This local LGBTQ film festival wants to make you laugh
The Prairie Pride Film Festival is celebrating its 15th year and showing some fun, gay movies.
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As the programmer behind this year's Prairie Pride Film Festival, Kris Stanley didn't want to just show a bunch of grim, depressing movies.
Kris and the festival's other screeners watched dozens of films and narrowed their choices to a slate of seven features and five shorts, all focused on queer characters or themes. They considered a handful of documentaries that dealt with stories of suffering and violence, but these weren't the kind of films they wanted to elevate.
So those docs didn't make the cut.
"I think as a group, we were all like, 'Yeah, we don't want this to be part of our festival. We want this to be celebratory,'" Kris told me.
On balance, the lineup for the 15th Prairie Pride Film Festival, an annual event organized by OutNebraska that's happening this weekend at the Ross, leans more toward comedy than drama. There are stories about compassion, parenthood and belonging, a 2000s-esque high school comedy featuring a trans cast and crew, and a fun animated romp about space lesbians.
Prairie Pride Film Festival schedule
All films will play this weekend at the Ross Media Arts Center. You can buy tickets to individual films for $10 each or purchase an all-access festival pass for $25. (The opening night screening of TheyDream is free!)
Friday, August 28
- 6 pm - Opening reception hosted at The Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts
- 7:15 pm - TheyDream (1 hour, 26 minutes)
Saturday, August 29
- 1 pm - We Are Pat (1 hour, 28 minutes)
- 3:30 pm - She's The He (1 hour, 22 minutes)
- 5:30 pm - Jaripeo (1 hour, 15 minutes)
- 7:15 pm - Lesbian Space Princess (1 hour, 27 minutes)
Sunday, August 30
- 1 pm - The Dads (1 hour, 12 min)
- 3:30 pm - Five Short Films (1 hour, 10 minutes)
- 5:30 pm - Jimpa (1 hour, 53 minutes)
The desire to show films that don't simply present queer experiences as miserable and tragic — and to find art that instead celebrates LGBTQ culture — has been a throughline for the festival since the very beginning.
"One of the things I always appreciated, and always pushed, was that they couldn't all be devastatingly sad, that we needed to see gay joy," said Elsbeth Magilton, one of the festival's founders. "I needed films that also had happiness and beautiful storylines and love stories that don't end in horrific violence."
Elsbeth is now a lecturer and director of externships at UNL's law school. But back in 2011, she was still a student and part of the Allies and Advocates for GLBT Equality (now OUTLaw). That year, she and fellow student Mike Echternacht pulled together the first iteration of the festival on a shoestring budget. They showed four features (including Undertow, a 2009 Peruvian film that's both a narrative about gay love and a ghost story) and an array of shorts at the Joyo Theatre in Havelock.
Mike had previously worked for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and used his industry connections to get in touch with a distributor who specialized in LGBTQ films.
"I was able to sweet talk him into giving us a really good deal," Mike told me. "This was a market that a lot of the filmmakers that he was representing ... were not gonna be able to get into otherwise. We were showing, effectively, Midwest premieres of a lot of these films."
The film landscape has changed a lot since the festival was founded, but back in the early 2010s, streaming hadn't yet become the global media behemoth it is today. (For context, Netflix was still shipping DVDs and had yet to produce any original programming.) In that era, the Prairie Pride Film Festival could bring films to Lincoln that might otherwise not get seen. At least, not on the big screen.
The two founders aren't involved in the festival these days. After the first few years, they got busy with their lives and careers and handed off operations to the organization that would become OutNebraska (then known as Outlinc).
"I'm extremely, extremely proud and also really humbled and so grateful that it kept going as long as it has," Elsbeth said.
This year's festival will also feature, in addition to the films, two panel discussions: The first is scheduled to follow Saturday's screening of the trans high school flick She's The He and will focus on the broader political context of so-called "bathroom bills." The other will happen Sunday afternoon after a documentary called The Dads. It will feature members of Rainbow Parents, who plan to talk about their experiences as parents of trans youth.
OutNebraska focuses a lot on education and advocacy, Kris said. Hence why they are programming panels and films that focus on timely, urgent issues. But the organization also recognizes that creating a space to just uplift LGBTQ lives and stories is equally important, he said.
"For me, it's less about coming away with some sort of lesson than it is just celebrating together," Kris said.
Films to look out for
I asked Kris what films from this weekend's festival that he's most excited for, and here's a bit of what he told me. You can find the full schedule higher up in this story, or on the Ross's website. (Descriptions edited slightly for clarity and succinctness.)
TheyDream (2026, dir. William D. Caballero) — "It's a stunning feat of animation and I've never seen anything like it before. The director created miniature sets, then he animated them two dimensionally, while sometimes interweaving other types of animation and live action. He took family recordings of audio and video and, along with his mother, reanimated family members from the past who had died. And he used that process of creating a feature film with his mother to process grief and bring back family members so they could have more time together. It's a very touching film, very emotional but also very funny at points."
She's The He (2025, dir. Siobhan McCarthy) — "It's mostly trans actors and crew who made this film. It has a trans woman in the leading role and primarily trans men playing cisgender roles. And it subverts conservative anxieties around bathroom access, which is particularly relevant now in Nebraska. It reads like this 2000s teen comedy, very campy and funny. But then there's these really emotional moments that will bring you to tears."
Jaripeo (2026, dir. Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig) — "An experimental, hybrid feature documentary. It's all about the yearly rodeos that happen in Mexico around Christmastime, and it explores the queer space that opens there. It's an observational documentary at times, but then at others it turns into this hypnotic, lyrical exploration of being queer in this hyper-masculine space. It's very dreamlike at times and very compelling."
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