Rhianna Ilube is a woman of many talents. She is an accomplished playwright, facilitator, curator and associate director at interactive theatre and game-makers Coney. She is also a film programmer at BFI Flare, the UK’s largest LGBTQIA+ film festival. Rhianna is currently tasked with curating films featuring queer women and non-binary people for this year’s festival. Meeting her was an enormous pleasure – the work she does is key in providing the LGBTQIA+ community with a wide range of representation, as well as working with lesser-heard voices to encourage new filmmakers.
As a film programmer, Rhianna is regularly faced with a spreadsheet of around 10 feature films and 30 to 40 short movies. Her daily life is rearranged to ensure she can give her full attention to each of these stories. The care that Rhianna takes in doing this is incredible. She makes thorough notes on each of the films and, when necessary, researches the stories to ensure she has “enough context to understand what the film is trying to say”. The next step in her process is imagining different audiences for the films, so that she can select which make it onto the festival’s line-up, alongside film recommendations from her fellow festival programmers.