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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE MARCH 19, 1993

ENTERTAINMENT

Cleveland Film Festival has gay film series

The 17th Cleveland International Film Festival, being held in downtown Cleveland from April 15-25 at Hoyts Tower City Cinemas, is showcasing for the first time a special section of gay and lesbian films.

The Cleveland Film Society is presenting between 50 and 60 contemporary international feature films, along with dozens of short films by professional and student filmmakers. This year, the film festival will include special sections of new films from eastern and western European countries, films for families, American independent features and both features and shorts by Ohio filmmakers.

Kicking off this year's film festival will be an exciting premiere screening of a major new feature film on April 15. A gala dinner of international favorites, attended by several hundred corporate and community leaders, arts patrons and film-lovers will follow the screening on the Avenue at Tower City Center. A complete schedule detailing all films to be shown will be available in mid-March. For copy of the schedule, to order tickets, or for any additional information, call 349-FILM.

Academy Awards party

The Film Society is also hosting an Academy Awards party at Fagan's in the Flats during the awards telecast on Monday, March 19.

The party will feature a ballot contest where participants can vote on their favorite films, actors and actresses. The person who comes closest to matching the Academy's choices will receive an Executive Producer package for two, which includes tickets to all Cleveland Film Festival films including the opening night gala, valet parking, and access to the Ritz-Carlton hospitality suite.

The party begins at 7:00 pm. Tickets are $18 in advance, $20 at the door, $15 for film society members. Proceeds benefit the Cleveland Film Society.

The lesbian and gay films:

Amazing Grace

Directed by Amos Gutman Wednesday, April 21 5:00 pm Thursday, April 22 6:45 pm

Rich with melancholia and sardonic humor, this multi-charactered drama centers on Jonathan, a young gay man in Tel Aviv. Despite a spectacularly dysfunctional home life (mom into Scientology, brother into Arab-hating, sister into abortion clinics each week) and thwarted affair, Jonathan clings to a romantic view of the world. He's in love--he just doesn't know with whom. The prime candidate seems to be Thomas, a downhearted emigre just returned from AIDS-ravaged New York. Jonathan has nothing but hope, while Thomas has lost all of his; writer-director Gutman's scrutiny of the men and their respective families is hauntingly emotive and won First Prize at the 1992 Jerusalem International Film Festival. In Hebrew with English subtitles.

Changing Our Minds: The Story Of Dr. Evelyn Hooker

Directed by Richard Schmiechen Monday, April 19 7:15 pm Tuesday, April 20 3:15 pm

It wasn't so long ago that electro-shock treatments, lobotomies and castration served as the medical community's "very latest" cures for homosexuality. Such was the scientific climate in the 1940's when

psychologist Evelyn Hooker began the first study of gays and lesbians done outside of sanitariums and prisons. Her goal was to do what Sigmund Freud couldn't--convince the American Psychiatric Association that

The Dead Boys' Club

homosexualty was not a disease. This compilation of interviews and archival footage shows how Dr. Hooker overcame dogmatic prejudice with logic and determination; it also conveys her humane and outstandingly compassionate personality, a role model no matter which way one interprets "family values." Narrated by Patrick Stewart.

Everybody Out!

Four gay and lesbian shorts First Base

Directed by Megan Siler Billy Turner's Secret Directed by Michael Mayson A Certain Grace Directed by Sandra Nellelbeck The Dead Boys' Club Directed by Mark Christopher

Coming out is always a process, sometimes a struggle. Here, four filmmakers descrive a variety of experiences. First Base is a coming of age story about two young teenage girls who try to seduce a couple of boys. Trouble is, these boys are pretty dull, and only sort of cute. Liza never makes it to first base with Doug, but that's okay.

Billy Turner's Secret addresses the

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struggle between two friends trying to come to terms with their sexual differences. This new short is a hip, energetic comedy about street attitudes and honest friendship. A Certain Grace is the story of Zelda, a woman comfortably settled in a life with her loving but self-absorbed boyfriend. During her work on a photographic essay she develops a friendship with Alice, who helps Zelda discover her creative power and her sexual identity. The award-winning The Dead Boys' Club is a haunting, sexy and humorous exploration of a young man's coming out, and an homage to the generation that paved the way--sometimes with their lives--before him.

Four More Gay and Lesbian Shorts An All American Story

Directed by John Keitel Things We Said Today Directed by John Miller-Monzon Deaf Heaven

Directed by Steve Levitt Glasses Break

Directed by Justin Buchanan

An All American Story is a personal documentary that examines the process of reidentification which a gay man has to undergo after a "typical" heterosexual upbringing. In Things We Said Today, a young woman living in New York can't pay the rent, has another fight with her lover, and loses another job. A brief encounter with, and uncertain attraction to, an automechanic wanna-be brings her world into focus, if only for a moment. Just inches away from an Oscar nomination earlier this year, Deaf Heaven was a highlight at this year's Sundance Film Fistival. It is a poignant and visually dazzling film that offers a glimmer of hope and purpose to those left behind in these troubled times of AIDS. Glasses Break is a stylish and touching personal reflection by a lesbian woman about an ex-lover. Through recollecting this relationship she is able to exorcise the lingering power it holds over her life.

Massillon

Directed by William E. Jones Sunday, April 18 12:30 pm

Monday, April 19 3:15 pm

Combining painterly images, literary prose, ponderous timing and dry humor, William Jones, in his acclaimed first feature film, renders his impressions of growing up gay in a small Ohio town not far from here. Says Jones, "There is no dramatic action in the conventional sense. The narrator tells autobiographical stories that cannot be recreated; it up to the spectator to imagine the drama against a backdrop of empty Midwestern landscapes." From the first fumbling encounters in a truck-stop

toilet to his decision to leave the Midwest, Jones' accounts lead to a thorough exploration hf how homophobia and ignorance have come to be embedded in our very language. The poetry and power fo Massillon compelled the L.A. Weekly to name it the best documentary of the year.

Nitrate Kisses

A film by Barbara Hammer Wednesday, April 21 3:30 pm Thursday, April 22 7:15 pm

For many years, filmmaker Barbara Hammer has been creating provocative, ofter experimental, images. In this, her first feature documentary, she has assembled an intense and exceptionally vital collage which relates a history which has hertofore been repressed or distorted. In 1990, while researching at the George Eastman Archive in Rochester, N.Y., Hammer discovered what may have been one of the earliest gay films, Lot in Sodom. Utilizing outtakes and clips, interwoven with an assortment of other materials, including footage from German narrative feature films of the thirties, interviews, period music and shots of three seperate couples making love, she offers a different set of images about lesbian and gay life than those which have previously emerged. In so doing, she not only challenges the dominant ideology of the heterosexual society, but confronts powerfully and graphically our images of sexual and erotic love.

This is not a liberal film attempting to assimilate its eroticism into a safe and accepted world. It is in fact subversive and adamant in its efforts to force us to see what we've managed to avoid for so many years. Hammer is not, however, just an ideolgue. Her artistry is striking: sometimes formal, but more ofter associative and construsive. Nitrate Kisses is a representation which operats on many levels, including allegorical, historical and erotic. The filmmaker also sees it as an invitation to elicit personal history. It is without question a statement about sexual mores which will remani impressed on all who view it.

Silverlake Life: The View From Here Directed by Tom Joslin

and Peter Friedman Friday, April 16 4:45 pm Sunday, April 18 6:15 pm

Behind the cold statistics, rote obituaries and sloganeering of the AIDS epidemic are genuine human faces. This shattering documentary focuses on two of them. When filmmaker Tom Joslin and his companion Mark Massi were both diagnosed with the disease they turned to herbal remedies, a channeller--and their camera, to record the terminal phase of their fight for life.

After their deaths Peter Friedman, Joslin's former student, edited the resulting forty hours of footage into this chronicle. No mere pathology, this is a first-person testament of love between two people put at the ultimate trial and, in fact, transcending mortality. Seldom does any work have impact of Silverlake Life, difficult to watch, harder to ignore, impossible to forget.

Thank God I'm A Lesbian Directed by Laurie Colber and Dominique Cardona

And thank her for this documentary, which lets a diverse assortment of women speak their minds without being shouted down by the Phil Donahue/Jerry Springer studio audience. The revelation is that lesbians are not a monolithic bloc but hold varied, often contradictory views on bisexuality, outing, S & M, fidelity, and feminism. Your preconceptions will be challenged. The voices include writers Dionne Brand and Nicole Brossard, and "Queer Theorist” Julis Creet.