3 minute read
FILMS: AN INTRODUCTION
an Introduction...
Thanks for your support of the 2008 Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival. On behalf of the entire selection committee I am excited to introduce you to a wonderful, inspiring and sometimes challenging program of films Our goal is to provide a roster of films that will entertain, but that also reflects our community’s diversity and our struggles, our moments of anguish and triumph.
Due to the unexpected large number of entries with a spiritual theme or subject matter, this year we are featuring a special festival-wide theme entitled Focus On Religion. Our critically acclaimed opening night film, Save Me, is a provocative drama about a troubled gay man and the Christian retreat he is forced to attend. This intelligent film features Chad Allen and Judith Light in affecting performances.
Chasing The Devil: Inside the Ex-Gay Movement is a documentary chronicling the personal journeys of four people candidly discussing their experiences “changing” their sexual orientation from gay to straight through an intensive Christian-based therapy program. For The Bible Tells Me So, our Spirit & Place program co-sponsored by Central Christian Church, is a documentary featuring portraits of Christian families and the myriad ways that they have reconciled faith with “that certain” passage in the Christian Bible.
We are screening two timely and fascinating documentaries that explore the experiences of LGBT people born into the Islamic faith and tradition. A Jihad For Love surveys LGBT folks around the world who live as outcasts and reformers within their own religious communities. Be Like Others is set in a Tehran sex reassignment clinic and follows the stories of doctors and their patients living under a fundamentalist regime where the existence and practice of same sex love is forbidden by death, yet sex reassignment surgery is culturally mandated and sanctioned by the government as a merciful cure for homosexuality. Voodoo Woman is an unusual and touching personal documentary about Canadian filmmaker Carolina Valencia’s struggle for personal acceptance, a journey that leads her to the Afro-Cuban tradition of Santería, a religion that recognizes that gender is not always defined by our physical bodies.
Saturday our lineup of narrative features includes Were the World Mine, a magical and sexy musical about an all-boys high school performing a Shakespeare production, XXY, an accomplished Argentinean coming of age film concerning 15-year-old Alex, born an intersex child, who begins negotiating a sexual awakening without the benefit of a clearly defined gender identity. To Each Her Own by first time feature director Heather Tobin (profiled on page 22) is the story of a romantic bond between a lesbian Lothario and her married - and closeted – lover.
Sunday we are presenting a new film by director Casper Andreas, Between Love And Goodbye, a contemporary romance about a young French man and an American who struggle to make their relationship work when family drama threatens to tear them apart. The World Unseen is a beautiful and polished period drama set in 1950s Cape Town where, amongst the legally oppressed middle class of “coloreds”, cafe owner Amina falls in love with Miriam, causing an upheaval in both their lives and livelihoods. This festival we are thrilled to offer the Indianapolis premieres of four films with local connections, Committed by Indianapolis filmmaker Sarah Mynett, Princess Alisanne by Carmel director Jennifer Mathews, Ready? Ok! written and directed by LaPorte native Anthony Meindl, and Ordinary Couples by Indianapolis photographer Mark Lee, featuring interviews with 10 long term gay and lesbian couples from the Indianapolis area.
Purely for fun and mayhem, we are excited to present our first ever Late Night Saturday Fun House on two screens - Goth Night features a slick and twisted lesbian vampire short, In Twilight’s Shadow, as well as the latest in raunch from notorious Canadian director Bruce LaBruce. Otto; Or, Up With Dead People features the adventures of a “real” Gay Zombie mistakenly cast in a Gay Zombie movie when the filmmakers all assume he is “living in character” and indulge his strange behavior and tendency to defile fellow cast and crew members.
Drag Show! Hosted by Holly Luyah is our first ever foray into a shorts program full of drag drama and science fiction whose titles – Baby Jane? Canada’s Next Top Showgirl, Trans Neptune, Labels Are Forever, The Vicious and the Delicious – capture the flavor and frivolity we expect from our audience at this screening.
Thanks for your support and we hope you will enjoy the movies!
