In this day and age, the world’s population has grown to be highly diverse and people have the freedom to believe or to pursue whatever they want, whether it is in religion, music, community or even, sexual preference. Helping to enrich the lives of homosexuals and hoping to change the views of the general public about homosexuality, the Northern American Country of Canada hosts one of the largest queer arts event, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

Celebrating Queer Lives

Hosting annually in the month of August, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival is the second largest film festival in the city of Vancouver, proving to be a great support for the area’s homosexual community. The 11-day long film festival started off in 1990 in response to the Gay Games, the world’s largest sporting and cultural event for the LGBT community, by a small film society, Out on Screen. Since then, the film festival grew in size and recognition, and celebrated its 26th anniversary last August, 2014.

With a goal to celebrate the life of queers, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival’s entire program revolves around the view to create a society where people would acknowledge and respect the sexual diversity, and the choices of queers. The festival screens some of the finest homosexual films to have the audience experience the lives of people with different sexual preferences. The film screens all sorts of films such as:

• Drama
• Documentary
• Feature Films
• Musicals
• Romance

The film “Shelter”, which won the Outstanding Film-Limited Release at the GLAAD Media Awards, won the People’s Choice Award For The Best Feature at the festival.

Reaching The Youth

Alongside the film festival, the Out on Screen hosts another event called Out In Schools, where the community reaches out to the young queers in local high schools, screening queer films in the schools with the aim to encourage queers and to create a comfortable environment for queers while battling the anti-homosexual behavior within the society.

The Vancouver Queer Film Festival hopes to bring change within the society and alter the views of the public against homosexuals through quality films and people’s love for good cinemas; they screen some of the finest queer films, and truly does a wonderful job at changing the perceptions of the people while entertaining them to the fullest.

Website :queerfilmfestival.ca

Facebook :www.facebook.com/VancouverQFF

Twitter :twitter.com/queerfilmfest