How the movies gave 2017 a much-needed dose of truth

Queeriesis a weekly column byCBCArts producerPeter Knegtthat queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

Like mostreasonably minded people, I entered 2017 feeling pretty numb. Making it through the endlessly unfortunate news of theyear prior felt like something akin to running a brutal obstacle course, only to make it to a finish line where the prize was...another brutal obstacle course. As a result, my emotions seemed to have an emergency meeting, ultimately deciding maybe dormancy was the best survival tactic for 2017.

Their plan only lasted a few weeks, though and ended up regularly thwartedthroughout the year because of an old flame I'd had somethingof a falling out with: movies.

Me and movies go way back. Long story short: they were my primary obsession as a child and teenager, my major over sixyears of university and then my day-to-day for the first decade of my journalism career. But sometime in 2016, we grew a bit distant. I stopped really making much of an effort to make my way to movie theatres, so much so that at times many months lapsed between occasions inwhich I did.I can't entirely explain why.Maybe the comfort of binging television at home hadproven too great a competitor. Maybe after all that time, me and moviesjust needed a break. Or maybe in the midst of that growing numbness, I'd forgotten what it was about movies that had drawn me in so much in the first place.

Whatever the case may have been, inlate January2017, me and movies officially began a year of serious make-up sex. Over back-to-back nights at the Sundance Film Festival, I was lucky enough to attend the world premieres of both Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name and Jordan Peele's Get Outliteral days after my faith in society had dropped to new lows thanks to a certain inauguration. And I will never forget how the experience of both those films breathed me back to life. While wholly different movies Call Me is a slow-building, Italy-setdrama about a romancebetween two men whileGet Out is a fast-paced horror-thriller that critiques systemic racism in America both are staggering in their ability to utilize the art of filmmaking to expose paramounttruths. In Get Out, it's the truth about what it means to be Black. In Call Me By Your Name, it's the truth aboutthe vulnerability of deep human connection.

So obviously it's not like "movies expose truths!" is some revolutionary discovery I made with those films. But there was something about witnessing their authenticity in a theatre with a few hundred other people (say what you want about the ease of at-home viewing, there is still nothing like communal consumption of great art)just as the world seemed to be officially entering a "post-truth" era. Itfelt utterly defiant. And as 2017 continued to prove itself an extraordinary year for cinematic truth-telling, that feeling just kept coming back.

Take Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird, which I've now seen five times in the movie theatre because I find the catharsis of watching itssincerity in terms of how it feels to be a teenagerdownright addictive. Or Sean Baker's The Florida Project, which, through astonishing realisticperformances by child actors, simulates innocence like few things I've ever seen. Or Robin Campillo'sBPM (Beats Per Minute), which gave me a drastically better understanding of what it meant and felt to be an AIDS activist during the onset of the epidemic.

Undoubtedly, each of these movies mean different things to different people depending on identity,background, experience, etc. I don't know what it feels like to watch Lady Bird as a woman or Get Out as a person of colour or Call Me By Your Name as a straight person. But I do know how much they collectively liftedme out of emotional paralysis, forcedme tofeel and gave me a renewed understanding of the power of the movies and as I crawl to the end of another brutal annual obstacle course, that's exactly the kind of fuel I need for whatever comes after it.