Milwaukee LGBT Film & Video Festival

Join us for screenings the first Thursday of the month. Monthly Screenings are held the first Thursday of every month at the UWM Union Theatre unless otherwise noted. Get ready: the 2012 Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival will be our 25th Anniversary!

Watch this space for information about our upcoming screenings on May 3rd and at PrideFest on June 9-10.

June

Join us at Milwaukee PrideFest

Milwaukee PrideFest celebrates its 25th Anniversary this June 8, 9, and 10 and the Festival will be uncorking screenings on the evenings of June 8 & 9 at the Stonewall Stage. To commemorate the occasion we will be sharing some videos (late 80's - 1987-88 mostly) that reflect the era from which PrideFest emerged. Work by Isaac Julien, John Greyson, Barbara Hammer, Stuart Marshall, and all sorts of cable-access activists. Also to screen: a video George Kuchar made in Milwaukee in 1988!

Work to screen includes: This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement (Isaac Julien, 1988); Neil Bartlett: Pedagogue (Stuart Marshall, 1988); T.V. Tart (Barbara Hammer, 1988); The ADS Epidemic (John Greyson, 1987); Angry Initiatives, Defiant Strategies (John Greyson with Deep Dish TV, 1988: this show produced for alternative television is a compilation of bulletins from cable access shows across the globe); Motivation of the Carcasoids (George Kuchar, with UWM Film Department students, 1988) and more!

And be sure to stop by our Booth and enter a drawing to win a Festival pass! (Wanna help staff the booth? See VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES)

August

Thursday, August 2, 7pm
UWM Union Theatre: Watch this space!!!!

September

Thursday, September 20, 7pm
UWM Union Theatre: And here, keep your eyes over here as well!

October

October 18-21
Oriental & UWM Union Theatres 2nd Annual 25th Anniversary Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival

November

Thursday, November 1, 7pm
UWM Union Theatre: This space you too shall watch!

Thursday, November 29, 7pm
UWM Union Theatre

December

Please note: Our December screening will occur on the LAST THURSDAY of November so that the Festival can participate in the UWM LGBT Studies program's Sex and Gender Spectra Conference. Details forthcoming!

Pedro Almodóvar's 1987 melodrama of sexual attraction starring Antonio Banderas & Carmen Maura.

Two works -- one pixelvision video and one feature film (shown, alas, on DVD) -- about girls and therefore two works about power.

Former Milwaukeean and then 19 years old, Sadie Benning (still the It Wasn't Love

city's queerest artist) conjures, in the privacy of a bedroom and in a bravura panorama of queer play, a romantic road movie for herself and her girlfriend that arcs through a mix-tape of available bad-ass postures (including that of The Bad Seed's Rhoda Penmark.) "We didn't need Hollywood," she declares. "We were Hollywood. She was the most glamorous woman I'd ever seen and that made us both famous."

And get a load of the uncheckable power of the murderous 11 year-old Rhoda Penmark in Mervyn LeRoy's 1956 film adaptation of the popular stage thriller The Bad Seed. Decked out in little girl drag, this little girl wields childishness lethally as she seduces and kills to get what she wants. (If she grew up, she'd be Sharon Stone's Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct.) So powerful is she here, that only a had-enough god can stop her, in the first of the film's two endings. Also a scoldy treatise on single parent family dynamics, with Freud casually deployed and nature-vs-nuture debated, The Bad Seed is either broad camp or transgressively queer -- or maybe both. But like Rhoda Penmark, the film was born that way.

We Who Are Sexy: The Whirlwind History of Transgender Images in Cinema
(presentation with generously shared clips)

A whirlwind ride through the history of transgender images in film. A smart combination of on-stage conversation and film clips, this program showcases an amazing array of rarely seen tidbits ranging from the bad old days of guys in dresses and pathological trannies up through the empowered self-representations of the early ‘90s and into the hot transgender best of the 21st century. Featuring clips from such rarely seen films as Summer Vacation: 1999, We Who Are Sexy and the Outfest Legacy Project restored gem, Queens at Heart to more recent favorites like By Hook or By Crook— this informative and entertaining exploration is not to be missed!

The bracing new documentary about Vito Russo, tireless activist for the LGBT community and the cultural critic
who wrote The Celluloid Closet.

We Were Here is the first documentary to take a deep and reflective look back at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco. It explores how that city’s inhabitants were affected by, and how they responded to, that calamitous epidemic.