A Mani-Pedi-Anti-Counter-FESTO for Queer Screen Production Practice

Abstract

In this audiovisual essay, four practitioner-academics seek to identify and address the need to reimagine queer screen production. Traditional heteronormative storytelling dominates the screen production landscape, necessitating a challenge to create more inclusive and diverse narratives. Through the creation of a manifesto essay film, the researchers collectively reflect on their creative practices, synthesize their approaches, and develop a new vision for queer screen production. The result demonstrates the value of embracing: sustainable practices, queer kinship-making as filmmaking, alternatives to hegemonic forms, queer shame, queer failure, eternal adolescence, and the disruption of the ever-forward momentum (among other approaches). Manifesto-making as a method encourages creative practitioners to question the status quo of screen production contexts and strategies, and to think critically about the storytelling norms in broader creative practice. The researchers argue that such an approach can enable creative practitioners to pave the way for new, innovative collaborations and contribute to a more inclusive and diverse creative landscape.

This film enacts the opportunities that arise when considering the spectrum of screen production in broader, ‘queerer’, ways, through notions of kinship-making, polyphony and the ‘queer art of failure’ (Halberstam 2011). The disruption of dominant narrative models can be considered in the context of queer theory’s critiques of heteronormative temporality, asking how queer approaches to narrative construction might challenge the heteronormative markers of success and happiness, or what Elizabeth Freeman calls ‘chrononormativity’ (2010). Using ‘manifesto as method’, the film combines the authors’ separate practices in filmmaking, screenwriting, mobile media and documentary in ways that deviate from mainstream categorisations, production hierarchies and workflows.