Iris Pintiuta has been busy. In the last three years, Pintiuta moved from the United Kingdom to Montreal, began a PhD in film studies at McGill, established a film festival and registered it as a non-profit, leveraging their academic research to create their own career opportunity.
It’s no small achievement, and Pintiuta did it almost entirely alone.
“[The film festival] allows me to use the scholarship I’m producing at McGill and apply it to my work, as well as exercising all these other skills,” said Pintiuta. “It’s really become my baby, and it keeps on being bigger and better than I expect.”
Falling in love with film
Pintiuta is from Romania but spent nearly 10 years in the United Kingdom, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from King’s College London and falling in love with film.
“I focused on a lot of experimental film, and it was during my master’s that I fell in love with queer and trans film,” said Pintiuta. “I realized there’s a rich and underappreciated body of trans-made film that offers nuanced, caring and complex portrayals of trans lives, and I knew I had to learn more about it.”
Pintiuta’s goal of pursuing a PhD and a career in academia led them to McGill, but once they arrived and began their studies, they realized that career opportunities in academia would be scarcer than they had expected, and that they were driven to work and support the community they were researching.
“Too often, queer and trans scholarship doesn’t make it back to the people it speaks about. I wanted to change that – I wanted to build a bridge between academic knowledge and public access and use what I was learning to support my community, not just advance my own career.”
Noticing a gap in Montreal’s cinematic offerings, Pintiuta began hosting casual film screenings in a queer bar.
“It started as a series for me and my friends,” said Pintiuta. “But by the third or fourth screening the crowd was beyond capacity just from word of mouth. I was looking around going, ‘How did this happen? This is incredible!’”
A labour of love
Soon after, Pintiuta learned that Canada hadn’t had a multi-year transgender film festival since 2002. Determined to change that, they organized Exposures, Montreal’s first trans film festival, in September 2024. Pintiuta recruited 10 volunteers, organized 13 film screenings in four days, earned media coverage from the CBC and ended up putting most of the expenses on their credit card; the only significant source of funding was $2,000 from the Dean of Arts Development Fund.
“There was a moment when I thought, ‘Have I just got myself into a lot of debt?’,” they recalled. But the event was a success. A second edition is planned for this September, and Pintiuta said they are well on their way to reaching this year’s annual fundraising target.
Ambitions include touring the festival to other parts of the country as well as developing mentorship opportunities and workshops for aspiring trans filmmakers.
“I want Exposures to be the biggest trans film festival in the world in five years – that’s my goal,” said Pintiuta.
“I hope my experience pushes other people to do similar things: to explore alternative avenues that are related to your research but also give you some practical skills, and a way to have a job at the end.”
Promoting trans inclusion
Exposures’s success is not just a win for Pintiuta, but a win for Montreal’s transgender community. The festival aims to promote inclusive representation for trans people, as well as create programs and events that advance trans acceptance.
“[The festival] was a massive labour of love that had a clear and positive impact on the wider community,” said Alanna Thain, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Pintiuta’s academic supervisor. “Iris pulled it off with professionalism and care.”
With anti-trans sentiment on the rise, the festival “seems even more important than ever,” said Pintiuta. “But if I’ve learned anything from my experience so far, it’s that the trans community is incredibly resilient, and we will find a way to make it work.”
In the meantime, Pintiuta’s efforts have already yielded positive results.
“Seeing 200 people come together to watch themselves represented with care and complexity on screen is pretty amazing,” said Pintiuta. “I’ve found something I love, and I want to see how far I can take it.”
Interested in exploring trans films? Pintiuta recommends checking out Canadian filmmakers Kaye Adelaide, Alec Butler, TJ Cuthand, Luis de Filippis and Mirha-Soleil Ross.