LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness by Antoine Damiens (review)

The past two decades have seen an exponential rise in academics studying myriad aspects of film festivals. Indeed, at least among scholars writing on the subject, film festival studies is now considered to be a legitimate academic discipline.1 Inherently interdisciplinary, film festival scholars employ a range of theoretical and methodological tools such as network theory, film analysis, discourse analysis, history of institutions, national cinema, logics of film distribution, and gatekeeping in order to study the film festival phenomenon.2 A notable strand of this scholarship addresses LGBTQ film festivals, a specific niche at the intersection of art, identity, and activism. Antoine Damiens’s LGBTQ Film Festivals: Curating Queerness is a timely book that attempts to intervene in this burgeoning scholarship by looking at some of the key assumptions that guide larger film festival studies based on his reflexive inquiry within LGBTQ film festival research.3 Damiens embarks on this ambitious journey on the back of two theoretical concepts: critical festival studies and film festival as a method. Critical festival studies, according to Damiens, is an “analysis of the methodolog-