Game Jam 2024 and More Exciting Programming at ReelOut 2025!

The 26th annual ReelOut Queer Film Festival runs January 30th-February 8, 2025  in Kingston, ON Canada.

The festival celebrates indie, international films that focus on gender and sexual orientation as well as other intersecting identities.  New this year, the festival will take place at our usual home, the independently owned, Screening Room Cinema (120 Princess St), as well as the central branch of the Kingston Frontenac Public Library (130 Johnson St).  The BOX OFFICE is now open.  You can purchase individual tickets to each program or buy a PASS to see whatever you like!

There will be 18 unique programs including a fabulous live performance by some of Kingston’s best and brightest drag performers, film screenings, special guest Q&As, discussions, retrospectives, special salutes to Atlantic Canada, Greece, and France. Check out our Schedule HERE.  Click on the photos for more information.

In addition,

ReelOut and Inter/Access are proud to co-present the creative results from last year’s Game Jam: Game makers in Residence for the 2024 Vector Festival in Toronto. A different game will be available FREE to PLAY for the public each day that we have shows at The Screening Room (Jan 30-Feb 2 & Feb 8, 2025)! Artists/game makers created games under curator Bracy Appeikumoh’s lens with workshopping support from multidisciplinary artist, Droqen. This project explores how technology, the machine, and machina have enriched and hindered our pursuits for sexual intimacy and understanding in relation to ourselves, one another, and the collective whole.

Sex, sexuality, and intimacy are difficult topics also because they are social – we come into our sexual selfhood in relation to one another and each person is their own universe with stars and planets and needs and desires. Social interactions, by their very nature, can be difficult to navigate because of the many variables when interacting with another person. Now, taking all this into consideration, how has technology created spaces for finding kinship but also allowed for gross misunderstandings?

What human idiosyncrasies and intricacies cannot be turned off or mediated by technology?

How does the internet help queer folks discover themselves sooner, and what happens when the imagery supporting this discovery is primarily pornographic?

What happens when certain marginalized bodies (trans bodies; sapphic bodies; queer bodies; Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies of color; femme bodies; women’s bodies) are made hyper visible as a result of increased access to online pornography but not made visible within public life or only made visible in an attempt to police and punish those bodies?

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Bracy Appeikumoh

Bracy Appeikumoh is a writer and mixed media artist whose work centers reimagining desire and pleasure wholly divested from the diktats of empire and all of its baggage. Her erotic fiction takes place in queer futures embodying queer pre-colonial pasts; her non-fiction ponders how we get here. She is burdened by the urgent need to restore, preserve, and disseminate indigenous ways of being and knowing. Octavia E. Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Claudia Jones.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP LEAD

alexander martin / droqen

alexander martin / droqen is best known for starseed pilgrim, but has spent decades (too long, surely) thinking about and making games of all sorts – often slipping poetry and pixel art together, sometimes accompanied by photographs, multiplayer, or creative prompts. in recent years a Godot user, but enjoys working in many materials digital & otherwise.

ABOUT THE GAMES & ARTISTS

8pm-10pm Thurs Jan 30th The Screening Room lobby (120 Princess St)

inner circuitry

The current digital surveillance apparatus that keeps watch over us all seeks to enforce normative gender and sexual identities. Thinking about possible futures of queer resistance and new ways of intimacy means that technology might make it possible. I am also thinking of the ways hegemonic systems might try to stifle that intimacy. This game is an attempt to combine aesthetics of hypertext and glitch to envision cyborg futures of physical/digital connection.

Artist bio:

Casper Sutton-Fosman is a cross-disciplinary artist, curator, and academic currently based in Toronto, ON. Their work centres conceptions of identity through a trans and disabled lens, pushing boundaries of medium and discipline to open in-between spaces for being. Sutton-Fosman is interested in troubling linearity and authorship, interactivity and implication, working in spaces between analog and digital, involving craft practices and outdated technology. They hold an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, & Design from OCAD University and a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.

7pm -10pm Fri Jan 31st The Screening Room lobby (120 Princess St)

Little Darlings, sick? emerged from an archive of strip club signage and ephemera from the pandemic. It is a playable video game built, coded, and designed in Roblox Studio, the popular children’s social gaming platform with many possibilities for in-game glitches and controversies related to strip clubs and sex clubs as they continue to appear on the platform despite constantly hiring moderators to get them deleted. This game thinks through the explicit nature of fatalities, sickness, and “HP” in games, media materialities, and their effects on corporeality– and the interpersonal and systemic issues workers in the erotic labor sector face especially amidst a global pandemic.

Artist bio:

Dahlia Bloomstone (b.1995) is a Puerto Rican/American artist and Hunter College MFA (NY, 2022) graduate with a BFA from Bard College (NY, 2018). Bloomstone has exhibited with Hauser & Wirth (NY), Essex Flowers (NY), 205 Hudson Gallery (NY), Rhizome (NY), Millennium Film Workshop (NY), Do Not Research (NY), CICA Museum (ROK), Hyacinth Gallery (NY), and Mass Gallery (TX), among others. Dahlia’s work is also affiliated with the White Columns Gallery (NY) artist registry. She is the recipient of the SPCUNY Actionist grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Master’s Thesis grant from Hunter College, the Ox-Bow CIP scholarship, and a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship. She has participated in residencies through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), School of Visual Arts, Ox-Bow, and Foreign Objekt and recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. From 2020 to 2022, she served as a Teaching Assistant at Hunter College, and in 2023, she was a Visiting Artist/Professor at UT Austin. Dahlia is currently an Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Art at Ramapo College, a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP), and a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow at Theater Mitu. She lives and works in New York.

4pm-9pm Sat Feb 1st The Screening Room lobby (120 Princess St)

Flaccid

It started as more of a stealth game. The idea was to make something that drew on my experiences trying to navigate sexualized queer spaces as someone who feels conflicted and inconsistent about gender. I wanted to use comedic physics to mirror the way it feels to exist in a body, specifically a trans, fat body, which directed the game a bit away from its original stealth goals and towards something much more arcade based and humorous. Now I would describe it as a high-speed, gender-dodging, obstacle course.

Artist bio:

Maxwell Lander (he/they) is an Assistant Professor of New Media at Toronto Metropolitan University. Their work spans many mediums, from games (both analog and digital), to XR, photography, film and music and is entangled in many conceptual frameworks, the most central of which is queer and trans subjectivites. They have been winning awards and exhibiting internationally since 2007 and, after publishing a book of photography exploring queerness and science fiction  in 2016, they took a brief hiatus from photography to delve into game design, interactive media and immersive technology. In May of 2019, they completed their Master of Design in the Digital Futures program at OCAD University, where they explored technology’s engagement with the body through custom controller design and the use of VR tech outside of the headset. They were lead-developer on Night of the Living Dead VR, an immersive homage to the classic film and have exhibited as a part of the Gladstone Hotel’s annual design exhibition, Come Up To My Room. They have released several tabletop roleplaying games, including one of Gizmodos best RPGs of 2022,  Himbos of Myth & Mettle, and are starting to work in the creative space between analog and digital immersive games.

7pm-9pm Sun Feb 2nd The Screening Room lobby (120 Princess St)

VidChat.XXX

VidChat.XXX celebrates the distance flattening intimacy that a webcam or a good imagination can offer us. Both online and offline, queer people can always find ways to fuck and find pleasure with one another. VidChat.XXX is an ode to the unexpected people you may find when seeking out new experiences online. So get that keyboard in your lap and I’ll meet you online.

Artist bio:

Seb Pines is a multi-award winning game designer and editor making curiosities into roleplaying games and games into a collection of curiosities. Seb is a co-founder of Good Luck Press where they publish experimental roleplaying games and multimedia interconnected stories. Their artistic foundation is formed from their love of multi-medium storytelling and from their research into embodied game design done during their Master’s Thesis work at OCAD University. Their work in game design has been acknowledged both with academic and industry accolades.

7pm-9pm Friday Feb 7th The Screening Room lobby (120 Princess St)

little diary

“little diary” is a series of vignettes meditating on how technology has both hindered and facilitated my understanding of sexuality as a child living in and around the digital space, without having the words yet to describe who I was (or was becoming). In making this game, I was particularly interested in how technology—the internet, digital games—has informed our relationships with others and ourselves. Without knowing who I was, in what ways did technology inform my identity? How did my digital self conflict with, or align with, my offline self or what people said I was or had to be?

This game looks back on those childhood moments with levity and a dash of silliness. Growing up is hard—and growing up online can be extra weird.

Artist bio:

Tamika Yamamoto is a non-award-winning designer, illustrator, and game-maker with five years of experience as a creative. She is excitable and tends to wear many hats, moving between various disciplines such as motion design, illustration, and game-making. She admits to occasionally falling off the deep end with each. She deeply enjoys the act of creation in its many forms and is intrigued by how creative work can enhance our capacity to empathize and connect with others. Recently, she participated as an artist-in-residence at InterAccess, creating games about queer Filipino girlhood, and exhibited at the 2024 Vector Festival in Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on interactive media, with an emphasis on AI criticality, language models, and crafting narrative-driven games that convey values-embedded play. Outside of her professional work, she also serves as a tutorial leader at OCAD University, where she introduces students to game-making and explores themes in animation.

 

Photograph by: Maksym Chupov-Ryabtsev