We're here all week: public formation and the Brisbane Queer Film Festival

Abstract

Now in its eighth year Brisbane Queer Film Festival (BQFF) continues to be Queensland's only regular public film festival dedicated to explicitly queer films. But at a time when queer film festivals around the world are under increasing pressure to disband, given claims that 'queer' is supposedly such an accepted part of mainstream media that separate events are superfluous, what role if any does the BQFF have in Brisbane's and Queensland's queer culture (see Rich 2006)? This paper explores the BQFF as a potential site for the articulation and enactment of a queer Queensland presence. To this extent, I am interested in the BQFF as an event and space, rather than as a collection of individual texts. I explore the BQFF's queer cultural potential from three angles. First, I look at the BQFF's spatial context by examining the Brisbane Powerhouse as a socio-sexual space. Second, I develop these spatial readings into an industrial analysis by contextualising the BQFF as part of the international queer film festival circuit. Third, I query the BQFF's queer potential by discussing its temporality; after all, what kind of queer presence is it really possible to mobilise with an event that lasts less than one week each year? And what might it mean to broader considerations of the BQFF's attendees or of 'queer publics' in Brisbane and Queensland? This paper offers answers to these questions.