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About
Schedule
Thursday, September 4
Friday, September 5
Saturday, September 6
Sunday, September 7
Monday, September 8
Tuesday, September 9
Wednesday, September 10
Thursday, September 11
Friday, September 12
Saturday, September 13
Sunday, September 14
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Saturday, September 6 (6 screenings)
1 pm She’s a Boy I Knew
(Gwen Haworth, Canada, video, 70min., 2007)
Community Co-Sponsor: Cream City Foundation, Parents, Family & Friends of Lesbians and Gays - Milwaukee (PFLAG)
Campus Co-Sponsor: UWM Women’s Resource Center
Community Co-Presenters: FORGE & Milwaukee LGBT Community Center
A fresh new film about the family-sized project of transitioning. Films about gender transition, like other coming out stories, now, wonderfully, comprise a genre: it’s a form of story we think we know. Which is why She’s A Boy I Knew feels so great: this documentary of Steven Haworth’s transition from biological male to female, from Steven to Gwen, feels remarkably fresh. Maybe it helps that Gwen made the movie herself.This auto-ethnographer is often listening to those around her, filling the film with the thoughts, feelings, resistances and developing understandings of her parents, her two sisters, a long time best friend and, most compelling, Malgosia, her wife. It also helps that Gwen has a (one-time) film student’s magpie resourcefulness, her video nicely textured with home movies, black-and-white student films, and sly, hand drawn animations. Or maybe it is just the community-sized scale of the project; as with Steven’s transition, this effort also benefits from supportive energies and investments. Whatever the causes, Gwen’s film about coming out and negotiating a new self – as a trans, as a relative to a trans - – is, like the best acts of self-declaration, a victory over expectations, a winningly original experience.
More information: http://www.outcast-films.com/films/sabik/index.html
Winner:
Audience Award , Best Documentary, 2008 InsideOut, Toronto’s LGBT Film Festival
with
S/he (Gina Pei Chi Chen, Taiwan, video, 12min., 2007) S/he deftly illuminates the struggle of one 12-year-old girl to follow her expected gender and cultural roles while exploring an emerging masculine nature.
3 pm An Island Calling
(Annie Goldson, New Zealand, in English & Fijian with English subtitles, video, 75min., 2008)
Campus Co-Sponsor: UWM Center for International Education
A riveting documentary about a horrifying hate crime in Fiji, and the histories of colonialism and white privilege, political unrest and intolerance, that it lays bare. On July 1, 2001, John Scott and his partner Greg Scrivener were brutally murdered in their home in Fiji. An Island Calling follows John’s brother Owen as he returns to Fiji to explore the myriad circumstances behind these awful deaths. The Scotts were long time Fijians, devoted to the island but also enjoying the relatively opulent life afforded whites there. John remained in Fiji, working as the director-general of the Fiji Red Cross, and witnessed the political crises that marked the end of colonial rule and the ongoing struggle for Fijian independence. Crimes are always manifestations of intersecting circumstances, and the stories Goldson reveals in this compelling, intriguing film have a restless, troubling complexity--involving the campaigns for post-colonial power, the influence of evangelical Christianity, family intrigue, and the challenges that contemporary LGBT Fijians face.
More information: http://www.op.co.nz/
5 pm La León
(Santiago Otheguy, Argentina, in Spanish with English subtitles, 78min., 2007)
Campus Co-Sponsor: UWM Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
A mesmerizing and troubling film—with the most captivating cinematography of the festival—about the isolation one gay man endures and cultivates living in the remote Argentine wild. A labyrinth of waterways defines the Parana Delta in northeastern Argentina: it is the source of industry for many and the main route of travel. A world of men—reed harvesters and fisherman, missionaries, illegal migrants, and thuggish capos—distant from conventional civilization, the region follows a kind of frontier justice, and all communication, including desire, is expressed bluntly. Among them is Alvaro, who lives quietly, fishing, harvesting reeds, once in a while traveling to the city to retrieve books he is hired to re-bind. Upon occasion, he hooks up with men from elsewhere traveling through. All the while he must endure the brutish El Turu, the captain of "La León,” the water-taxi that connects the river dwellers to the city. Sensing someone different, El Turu taunts Alvaro, his harassment masking perhaps a different kind of interest. With the exquisite gloom of his black-and-white widescreen imagery, his landscape here endowed with a grave, overwhelming authority, director Otheguy conjures a variation on Melville's Billy Budd, the eventual collision of the characters predestined manifestations of an isolation so imposing.
More information: http://musicboxfilms.com/laleon/
Winner:
Jury Award, Best Film, 2008 Turin LGBT Film Festival
Special Mention, Cinematography, 2007 Berlin International Film Festival
7 pm Butch Jamie
(Michelle Ehlen, USA, video, 86min., 2007)
Campus Co-Sponsor: UWM Women’s Resource Center
Community Co-Presenter: Lesbian Alliance, FORGE & Project Q’s Ladies Lounge
The festival’s funniest film--and the cat film of the year--shares the travails of a butch dyke and struggling actress who dares to be herself when cast as a man. Actress Jamie Klein masks her butch self in femme disguise whenever she goes on acting auditions. To no avail: she can’t get a part whatever the drag. Even her arch nemesis Harold--her bi roommate’s cat, also an actor--gets cast more often than she does. But on the day when she dares to read for a part as her bad butch self, she gets cast--as a dude! Named Steve! After initial outrage, the actress in her accepts. Complications ensue when the film’s costume mistress, herself a lapsed lesbian, falls for him/her, believing him/her to be a man. Writer, director, editor, soundtrack artist, and star Michelle Ehlen has perfected a low-key, slowly simmering mode of story telling, unfurling a deadpan manner that tickles the film’s absurdities into erupting hilariously. And the movie is a stealth romantic comedy--in screwball drag – with the longings of the heart introducing and resolving themselves with an unanticipated sweetness.
More information: http://www.butchjamie.com/
Winner:
Jury Award, Best Narrative Feature, 2007 Chicago Reeling Film Festival
Best Actress, 2007 OUTFEST, Los Angeles LGBT Film/Video Festival
9 pm Save Me
(Robert Cary, USA, video, 96min., 2007)
Community Co-Sponsor: Art Bar-Riverwest
Community Co-Presenter: Metropolitan Community Church
Community Center Spiritual Wellness & Milwaukee GAMMA
A star-studded romantic drama about a troubled gay man sent to a Christian retreat to be “cured.” After yet another binge, Mark, troubles manifesting as addictions, is checked into Genesis House by an at-wit’s-end brother. Run by Gayle and Ted, a married couple of a determined, ideological compassion, Genesis House works to “cure” young men of the “gay affliction” through spiritual guidance and behavior control. Mark is not immune to the camaraderie among his new companions: he overcomes his initial resistance, bonding with his fellow residents--Scott, his mentor, in particular. As the two grow closer, however, their developing relationship unmoors the stability of Genesis House and threatens the tenets of Gayle and Jim’s teaching. With the ready warmth of the engaging Chad Allen and Robert Gant as the easygoing leads and with Judith Light in a compelling performance, Save Me is a most watchable, compelling drama, its adherence to formula both effective and satisfying. Interested in generating dialogue, the film offers no villains: each character, gay man or missionary, irresolute or misguided, stumbles in their hope for some form of solace.
More information: http://www.firstrunfeatures.com/saveme_synopsis.html#
11 pm The Lollipop Generation
(G.B. Jones, Canada, video, 80min., 2008)
Campus Co-Sponsor: UWM Women’s Resource Center
Community Co-Presenter: Queer Zine Archive Project
A DIY and punk lollapalooza featuring kids on the lam by legendary artist, filmmaker, zine pioneer, and musician G. B. Jones (who helped start the Queercore movement in Toronto in the 1980s). The Lollipop Generation was shot and edited on Super-8 over a period of 15 years -- the result is an image both beat-up and marvelous, mirroring the lives of the film’s characters. It stars a gang of under-age porn stars and hustlers, all refugees from phobic parents. The juvenile delinquents shoplift, get busy in public places, and search for their faces on milk cartons, all the while armed with lollipops of various sizes and shapes. The “Dick and Jane” dialogue and candy-sweet delivery belies the undercurrent of hostility towards adult hypocrisy. The kids are pursued by “playground pervs” and guys with video cameras claiming to be artists. One of their exploiters, who meets a boy outside a Catholic school, is played memorably by Vaginal Crème Davis.
View Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeMQlzX0CbM
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