Queer Film Festivals and Urban Space

Reviews / Votes

"Queer Film Festivals and Urban Space: Reclaiming the City offers an exhilarating account of the queer film festival's transformative potential. Writing across film studies, cultural geography, disability studies, and queer and feminist theory, Theresa Heath beautifully synthesises aesthetic, institutional, and activist approaches to queer film festivals and their precarious urban communities. This much-needed book animates a history of struggle to create film culture by and for marginalised people."

Rosalind Galt, Professor of Film Studies, King's College London, UK

"This book lucidly explores how queer film festivals have the unique power to connect the way films represent ideas on screen with the physical or digital space of the festival itself. Queer film festivals are treated, here, as activist events that boldly claim a space in the city. The connection between different forms of queer worldmaking creates a dynamic space where the relationship between queer people and the city can be rethought, helping to push queer politics forward and imagine more inclusive and fair spaces. Dr Heath's own lived experiences inspire her to push boundaries, as a producer and as a scholar. She looks into the ways hybrid spaces can produce more accessible, queer, counterpublic events."

Stefanie Van de Peer, Reader in Film and Media, Queen Margaret University, UK

"In this book, Theresa Heath beautifully weaves together a historical trajectory of queer film festivals as regionally specific sites of queer cinema. Informed by her first-hand experience as festival organizer, she connects discussions of programming, activist labor in the face of pressures of neoliberal gentrification and pandemic responses between AIDS and COVID-19 with the struggle to create space for community."

Skadi Loist, Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Germany