When I meet Anna Dunwoodie in the salubrious surroundings of the newly poshed-up BFI, she looks fresh and excited – not remotely like someone who’s just emerged from several months in a darkened room in search of the perfect festival film. The job of putting together London’s Lesbian & Gay Film Festival – all 200 features and shorts, countless events, plus a sprinkling of late-night shenanigans – falls to Dunwoodie, her co-programmer Kyle Stephans, and three male counterparts. It’s a task she clearly loves despite moments of occasional frustration.

‘The real thrill of the Fest is that it’s in your head for six months – we have a few meetings, but basically you spend a long time alone in your bedroom with your DVD player. Then suddenly, when it all starts, you get to see what audiences make of it. You get very blasé about what you’re seeing during the year and you forget that people generally don’t get the chance to see much of this sort of work in any capacity at all if it weren’t for the Fest – not on TV, not in the cinema. It’s a one-off chance to show what’s out there.’

Given the different quality of films on show, I wonder if there’s any relationship between the amount of cash spent on a film and how good the end result is? ‘Depends what you mean by “good”: this year we viewed a couple of features which had clearly cost a lot of money, but we turned them down because they just weren’t “good” enough. Just because a film looks slick doesn’t help it entertain you. It’s a hard one because with the girl’s programme you’ve got an uphill struggle to find features at all – this year again the boy’s selection is bigger, so to turn down films means a bit of soul-searching in case your dyke audience misses out. But people put their hands in their pockets to buy tickets, and you have to be happy with what you’re putting in front of them.’

When I ask if bigger means better in terms of the boy’s programme, she ’fesses up to a tinge of envy at the sheer size difference. ‘A few years back I might have been envious of quantity and quality of the lez versus gay programme, but I don’t feel so much like that this year – we’ve got a lot to be excited about.’

THRILLING BILLING
Asked to pinpoint what she’s most excited about, she giggles. ‘I’m excited about something that doesn’t sound very exciting: there’s a collection of stuff that mixes political activism with stories about lez/ gay lives from other cultures. See, not very exciting. But there’s some great stuff that falls into this bracket. The best example is an amazing documentary called Love and Words – it’s from a French director who set out to make a film about women’s lives in the Yemen and right at the beginning fell out with authorities, so sees her precious project fall apart. But as it does, she strikes up a friendship with her translator and suddenly finds herself falling in love – so keeps filming. It’s lovely and very real and not at all what she was meaning to film or I was expecting to see. We’re playing it with a Korean short about schoolgirl teens whose school crackdown means they can’t even hold hands in the corridor. You watch something like that and realise how easy we have it.’

Politics and culture are all very well, but how does the Festival sit with an audience whose idea of a good night’s viewing is a particularly steamy episode of The L Word? ‘I hate to say there’s something for everyone here – but there is. We do “light and fluffy” alongside the harder stuff. Something like Don’t Go, which is a low-budget TV pilot from a new film-maker following a group of LA girls: there are butches with secrets, a young Indian girl escaping her family, and good old Guin Turner (Go Fish, The L Word) as a hermaphrodite who accidentally gets her girlfriend pregnant. You can leave your brain at the door, but it’s a great laugh. And the lezzers look like real dykes.’



I wonder aloud if we still have the age-old problem of lesbian films that, at worst, have seen us either die or get punished, or at best just do endless rounds of coming out. Dunwoodie admits that we have a long way to go: ‘It’s weird because I’d have thought that the explosion of digital film-making would mean more lez dramas coming through, tackling wider subjects. But that’s not the case. Still, one of the other pleasures of working on the Fest is that you get a sense each year of what queer debates are bubbling under internationally. This year, the two key things are lesbian and gay Muslims – the problem of reconciling faith with sexuality – and then a very visible increase in trans concerns. We’ve had a much bigger participation from the trans community, and it’s resulted in some great films and the promise of good debates.’

The ‘participation’ of various bits of the community seems welcome for the programmers, not least because there hasn’t always been a comfortable relationship with this particular section, when every year the Festival ducks the issue of the naming of the event. ‘Lesbian & Gay’ doesn’t cover many bits of the community that the Festival is trying to satisfy and there’s been many an ugly fight over tacking ‘Bi’ and ‘Trans’ onto ‘Lesbian & Gay’. Dunwoodie is relaxed about the issue – she acknowledges that the Festival, at 22 years old, is now a brand, and to mess with that risks confusing audiences. But she knows that trans and bi voices have a point. ‘I don’t have an answer. All I know is that it would be too clumsy to have one of those mouthful titles – until someone comes up with a good alternative, we should stick as we are.’

WE'RE QUEER, WE'RE HERE
Every year one question is asked repeatedly, so it seems rude not to do the decent thing and ask it: in this day and age when Brokeback can play the multiplexes and L Word can get a fifth series commissioned, do we still need a queer film festival? Dunwoodie is clear: ‘I’d say yes, even more than ever, actually. The LLGFF has been many things in its 22 years – from a daring, risqué campaigning event through to a launch pad for the film industry. These days we have come full circle, and it’s very much about community and visibility again. There seem to be fewer queer cultural events – look at the Drill Hall and the rest falling by the wayside. To have a Festival where you can see a massive range of material made by and for a diverse group of people who normally don’t have the chance to come together, debate and have fun – well, that seems like something worth hanging on to.’