The FairyTales International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, reeling from the success of last year’s tenth anniversary celebration, is hoping that 2009 will bring continued prosperity. The non-profit organization, FairyTales Presentation Society made the decision to open an office space that would contain a GLBTTQ movie resource library accessible to the public.

“There were a few options bandied about,” explains Festival Director Matt Salton. “But in the end we decided on shared space with Calgary Outlink Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity because it’s a terrific organization and located on 17th Avenue where we can expect a lot of queer traffic.”

Indeed the building at 1230A 17th Avenue is a small hub for queer businesses that includes the head office of Outlooks Magazine, IModel Management, Dabble Event Inc, and the Blake Fiero Salon. The location is also conveniently located next to gay owned Priape, Blubox Inc. and JaroBlue.

The DVD resource library has already taken shape with over a hundred titles for the community to choose from including short films, documentaries, and TV series.

“We want this library to be a resource for education on sexuality and diversity,” says Salton. “ But we also want to provide the community with access to some more popular titles that are still hard to find in Calgary for pure entertainment like Queer as Folk, all five seasons of the L Word, Torchwood and Doctor Who.”

The library also contains classic films like The Boys in the Band, Desert Hearts, The Watermelon Woman and Longtime Companion as well as Criterion Collections of Gus VanSant’s Mala Noche and Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. It also includes its fair share of campy titles like Skyjacked, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Mommy Dearest and the Village People musical Can’t Stop the Music.

One genre of cinema the FairyTales Resource Library will not carry is the triple X variety. “There’s enough places in Calgary where the public can access porn.” Salton says. “We’re by no means being prudent as we do carry some pretty steamy titles but there is an artistic context to these films that mainstream adult videos lack.”

There is no rental cost associated with borrowing films if you are already a member of the society, which now only costs ten dollars. It includes additional benefits like a dollar off any FairyTales film screening and the opportunity to buy advanced tickets to the festival.

FairyTales is also planning to take the show on the road in 2009. “I think I’d like to call it ‘Reels on Wheels’,” Salton laughs. “We’ve been hearing time and time again from gays and lesbians in smaller, rural centers of Alberta who’d appreciate some queer culture in their communities. So we’ve invested in some technical equipment so that now we have the capabilities of packing up some films and taking them on the road.”

And FairyTales has already been busy traveling since the tenth anniversary festival wrapped last summer. Salton has represented the festival and Calgary at the Vancouver Out on Screen Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, the Winnipeg Reel Pride Festival, Montreal’s Image + Nation Film Festival and Kingston’s reelout queer film festival. In addition, FairyTales’ Board President Gordon Sombrowski has visited film festivals in South America and Germany, and programmer Amy Darling attended the Slamdance Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival in Utah to bring Albertans the best queer themed movies for 2009.

“We’re really excited by the quality of films being made over the past year,” Salton says. “I think our eleventh year is really going to reflect a truly international collection of excellent, original film and video works.”

The eleventh FairyTales International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival runs ten days from May 28th to June 6th but you can catch their monthly screenings at The Plaza Theatre in Kensington usually around the last Wednesday of the month. You can go to their website at www.fairytalesfilmfest.com to check out their calendar of events or for information on sponsorship or donating to the festival.