Rounding out a strong comeback too many queer cinephiles in L.A. thought might never come, Outfest NEXT just survived its 2025 edition. Although, judging by the sound of it, a speaker inside Glendale’s LOOK Dine-In Cinema Auditorium 3 did not.
On Sunday night at a screening of Avalon Fast’s “Camp,” static erupted when the audio levels on Fast’s self-proclaimed “girl horror” movie got too high. “If any film was going to blow the system, it would be ‘Camp,’” the Canadian filmmaker quipped on Instagram to IndieWire, quoting a sentiment Fast heard and liked coming from the programming team.
Asked for just a few nice lines about the director for IndieWire, OutFest Next’s top trio of tastemakers — Sheryl Santacruz, Daniel Cooke, and Gabi Grossman, all familiar festival circuit faces with real warmth behind them — sent an effervescent text wall of sincere and complex praise via email.
“With her second feature, Avalon is showing herself to be a vital member of the genre she calls GIRL HORROR, helping to redefine the aesthetic of a new generation of transgressive, DIY, queer cinema,” the group wrote in an email. “‘Camp’ is a film that, like the best works of art, feels like a divining rod to something abstract and true that you can’t quite put your finger on but makes you walk through the world a little differently. It’s a film about grief, the way those experiences can distort our senses of ourselves, and the extremely different ways people react to those.”
The word “grief” overstates the loss of a movie theater speaker by a fair bit, but the belief that human beings can, do, and perhaps should experience the world we all live in differently was clearly felt during that final programming block of Outfest Next 2025.
A handful of festival attendees left when the audio issues persisted, but many more stayed. Some soldiered on for sheer love of Fast’s story. Others got tripped up by the nature of the presentation, reframing the technical difficulty as a happy accident unprompted.
“Many thought that the speaker issue was actually a conceit of the film,” interim executive director Christopher Racster told IndieWire in a post-fest interview. “Especially because it’s part of our Platinum Program, which is for more experimental films. People really wanted to see the movie, yes, but there was also this idea of like, ‘Well, maybe that’s just a directorial choice!,’ which was lovely — just to be able to keep going and get through that and then have the flexibility to make sure that we are honoring the filmmaker and giving them another chance to show their film for anyone who didn’t have the experience they hoped for and wanted to come back.”
“Camp” was shown again as a matinee the next day, free of charge. “This is a film that feels deeply mystical — not in a specific religious sense — but in the sense that this film mines the mire of these characters’ unmistakably queer senses of exile, pain, and alienation to find something sublime,” the programmers explained. “We think it’s fitting that, of any film that would overwhelm the [sound] system that was meant to contain it, it was ‘Camp.’”
Fast’s film was one of only 20 “fun, emotional, and sometimes campy” features and shorts programs picked by Outfest NEXT because they “challenge convention and expand the boundaries of LGBTQ+ representation.” That’s a sharp decrease from the dozens of movies the festival used to screen back when it was an established annual event. Before Outfest picked up the “NEXT,” it ran for 11 days and took place at nine different venues, attracting as many as 70,000 guests from across the city of Los Angeles.
In 2025, the shorter screening series had just two locations — LOOK Dine-In in Glendale and the LGBT Center’s Renberg Theater. It’s a stark contrast that looks like a sad story to anyone missing the context.
“Being back in a theater surrounded by members of the Outfest community felt like a homecoming, screening after screening,” the programmers wrote to IndieWire. “It also felt like an announcement: that despite a brief lull in access, visionary queer and trans cinema will always have the power to transform, engage, and empower here in the city of Los Angeles.”
If you’re just meeting Outfest NEXT (and the beloved indie film event it used to be) for the first time this year, then you’ve got some real reading to do before you can say you’re fully versed in the SoCal movie scene. But ask Racster to quickly sum up that 43-year history for you and the interim executive director was clear-eyed with a response he said he’s been putting his heart behind for months.
“We had several goals in coming back this year,” Racster told IndieWire. “First, we wanted to take the time to make sure that our foundation was secured. There was debt when I took over and our debt is paid. We even had reserves in the bank.”
After a cataclysmic economic collapse ended Outfest in 2023, the team behind it unionized amid the push to come back. They’ve been officially recognized and Racster told IndieWire he’s ready to get out of the way as soon as establishing infrastructure starts to inhibit community. “If we are going to learn and grow and serve the community where it is now, we need a leader who is centered in that,” he said. “And you know what? I’ve had my time. It’s time for me to step aside once we’re stable and make sure somebody else has their time.”
What they do with that time isn’t about what Racster wants or even what the board wants, the interim executive director. Ensuring there is an Outfest NEXT in 2026, 2027, and beyond comes down to “talking to all the different communities that make up the LGBTQ community and asking, ‘What do you need from an organization that is hoping to serve you? What do we need to do as both a community mooring point and as [an organization that wants to] develop and promote and platform your stories?’”
Noting the entire Outfest NEXT team has a well-earned nap in their future, Racster said an important step had been taken by ensuring the fest returned in 2025. Still, he emphasized that the nonprofit organization needed to focus on feedback during the rebuild. Racster concluded, “Our number one job is to listen and reflect. This gave us that opportunity.”
Even if it did take out that speaker.
Outfest NEXT returned to Los Angeles from November 6 – 9, 2025.
