Fairy Fantastic! is a platform for the creation and promotion of queer folk and fairy tale cultures. Founded in 2014, by Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver, Fairy Fantastic! projects include:

  • the production of experimental, gender creative folk and fairy tale films, and related visual art projects including zines, prints, drawings, banners and books.

  • curated screenings of queer experimental folk and fairy tale films from around the world (Out in the Woods)

  • curated screenings of experimental, gender creative films for kids of all ages (Over The Rainbow, Friends of Dorothy)

Fairy Fantastic! Productions

Each Fairy Fantastic! production is based on a traditional folk or fairy tale.  The Sausage (2015) is based on a Swedish folk tale sometimes known as “Sausage Nose.”  Stinkhorn (2019) is based on a Scottish tale called “The Blacksmith’s Wife of Yarrowfoot” and Better Out Than In (currently in production) is based on a Japanese folk tale called “The Farting Bride.”   We chose these stories because they reveal aspects of folk culture that challenge binaries and celebrate the material bodily spirit that the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnivalesque grotesque. Bakhtin described a bawdy cultural form that celebrates the open, communal body through laughter, exaggeration, inversion of hierarchies, scatalogical and sexual humor, and acknowledgement and acceptance of the cycles of life and death. Fairy Fantastic! Productions find common ground between the grotesque bodily traditions embedded in folk and fairy tales and contemporary queer culture including a fascination with mutability and bodily transformation, non-binary genders, animality, transgression and the inversion of hierarchies.

Out in the Woods (queer folk and fairy tale screening program)

Out in the Woods is a curated selection of international short films that offer queer interpretations of world folk and fairy tale traditions. The films in Out in the Woods destabilize categories of gender, sexuality, and desirability; and invent new queer folk cultures.   

Over The Rainbow/Friends of Dorothy

The films in Over the Rainbow & Friends of Dorothy are for an all-ages audience and address themes of difference, anti-bullying and gender-variance. Through these stories we seek to convene a mixed-ages, queer audience for mutual celebration and recognition.