QFILM FESTIVAL: HEAR ALL ABOUT IT BY LINKING TO GREATER LB RADIO
By Greater Long Beach
The Long Beach QFilm Festival, the city’s longest-running celebration of the celluloid art, will present its 2012 edition—nearly 30 features, documentaries and shorts relating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered communities—this weekend at the Art Theatre and The Center.
“It’s a major undertaking,” says Porter Gilberg, administrative director of The Center, her weary chuckle suggesting that she’d just delivered a major understatement. ”This year’s festival pretty much started when last year’s festival ended.”
Gilberg is the only paid member among the half-dozen people who comprise the QFilm Festival’s planning core. The group tends to nearly every aspect of the festival, from recruiting sponsors, to printing tickets, to generating publicity, to planning parties—and, of course, watching every single film that is submitted and determining which of them are included in the festival lineup.
”We’ve been working non-stop,” Gilberg acknowledges, “but I think it’s some of the most fun I’ve had in my life.”
Gilberg doesn’t have much time to talk now, but last week she scraped some minutes from her wall-to-wall schedule to discuss all aspects of the QFilm Festival during an appearance on Greater Long Beach Radio with Dave Wielenga.
Give it a listen—then go buy your tickets.
“We program our festival by choosing from among films that come from all over the world,” says Gilberg. “We try to program films that show at least a touch of the diversity across the LGBT community, but there is so much diversity we can’t program it all. Yet even though we’re small, we produce a film festival of very high quality.”
In fact, Gilberg contends that the Long Beach QFilm Festival’s size works as one of its strong points.
“Film festivals like ours, festivals that are really independent in their decision-making—especially when it comes to programming—are incredibly important,” says Gilberg. “We are helping create an area of accessibility. Not everybody can make it to the big festivals—drive to Los Angeles or San Diego for Outfest or fly to San Francisco for Frameline. We reach people who might not otherwise be able to see these films.”
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[NOTE: GreaterLongBeach.com is a media sponsor of the 2012 QFilm Festival. Greater Long Beach Radio goes live every Thursday morning at 11 a.m. on KBEACH.org, the online radio station at California State University/Long Beach. GreaterLongBeach.com publisher Dave Wielenga is the host, applying his 40 years as a locally based journalist to exploration of the most-important stories of today. All Greater Long Beach Radio shows are archived at KBEACH.org, where they can be accessed 24/7 or downloaded as podcasts.]
