By VIVIAN KOPKA
On Friday, April 4, the Beloit International Film Festival paired up with Beloit students to put on a queer shorts festival in the Weissberg Auditorium.
The festival began with a panel, featuring two staff members in the LGBTQ+ Affinity Group, Tom Stojsavljevic and Randi Mogul, and Students Joy Figueroa’25, Jeremy Du Ravage’27, and Isella ‘Izzy’ Claudio-Deutsch’27. Figueroa represented SAGA, Sexuality and Gender Alliance, while Du Ravage and Claudio-Deutsch represented SIC, Students for an Inclusive Campus.
The panel, led by Stojsavljevic, focused on queer life through the lens of campus life and media. All three students agree that while the campus is inclusive towards queer people, in terms of being in Wisconsin, there is always work to be done.
Du Ravage emphasized the importance of implementing more required CRIS (Critical Identity Studies) classes for all students. He spoke of his own experience with homophobia as a queer man on campus, sympathizing with these students, “I don’t feel that a lot of people who have acted this way towards me are doing it out of hate, but rather out of genuine pure ignorance,” Du Ravage noted. “Creating a space where [students] can educate themselves is crucial, rather than trying to push them away so they become further radicalized.”
A group of queer seniors attended the festival. To conclude the panel, a man from the group spoke up and expressed that their group was having trouble with diversity within their group. He asked how his group can be more inclusive towards people of color, expressing that “It’s just so hard, I think, for these minority groups to come out.”
Stojsavljevic replied with a challenge to the group. “Look around. I mean, this is a very diverse group,” he said, “what can we do to prevent the siloing within, you know, the silos that we already exist in?”
The festival featured eleven films from nine different countries. Six awards in total were given out at this event.
The award of Best Student Short was awarded to “Laura,” directed by Alan Mejía L. from Bolivia. The short focused on a woman who figures out her feelings towards her best friend, while mourning the loss of her boyfriend, highlighting the messiness of grief and its intersection with sexuality and queerness.
Another short, “Mecha Meraki,” directed by Babi Astolfi from Brazil, received the Best Animated Short award. The animation follows a grey robot in a colorful robot society. The insecure robot tries to find color, but it keeps going wrong. Highlighting consumption and pressure to fit in, the short film ends with the robot accidentally stepping on paint and forming an unlikely new bond with another robot.
Student Mari Moyar’26 spoke of her favorite film of the festival, “Don’t Cry for Me All You Drag Queens,” a documentary paying tribute to drag queen Mother Cavalluci of New Hope, Pennsylvania. The short takes place at a hotel, where Cavalluci used to throw theatrical, extravagant drag weddings. “It was so wonderful. I had never gotten into drag until a couple of years ago,” Mari explained, “I’m so invested in just how wonderfully creative of a space it is.”
When asked about her takeaways from the festival, Mari expressed the importance of queerness in media. “There’s not really anything that makes queer film queer except for the fact that it was labeled queer,” she replied, “[the films] very much embody the human spirit. So I’d say anyone could have a good experience watching any of these films–anybody can relate to them.”
The project initially started in Michael Dango’s Queer Theory class in the Spring of 2024, and was taken over by Rick Rose’88 and the class he is teaching this semester, Content Creation and Marketing.
Featured image: From left to right: Randi Mogul, Izzy Claudio-Deutsch’27, Jeremy Du Ravage’27, Joy Figueroa’25, and Tom Stojsavljevic. Credits to Vivian Kopka’27
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