When the CinemaQ Film Festival opens Thursday at the Sie FilmCenter, in addition to its strong slate of feature-length films and shorts, fiction and documentary stories, it will launch BLQ. The new initiative – a partnership between Denver Film and the LGBTQ+ organization Black Pride Colorado — underscores just how nimble Denver Film’s beacon of queer cinema remains. The loving brainchild of Keith Garcia, artistic director of the Sie FilmCenter, and Black Pride Colorado founder Tara Jae, BLQ (Black Lives Queerly) centers on the experiences of black LGBTQ+ people.
The organizations have done programming together before but the two see in this new program an opportunity to build on that relationship. “Keith has been in my corner for a few years, and we often have talked about the importance and lack of space for Black queer creatives in Colorado,” Jae said in an email. “As we continued our dialogue and observed what was happening nationally, the opportunity to have space during CinemaQ opened up.
This partnership with Denver Film and Black Pride Colorado is an opening for us to continue to curate spaces and build a platform out for our Black queer creatives in the community.” “We asked ourselves, ‘What does that organization need? What can we do to help to bring everyone together?,’ ” said Garcia. It turned out to be a very simple answer, he said.
“Queer Black voices need more amplification than most, especially within the LGBTQIA community.” Garcia se.