Jenni Olson: ‘I remember walking out of the movie theatre like, “Yeah, I’m a cowboy!”’

How did a little girl who loved Westerns grow up into an icon of queer cinema? As she wins a Teddy award, the filmmaker talks about a life devoted to the movies

When Jenni Olson accepts the Berlin film festival's coveted Teddy award this month - for embodying, living and creating queer culture" - she will join the ranks of past recipients including John Hurt, Joe Dallesandro and Tilda Swinton. Me and Tilda, you know?" laughs the 58-year-old as she winces in the morning sunlight which is streaming into her home in Berkeley, California. With her youthful features, crisply side-parted hair and apostrophe-shaped eyes, she might have been drawn by Charles M Schulz.

When I started my little gay film series at the University of Minnesota in 1987," she says, I never could've imagined that one of the largest film festivals in the world would recognise my work." Along the way, she has been co-director of the San Francisco international lesbian and gay film festival as well as an influential curator, critic and archivist. She has taken her compilations of film trailers - including Homo Promo, Jodie Promo (Foster, that is) and the Jewish-themed Trailers Schmailers - to festivals around the world. Her vast collection of LGBT-themed film prints, along with the promotional materials that featured in her near-exhaustive collection The Queer Movie Poster Book, was acquired by Harvard last summer.