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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE March 9, 20

eveningsout

Film festival

Continued from page 9 Letters to Uranus

The program guide for the film festival refers to this documentary as the "Northeast Ohio answer" to My Dinner with Andre. It is an apt, if not accurate, analogy. In My Dinner with Andre, the audience is a thirdperson observer, a fly on the wall, if you will. In this film, the audience is a participant in the conversation.

Lenny Pinna, who did just about every-

Schneebaum, a painter-cum-anthropologist who lived in the jungles of Peru and New Guinea with tribes of head-hunters and cannibals.

He ate human flesh, he learned about their cultures, and he interacted with them as a gay man, which perhaps adds the most interesting twist to the story. The religious right may want you to believe that homosexuality is a sign of a declining civilization, but most indigenous peoples around the world have some form of it.

How did Schneebaum get along with the tribes he met? Watch the film.

thing on this film, apparently carried the Longtime Companion

video camera around on his shoulder as he spoke to Tedd Burr, a true grande dame of the Cleveland theater scene going back decades. We can just hear Pinna's voice when he says something; Burr, on the other hand, comes through loud and clear.

This isn't really the type of film someone reviews; you can only come up with comparisons, and hope they do the movie justice.

For instance, it could be a poor man's Naked Civil Servant: instead of a British expatriate, we have a native Clevelander, and instead of acting out scenes from a life, we have them described to us.

It could be a gay Arsenic and Old Lace, only without old ladies, Cary Grant, or anyone being poisoned.

What it is, in actuality, is a living document of the life of an interesting person, an archive of local lore. Instead of piecing together Burr's life after his death, Pinna let Burr do it himself while still alive. As Mr. Spock used to say, fascinating. Keep the River on Your Right

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Norman Rene's 1990 drama, which got Bruce Davison a Golden Globe award in addition to his Oscar nomination, chronicled the lives of a group of friends during the AIDS epidemic, from its first flickers around the vestiges of people's lives to international pandemic.

The festival is bringing this film back as part of its 25th anniversary retrospective, and it is a marvelous choice. Witty, emotional and most of all sincere, this movie is, to this day, one of the most powerful films about AIDS and its effect on those who deal with it. This is all before protease inhibitors and cocktails, before a widespread view of AIDS as a manageable, if chronic, disease. In the time frame of the narrative, AIDS was a death sentence, and there weren't decades of appeals to be heard before it was carried out.

As another side note, Davison should have won the Academy Award for his performance in this film. He has had many roles along the course of his career, but none with the sheer scope of humanity that he displays here. Of course, awards could have been easily and deservedly handed out to much of the cast, but that is not the way things work.

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Nico and Dani

Dani (Fernando Ramallo) invites his friend Nico (Jordi Vilches) to stay at his house for a while during their summer break. Dani's parents are away on vacation, and it will just be the two boys (and Dani's cook and his tutor) for the summer. At least, that's what he hopes.

Dani and Nico, when there are no girls around, engage in krampack, the subtitle of the film and an apparently generic term they invented for... helping each other out. The problem is, Nico is trying to score with a girl, and Dani is trying to score more krampack.

Love, jealousy, underage sex, drinking, smoking and use of marijuana infuse director and co-writer Cesc Gay's film with an odd air, a cross between pedophiliac voyeurism and innocence. It's been compared to Beautiful Thing, but about the only thing the two films have in common are teenagers. Despite any strange aftertaste it might leave, it is, nonetheless, a worthwhile film. Let's face it, it's always interesting to see a Spanish gay film not directed by Pedro

Almodovar.

Scout's Honor

Tom Shepherd's documentary on the movement inside and outside of the Boy Scouts of America to dismantle the BSA's ban on gays in scouting won big at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and it is making its Ohio debut at the CIFF.

The film looks at the organization Scouting For All, as well as current and former Boy Scouts of all ages, asking the question, since when does "morally straight" mean "heterosexual?" And why, if a Boy Scout is always honest, are people being penalized for telling the truth?

Trembling Before G-d

Another Star Trek reference: To boldly go where no film has gone before, into the lives of some of the most torn people on Earth, gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews. Sandi Simcha DuBowski takes a look at a group of people previously ignored. There

Big Eden

are often stories about people growing up in fundamentalist Christian households who finally, after years of struggling with their sexual orientation, come out of the closet.

Imagine the same situation, if you will, only with long beards, earlocks, gefilte fish, and lots of shouting in Hebrew and Yiddish. It's not a pretty picture, is it? Yet this is what gay and lesbian Orthodox and Hasidic Jews must face, growing up in communities that can be as strident about "what God wants" as Jerry Falwell.

The spelling in the title, by the way, is a reference to the proscription in Jewish Orthodoxy against spelling any of the various names of the divinity. Orthodox Jews have pseudonyms, if you will, for all the referential terms for God in the Bible, like adoshem instead of adonai. They actually both mean something in Hebrew, but here endeth the lesson.

Absolut Best

The crowning glory of Ten Percent Cinema this year (it's arguable, true, but who is writing this article?) is Absolut Best, an evening of film clips with the Daily Show film critic Frank DeCaro, whose gay spin on movies adds hilarity to an already hysterical show, and makes everyone question Jon Stewart's sexual orientation.

DeCaro will show film clips selected by online and live polling in 1999 by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation showcasing the most popular gay, lesbian and transgendered films. Throughout, DeCaro will add his own commentary to the clips. If his appearances on Comedy Central are any indication, it will be an event to remember. The only problem is, it's one night only, at 7 pm on Saturday, March 17.

For its silver anniversary, the Cleveland International Film Festival has outdone itself. At this rate, there might not be enough really good gay and lesbian films for next year's festival.

See Charlie's Calendar on page 8 for show times.

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