JENNI OLSON
Jenni has been with us since the start, since Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance found one of its earliest queer audiences at Frameline's festival on Castro Street back in the 1990s. From that first film to every one since, they've been there generously brainstorming, opening up their encyclopedic knowledge of queer cinema's deepest and most significant histories so that we can understand where our own work fits inside it.
They are the world's leading expert on LGBTQ film history, and have spent four decades proving that queer cinema's footnotes are as important as its features. Their personal collection of rare queer film prints, posters, and ephemera, acquired by the Harvard Film Archive, has filled in a history that was nearly disappeared, including Queens at Heart, a 1967 documentary about trans women, they rescued and restored from a $100 35mm print.
And they're an artist in their own right. The Joy of Life, Jenni's 2005 experimental landscape documentary, is a genuine work of art, and The Royal Road (2015) will crack you wide open if you give yourself over to it. Gorgeous, devastating, fortifying films that they've spent a lifetime making to be sure the rest of us get to see the most complex, revolutionary, unseen selves - including our own - on screen.
Aubin's Rewind pillar exists because we believe the same things as Jenni: that what gets preserved is itself an argument about whose story counts. Chavela and Hallelujah! Ron Athey live in the same lineage of queer image-making they're dedicated to protecting. They've been with us since the very first reel.