April 13, 2001

Wexner festival features a wide variety of GLBT films

by Kaizaad Kotwal

The Wexner Center for the Arts and Ohio State University's Office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Student Services are presenting their annual GLBT film festival on the final weekend in April. The three-day festival features eight works ranging from shorts and features, dramas and documentaries, animation and live action to foreign and American films.

From the Edge of the City Thursday, April 26, 7 pm

This evening's feature is preceded by two short films.

Rick and Steve, the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World (8 minutes) is a unique and irreverent piece that uses Lego pieces in unintended ways.

Rick and Stever the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World

A Summer Dress (15 minutes), by French director François Ozon, tells the tale of a teenager's holiday encounter with a stranger on a beach.

up reinforcing the very same duplicities.

However it is worth watching for its fresh and stark performances, particularly by Stathis Papadopoulos, who plays Sasha with a blunt frankness, an edgy rawness and a sharp sense of confidence. Dimitri Papoulidis plays the pimp Giorgios with brute strength, and Theodora Tzimou plays Natasha as an overworked whore with quiet desperation and world-weary resignation.

I.K.U.

Friday, April 27, 7 pm

Taiwanese-born director Shu Lea Cheang will be on hand to present I.K.U., described as a "Japanese scifi porn feature."

This film is a reworking of the classic Blade Runner, where a future cybersexual universe is populated by replicates rampantly roaming in search of orgasmic experiences to further the cause of science.

The film is accompanied by a throbbing techno soundtrack that underscores this unique tale of transgenderedness.

The screening of I.K.U. will be preceded

Constantinos Gianaris' From the Edge of by a free reception sponsored by OSU's

the City (98 minutes) takes place in the seedy underbelly of Athens, where male and female prostitution is a fact of life. The realities of the flesh trade are further compounded by issues of racism and ethnic strife.

The film centers around Sasha, an immigrant from Kazakhastan who finds himself selling his body to men, all the while dreaming of a stable future with his 15 year old sweetheart Elenista.

The film blends gritty realism with a stark documentarian's style. It is rough around the edges, giving it a coarseness that reflects the rough-and-tumble existences of Sasha and his cadre of lost youths. Like young people all over the world who find ennui in everything they do, Sasha and his friends are searching for the ultimate high, the fast buck and a series of instant gratifications that are simply not instant enough.

Sasha comes into contact with Giorgios, a despicable pimp who has become bored with his prize whore Natasha, a woman he expects to satisfy 30 to 40 clients a day. Giorgios plans to farm Natasha off to some other pimps and he leaves her in Sasha's care while he works out the deal. With disastrous results, Sasha ends up falling in love with her.

The film brilliantly captures the rootlessness of these ethnic immigrants in Greece and it chillingly depicts the self-annihilating boredom of these young people as they smoothly transition from rough and soulless sex to smoking pot to experimenting with other drugs.

It is also a brilliant depiction of the tensions between sexuality, machismo and homophobia in the Eastern European cultures. These boys believe that they are simply providing a service, and that having sex with men does not a homosexual make. These contradictions of false machismo and misguided notions of sexual aggression and gender dominance are very starkly portrayed.

However, the film plays right into these stereotypes by showing the heterosexual sex rather graphically and distancing itself from any real maleto-male contact. While the film seems to be critiquing certain falsehoods and hypocrisies of sexuality in the Eastern European context, it cinematically ends

GLBT Student Services in the Wexner Center's lower lobby. The reception will start at 6 p.m.

Live Nude Girls Unite! Friday, April 27, 9:15 pm

Live Nude Girls Unite! (70 minutes), a film by Vicki Funari and Julia Query, is a powerful story about San Francisco's Lusty Lady Theatre, the first unionized strip club.

Query, a lesbian writer and stand-

From the

Edge of the City

Chutney Popcorn

up comedian, worked at the club to pay her rent. She decided to document the strippers' move to unionize. The film is a stirring compilation of the women's stories, as they search for dignity and basic worker's rights in an industry rife in debasement.

The film blends vivid documentary with deeply personal and often comic accounts with some stand-up comedy and comic book style animation. The film takes us into uncharted territory and the result is an arresting and compelling look at the world's oldest profession. Most compelling in the film is Query's relationship with her own mother as they try to resolve opposing views about Julia's career choice.

This is a well-paced, intelligently made documentary definitely worth a close viewing.

Chutney Popcorn

Saturday, April 28, 2 p.m.

The short film Breaking the Glass (25 minutes) precedes the main feature. It is a fast-paced documentary about the women's pro basketball league that includes Columbus' own three-time champions, the Quest. Filmmaker Nisha Ganatra also stars in the acclaimed Chutney Popcorn (92 minutes), a tale of motherhood and Indian immigrants living in New York.

Ganatra plays Reena, an Indian-American lesbian who has always lived in the shadow of her perfect sister, who is married to an American man but unable to conceive a child. Reena decides to carry the baby, all the while hoping that she will gain respect in her traditional mother's eyes and help her sister along the way. But Reena also has to contend with her commitment-phobic girlfriend.

The film, on one hand, is a tried-and-true-tale of east meets west. On the other hand, it struggles with the changing definitions of family, self and parenthood in increasingly

an

global culture. It

also nicely depicts the generation gap. Chutney Popcorn often threatens to slip into cliché and formulaic predictability, and it sometimes does. But equally often it takes subtle twists and turns allowing the story to unfold with warmth and a genuine understanding of the characters, their predicaments and human conflicts.

While Chutney Popcorn doesn't live up to Fire, the other Indian lesbian film, it is worth a look. It is comic and touching and Ganatra turns in an unassumingly effective performance as a woman in search of self, family and identity.

Continued on page 15

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 11