Two Southern California film festivals focusing on films from and about members of communities of African descent are taking place during the coming days, and each feature LGBT-inclusive films and shorts. The San Diego Black Film Festival is going on right now, and the Los Angeles Pan African Film & Arts Festival kicks off next week. We've got your LGBT look at what will be screened here.
The film Blueprint, from director/writer Kirk Shannon-Butts, was chosen to appear at both fests. This film, set amidst the hustle of vibrant Harlem, is a modern-day love story of two college students, Keith and Nathan. They meet one day after class and embark upon a journey of discovery.
In other news, GLAAD Media Award-nominated Dirty Laundry expands to Atlanta, Baltimore and DC. Check it out!
As always, check out what's coming up and coming out in LGBT film at our exclusive cineQUEER database.
The furniture has been packed up and tucked safely away for another year. The beautifully-framed vintage movie posters of queer films shown at Sundance have been bubble wrapped until they can be displayed again. And the Queer Lounge sign has come down from its very prominent spot on Park City's Main Street. What we're left with is a strong sense of community, business cards and future opportunities.
Thousands of festival-goers, filmmakers, actors and industry types made their way through the doors of Queer Lounge for networking, educational panels, premiere parties and other mixers. Take a look at just a few of the familiar faces. . .
photos by dannakinsky.com
Special thanks to all the volunteers who came from all over the country to work long hours and fight off the cold, flu and other ailments passed around the Queer Lounge condo. Of course, none of this could be possible without the support of all of our sponsors, in particular Presenting Sponsor ABSOLUT VODKA, and Major Sponsors Bud Light and Fandango.
You don't have to be gay — just an ally and a friend — to appreciate the Queer Lounge. Filmmakers of Red, showcased at Sundance, held their premiere party at the lounge and stars such as Brian Cox, Tim Daly, the Dave Matthews Band and more partied until the wee hours.
photos by dannakinsky.com Red refers to a 14-year-old dog who is killed by troubled teens, only to have karma bite them in the ass when Red's owner (Brian Cox) seeks revenge. Reviewed here by Variety.
Today we are finally packing up our snow-stained clothes and heading back to warmer climes. We had a great time here and hope that our readers had fun living vicariously through us!
Check out the video below, highlighting just some of the best moments at Queer Lounge.
For those of you who spent any amount of time on the 2nd floor of Queer Lounge saw a series of movie trailers, GLAAD Media Awards coverage and great ads from ABSOLUT, Bud Light and Fandango running on a seemingly endless loop.
However, we've gotten requests to have the reel available in its entirety. No one says we don't listen to our readers! Check it out here: it's broken up into three parts.
Saw Otto; or Up With Dead People and it may best be described as a gay gore horror mockumentary with zombies and sex, but even that doesn’t do it justice. Director Bruce LaBruce's storytelling doesn't shy away from soft-core porn elements, which has put the out director on the underground map—if there were a map of the underground (that's an inside Otto joke). We hosted a Queer Lounge panel featuring the director earlier this week and he said then that his filmmaking is often at odds — he presumed — with GLAAD because his highly-sexual characters aren’t “positive” gay role models.
I was happy to have had a chance to meet the director and hopefully dispel his notion that GLAAD rebels against images that may not be considere "positive." He thanked me for letting him know that GLAAD’s mission is to see “fair, accurate and inclusive” representations of LGBT lives on the screen — whether those be zombies or otherwise. While Otto may not be for everyone (between the flesh-eating and the hints of gratuitous sex, plenty of people walked out of the screening), I found the script to be campy sharp (ripe for a midnight movie) and the story a not-so-veiled-metaphor of the violence gay people face every day.
Sure, LGBT serial killers, in films like Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs, once raised red flags at GLAAD and for good reason; in the absence of “positive” images it’s necessary to get upset over the “negative” ones. But we’re in a different time now, where there are more representations of our lives in all forms of media. There’s room now for good, bad and plenty of grey shades in between. When there are two dozen LGBT-inclusive films screening at Sundance and Slamdance, and another two dozen at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, there are going to be LGBT images that run the gamut from positive to negative stereotypes, and odds are that many will fall into the "fair, accurate and inclusive" bucket.
And with Otto, Bruce has created a sexy horror spoof inclusive of gay people, er, zombies.
Take a look at a clip of Bruce at our Queer Lounge panel:
An interesting side note: At the Queer Lounge panel I sat next to the adorable Jey Crisfar, who plays Otto (above) with delightful abandon. Bruce revealed how he cast Jey for this pivotal part: "I found him on MySpace."
The sudden and tragic loss of Heath Ledger is on the minds of many here in Park City.
As our friend Marc Malkin reports on E!'s Planet Gossip, Half-Life star Lee Marks (left) choked up when talking about the late actor at the Sundance premiere of his film. Marks says it was Ledger's role in Brokeback Mountain that helped inspire his own work in Half-Life, the story of a romance between an Asian American male and an African American male.
“I always told myself that when I was able to play a gay character, I'd feel that I had arrived as an actor,” Marks said while fighting back tears. “I read an article about how Heath developed his character and what the character felt. I watched Brokeback Mountain about 15 times.”
Co-star Leonardo Nam (above right), who grew up in Sydney, Australia, said he and Ledger hung out in the same social circle and shared an acting coach. “He was such a brave actor by the way he directed his own career, making choices such as Brokeback and now doing the Batman movie,” Nam said. "It's dangerous to reprise a role that has already been done by Jack Nicholson. It was incredible to choose that."
At the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) we are in the business of changing people's hearts and minds through what they see in the media. What people see at the movies or read in the newspaper shapes how they view and treat the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people around them, and we have a responsibility to make sure those images foster awareness, understanding and respect.
Visit CineQueer.org, the LGBT film database, and check out our weekly TV Gayed listing.
