Flee.(Sundance Film Festival)
Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.
It may have mostly happened in the living rooms of movie lovers, but the Sundance Film Festival just successfully pulled off its first — and hopefully only — pandemic edition. And with it came the same quality of LGBTQ-themed filmmaking we have come to expect from a festival that has built a pretty unparalleled reputation in that regard in its four decades of existence.
Alongside the many new films that will surely go on to represent the very best queer cinema of 2021 (which I'll get to in a minute), this year's festival gathered a multi-generational Zoom panel of LGBTQ filmmakers, asking them "to look back and imagine forward." The "looking back" specifically was in reference to New Queer Cinema, a movement of energetic and disruptive filmmaking in the early 1990s that I discussed at length in last week's edition of this column.