmmakers, watchers, and local people completely unprepared for what was being shown. And all of them had just as many interesting things to say.
Thank you to Queer Fear Film Festival for letting me join this year, I hope to see all of y’all reading next year, too!
By Fleur Wooten
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Stay spooky!
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