aGLIFF Announces Bears Rebecca Fonté as New Artistic Director

Austin's oldest film festival, aGLIFF (The All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival) has announced Bears Rebecca Fonté as the new Artistic Director. Fonté has served on aGLIFF's Board of Directors since 2016 and has been a part of the fabric of Austin's film and arts scene even longer with highlights including Director of Programming for Austin Film Festival, and Founder and Creative Director of the SciFi themed Other Worlds Film Festival. She has also recently taken a seat on the Board of Directors for the Film Festival Alliance, a global community for mission-driven film festivals. Fonté begins her role as Artistic Director this month.

"aGLIFF is such a fundamental part of my own personal coming out story - it was the first place I saw my internal self on screen. I couldn't be more honored to step into the programmer's seat," said Fonté. "I'm sure when Scott Dinger founded this festival, he could never have imagined how much it would mean to so many people. I can only aspire to live up to all the great programmers who came before me."

Board President Casandra Alston discusses Fonté's new role within the organization. "Our new Artistic Director, Bears Rebecca Fonté will do an amazing job curating our festival line up for 2021. Bears Rebecca has not only been on the Board since 2016, but she has also been a fan of the festival for years and brings knowledge from both a participant and organizer. We know with her leadership we will continue to have diverse, high quality, and unique programming from Bears Rebecca in the coming months and during our 34th Annual Festival."

aGLIFF will also continue to brand its annual LGBTQIA+ festival under the name PRISM. Fonté has played a major role in the development of this name and reshaping aGLIFF over the years. "Since I joined aGLIFF as a board member, my primary focus has been on our branding - working with my colleagues on redefining the acronym aGLIFF to be more inclusive of the entire community, redesigning our logo, and our identity as a film festival," explained Fonté. "I have always wanted us to be a 'one word' fest - a festival who can declare who they are in a single statement. PRISM encapsulates the spirit of aGLIFF just like a prism captures light, splitting it into many colors. We take the light of film (or a cinema projector) and reveal the many voices that make up our community. And prisms work both ways, if you put one in front of separate colors it combines them into one fused beam. As aGLIFF presents our official PRISM Festival in 2021, I am flattered to get to be the first programming director to work under the light of that vision."

Alston expands on the revitalization, "We felt PRISM more accurately described and represented the large spectrum of LGBTQIA+ stories told at our festival. Our goal is to create positive and visible film programs that are relevant in our lives and the only way to do that is to tell everyone's story. The festival's purpose is to educate the community to help them learn, grow, and evolve through storytelling. We are confident that Bears Rebecca will do an amazing job incorporating that vision into the festival's line up. We know she will continue to push boundaries, and with her leadership the festival will continue to evolve and ensure important stories from every aspect of our community are told through film."

Film submission information and dates for PRISM, aGLIFF's 34th Annual Festival will be announced in the coming weeks.