29 Queer Film Festival brings LGBTQ films and talent ‘right in the middle of the desert’

I promise, you don’t have to drive all the way to L.A. to celebrate film and queer community.

The city of Twentynine Palms is home to a vibrant intersection of communities. It’s an entry point for Joshua Tree National Park, the edge of the Mojave desert, a stone’s throw away from Palm Springs or the Coachella Valley. And this weekend, there’s a new film festival to check out too.

The 29 Queer Film Festival is running from Sept. 20 - 22 at venues around town in Twentynine Palms. It’s a film festival highlighting queer films and the local region, with screenings, panels, drag performances, and more.

Love and movies

Festival founders Jonathan Andre Culliton and Graham Kolbeins are partners in love and film. They bonded over a shared love of films and filmmaking, and decided to create a film festival in Twentynine Palms after joining a workshop about creative and professional development for artists in the desert.

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“There’s so many amazing, creative people out here,” says Kolbeins, a filmmaker of 15 years who’s worked on documentaries, music videos, and has recently started making narrative films. “And we wanted to bring together queer filmmakers from around the world to celebrate their art.”

A need for film fests

Smaller film festivals feel particularly important given the loss of Outfest, a queer focused film festival that ran in L.A. for more than 40 years. After some tumult, its future is uncertain. The “events” tab on their website just leads to a page that says “sign up for updates.” And while the Palm Springs International Film Festival brings movies to the desert, there was still a dedicated space for queer film missing in this area.

Twentynine Palms is also what’s sometimes referred to as a “movie theater desert” (not to be confused with a desert movie theater!). As Kolbeins says, “There’s really no movie theater that’s operational right now.” The community is “starving for this kind of content,” he says.

A poster for "Willa Justice: Drag Queen Private Eye," which Kolbeins and Culliton worked on together.

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Courtesy 29 Queer Film Festival

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Cheryl Bookout, a documentary filmmaker based in Joshua Tree, is screening her documentary about queer life in the high desert at 29 Queer. Her film “Inside the Beauty Bubble” follows Jeff Hafler, a gay hairdresser who runs a roadside attraction full of historical hair artifacts. She calls him a “hairstorian,” and loves sharing his story at festivals.

“I can’t tell you how important the film festival circuit…has become for queer communities,” Bookout says. She’s a believer in the power of film, saying that the medium “has the power to create empathy and change in a more visible way than any other art form.”

All this means that Kolbeins has one major goal in mind with 29 Queer Film Festival. That’s to let people know “you don't have to go to LA to get queer film. You can have it right here in the middle of the desert.”

Festival passes and individual tickets are still available here. 

Brian De Los Santos contributed to this report.