OCTOBER
18-27, 2002
Introduction
Index of Films
10/18, Friday
10/19, Saturday
10/20, Sunday
10/21, Monday
10/22, Tuesday
10/23, Wednesday
10/24, Thursday
10/25, Friday
10/26, Saturday
10/27, Sunday
Print Version
CPArts
Queer Notions
Reel Affirmations Festival
19SATURDAY
Georgie Girl
Annie Goldson and Peter Wells' documentary focuses on Georgina Beyer, the first transsexual to be elected to a national political office. The 69-minute film follows Beyer from her childhood as farm boy George to her days as a transvestite exotic dancer to her election to the New Zealand Parliament in 1999.
At noon at the Goethe Institut.
Hand on the Pulse
For co-founding New York's Lesbian Herstory Archive, Joan Nestle might have expected to be a feminist icon. In the early '80s, however, she found herself on the "enemy list" of feminism's anti-porn wing, which objected to her frank expression of her sexuality. "I wanted the body to be present," she explains of her decision to do public readings from her erotic fiction wearing a black slip. In Joyce Warshow's documentary, Nestle is depicted as both her own woman and the empathetic child of a widowed, cash-short mother whose own sexual history much of it unpleasant or worse wasn't revealed until after her death. As a '40s latchkey kid whose elementary school teacher denounced her kind, Nestle had a revelation: Authority figures don't know what they're talking about. That moment, according to Hand on the Pulse, has driven Nestle's life and work, inspiring her to doubt common wisdom and challenge both "friends" and foes.
At 2 p.m. at the Goethe Institut.
Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay
Growing up in Los Angeles in the early 20th century, Harry Hay didn't even have a word for what he was. Eventually, though, he was to help establish three organizations that gave him and many others an identity: the Mattachine Society, the Gay Liberation Front, and the Radical Faeries. As a young actor, Hay met other gay men and had an affair with Will Geer, a fellow Marxist who would later play Grandpa Walton. But unable to find a sense of community in the subterranean gay world, he joined the Communist Party, married a leftist female friend, and fathered two children. In 1948, he founded the Mattachine Society (named for a 13th- century Italian jesters group), which brought "hope along the wind" to gays everywhere, in part by mounting the first successful legal defense of a gay man busted on trumped-up charges. Ironically, Hay was forced to quit the Communists for being gay, and he was later expelled from the Mattachine Society for being a Marxist. As Eric Slade's crisp documentary shows, Hay made some missteps but never lost his way.
At 3 p.m. at the Goethe Institut.
Stranger Inside
American director Cheryl Dunye's follow -up to her film Watermelon Woman explores notions of family and self through the lives of two black women serving life sentences in a state prison.
At 3 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre. Free.
The Ghost of Roger Casement
Alan Gilsenan's fascinating documentary explains who Roger Casement was and why you probably didn't know. A Victorian-age Irish orphan, Casement went to work for a Liverpool shipping line as a teenager and was soon a West Africa expert. When British authorities began hearing stories about atrocities committed by Belgian rubber barons in the Congo, Casement was assigned to investigate. He wrote a devastating report that brought reform to that country and then did much the same thing in Brazil, whose rubber- harvesting industry was as brutal as its African model. Knighted as a humanitarian, Casement returned to Ireland, where he noticed too many similarities between his homeland and the European colonies of Africa and South America. Radicalized, he attempted to enlist German aid for the 1916 Irish rebellion. Casement was captured and hanged as a traitor, but even in death he remained a problem for the British government. To transform him from martyr to "pervert," agents quietly circulated Casement's "Black Diary," accounts of a gay secret life that some supporters believe was forged. The film's punch line is the latest forensic study of the journals, but Gilsenan also shows how Casement's memory is being reclaimed, regardless of what anyone thinks about his diaries.
At 4 p.m. at the Goethe Institut.
The Business of Fancydancing
A mix of fiction and autobiography in the form of a mock documentary, Smoke Signals scripter Sherman Alexie's directorial debut is the fractured tale of a successful gay writer who feels more at home with his lover in Seattle than on the reservation where he grew up. When a childhood friend dies, Seymour Polatkin (Evan Adams) makes his first trip home in years. Some of his old pals receive him angrily, however, accusing him of abandoning them and stealing their lives for his writing. Things are better off the rez, where Seymour is greeted with adulation at readings, although his successes are interrupted by clips from an interview with an angry African-American woman who finally calls him a "whore." The film will likely interest Alexie's fans, but the direction and some of the acting are shaky, and the agenda is a little too self-serving.
At 5 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre.
Queens Don't Lie
Director Rosa von Praunheim returns to Ovo, Bev, Tima, and Ichgola, the drag activists of Lady's Envy and self-titled Berlin "queens" she worked with previously in I Am My Own Woman, The Einstein of Sex, and Neurosia. The quartet was the Cockettes of Germany, for whom queening being boldly who they imagined themselves to be was a political act as well as a psychosexual performance. ("Our suffering must be authentic," one says as they shimmy into cheap organza.) For them, dressing up as ugly, vulgar women frumps in slippers with dirty makeup and blue wigs, epicene nuns, and maiden aunts was a provocation; even their families complained that they weren't pretty enough girls. The men's stories are nothing new: Von Praunheim listens as they separately recount coming out, first loves, struggles with family and God, finding each other in the pansexual paradise of Berlin, and the breakup of their union as three of the members face life with HIV. But it's a charming portrait the men are witty, wise, and honest, and their seriousness as artists is Teutonically solemn. As a snapshot of sexual discovery in Europe at the dawn of the age of AIDS and queer activism, Queens Don't Lie is rich, engrossing, and even educational you'll be happy to hear that the German term for tits is Titten.
At 6 p.m. at the Goethe Institut.
Ruthie & Connie: Every Room in the House
During the first few minutes of this documentary, you might wonder why you're watching somebody else's home video. Ruthie Berman and Connie Kurtz, a Jewish lesbian couple, are introduced in Florida in 1999, discussing their "colors" and sorting through old photographs together. This is the year they celebrate their 25th anniversary, and before you get to decide that you don't exactly care, the film sweeps you into the drama of their time together. Although there's nothing remarkable about a lesbian couple in 2002, the world was a much different place in '70s Brooklyn, where Berman and Kurtz met. The gravity of the women's realization that they were in love with each other at the time, both were married with children, and both still are practicing Jews is expressed when Berman says, "When I heard that I was a lesbian, I wanted the ground to open up and for me to die." (She then adds, "And who [first] called me that? My now ex-husband.") Berman long denied her attraction to Kurtz, even after they moved in together though into a two-bedroom apartment complete with cute plaques to designate each other's room. Eventually, however, the guidance counselor fought the New York City Board of Education for domestic-partner benefits and won, and she and Kurtz also started a PFLAG chapter in Florida. Incorporating interviews with both lesbians and Jews who were inspired by Berman and Kurtz's courage and outspokenness, Ruthie & Connie turns out to be a look into others' home life that's an inspiration instead of a bore.
At 7 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre.
Endgame
Sadism and bathos make strange bed fellows in writer-director Gary Wicks' Endgame, a melodramatic thriller about the plight of an English rent boy. Tom (convincingly played by doe-eyed Daniel Newman) is kept in an icily modernist flat by a married gangster who shares his boytoy with a depraved cop (John Benfield) in return for purloined narcotics. Both men subject Tom to agonizing rough sex, and when he is caught in a life-threatening situation, he prevails upon his neighbors, a heterosexual American couple, to hide him in their country cottage. But the demonic cop trails him, leading to a bloody climax. Wicks stages the sadomasochistic sequences with nasty relish, intercutting them with idealized, slo-mo flashbacks to Tom's relatively untroubled childhood, complete with bubble-machine effects. In the bucolic rural scenes, shot through frozen- broccoli-green filters, Tom is introduced to the joys of heterosexuality by his host's sympathetic wife (Toni Barry, nasal and stiff). None of Tom's same-sex encounters is consensual all involve physical force, including an incestuous rape but his lovemaking with Barry is presented in swooningly romantic lap- dissolve images. The film's implicit homophobia leads one to question its suitability as part of a film festival affirming the gay experience.
At 9 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre.
Don't Ask Don't Tell
Director Doug Miles has taken a tattered print of Killers From Space, a soporific grade-Z 1954 sci-fi movie featuring Peter Graves and directed by W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder's ungifted brother), and transformed it into an often deliciously daffy satirical comedy. Overdubbing new dialogue, as Woody Allen did in 1966's What's Up Tiger Lily?, Miles reconfigures the original's Cold War plot a dead scientist, revived by aliens, is commanded to steal atomic secrets into a farce about extraterrestrials from the planet Uranus plotting to turn our planet's population gay. Sprinkled with inserts of newly shot footage, Don't Ask Don't Tell casts a wide net for its comic targets, snagging the usual suspects (the Bushes, J. Edgar Hoover) as well as a few sacred icons (Bill Clinton, Barney Frank). Although it runs out of steam in the final quarter-hour, proving that no amount of retrofitting can transfigure Killers From Space's catchpenny turgidness, this inspired, zany film is one of the festival's highlights.
At 11 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre.
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