It’s a good thing Tatum Yancey, director of education and filmmaker development at the nonprofit Chicago Filmmakers, is somebody who likes watching movies.
Chicago Filmmakers organizes the annual Reeling: The Chicago International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, which kicks off Friday, Sept. 19.
Yancey, a Chicago native who’s long been active in the city’s film and TV industry—with jobs on programs such as The Bear and Empire, for example—started her new job early in 2025.
“As a member of the queer community, when I first saw that Chicago Filmmakers put on Reeling, I [thought], ‘Oh my gosh, I want to be a part of this organization even more. So I’m happy to be involved.”
Chicago Filmmakers staff are each year asked for a particularly daunting but necessary task: screening the myriad submissions the organization fields for its fall festival.
“When [Executive Director Brenda Webb] brought up that we need programmers, I said, ‘Hey that sounds really exciting.’”
But Webb struck a cautious note for Yancey: “She said, ‘Okay, great, Tatum, but just you know, that’s a volunteer position. You’re gonna have to do that on your own time.’ And I was like, ‘That’s fine. Of course I’ll sign up.’”
Yancy estimates she watched about 100 films over the course of a month. She explained, “I was waking up in the morning and watching a film before going to work. I was spending all day Sunday watching four movies. And it was an absolute pleasure.”
She’s particularly eager for audiences to see the opening night offering Lesbian Space Princess, an animated film that was one of the first films she and the other programmers watched. The film will be followed by a costumed after-party, and the audience is invited to wear their space-age best.
“It’s just a really fun, beautiful-looking film, about—you guessed it—a lesbian space princess whose girlfriend gets taken and kidnapped … It’s really fun,” she said.
The centerpiece documentary, showing Sunday, Sept. 21, is It’s Dorothy!, which dives into legacy of the character Dorothy Gale, the heroine of The Wizard of Oz, Yancey said. She also was excited that the festival would be showing Newborn [Saturday, Sept. 20], an intersex-themed film that she said she was “blown away by … We really need a lot more intersex representation in the cinema.”
Another important film she described is Dreamers [Saturday, Sept. 20], which Yancey said is “really relevant [for] what we see going on the country right now. It’s about a woman who flees from Nigeria because she’s persecuted for being a lesbian. She arrives in the U.K. But she’s undocumented and is put in a detention center. … She falls in love while she’s there and it becomes a question of, is it worth it to fall in love when life is so uncertain?”
She described Rains Over Babel [Saturday, Sept. 20] as being simply “hot,” adding, “It’s just a really fun, fantastical, punk rock, very colorful film. … It’s ‘hot’ in terms of the characters are all hot. The production design is hot. The sound design is hot. Everything you see there is oozing hotness.” Another film, She’s the He [Thursday, Sept. 25] “highlights trans people in a really innovative way,” Yancey added.
Outside of planning the festival, one of Yancey’s primary tasks at Chicago Filmmakers is training the next generation of film and television production professionals. She works on a State of Illinois-run workforce readiness program.
“We believe that the film industry needs to be more diverse, and and so we do a production assistant [PA] training,” she said. “It’s very competitive. I think when I first came in, I think we had almost 300 applications and I had to choose 12.”
Students learn the roles of each production department and meet various industry professionals.
“When the program is over, when our students are placed in jobs, they are prepared and basically have a step above because they have all this training,” Yancy said. “We believe change in the industry starts from the ground and the bottom up.”