The Reeling International Film Festival returns this week for its 37th year to—as The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Girardi has famously said—give the gays everything they want.
Reeling’s crop of documentaries offers an equally wide breadth of stories, with films that tell and preserve queer history, films that represent what it’s like to be queer in this very moment, and films that investigate wonderful, niche queer subcultures. “This is a culture that you do not see represented,” says Knight of the films.
Reeling is a chance for queer audiences to see all aspects of ourselves represented at the movies—not just scraps of representation within Hollywood blockbusters. And as queer filmmakers push themselves and break out from traditional conventions, we finally get to see ourselves as the complex heroes and villains of our own stories.
