Daisy Asquith • THE FUTURE OF QUEER FILM

Queerama

How can we mobilise creative editing to expand the realm of what’s possible? Queerama by Daisy Asquith is a 70-minute essay film made from one hundred film fragments drawn from the BFI archive. The film rebuilds a queer history, connects the past to the present and thereby projects a better queer future. It is structured thematically rather than relying on a chronological ordering that would privilege dates and the unfolding legislation around gender and sexuality. The film’s structure makes its own argument - namely, that progress is not linear and that queer lives don’t wait around for the law to be changed. Moments and phases of persecution and freedom come and go throughout the century, as they always have. Gender is shown to have been a battleground between the instincts and experiences of individual and societal heteronormativity, at least as long as film has existed.

The process of working with archival material mobilised in this film blends theory and practice research, as reworking old films simultaneously acknowledges their text as a form of context, while repurposing and building on the meanings it contains. The more we take ownership of our stories and pasts, suggests Asquith, the more solid a foundation is laid for building an optimistic queer future.