celluloid cornucopia

Sundance celebrates Pride month with 37 LGBT feature films

June 1, 2001

by Anthony Glassman

The Sundance Film Festival has a history of presenting the finest independent lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender films. For the fourth year, the Sundance cable channel brings them to you for Pride month with their

Sundance Channel's "Something New: Sundance Channel Premieres" stock: Taboo, Chuck & Buck, which made quite a splash theatrically last year, Benjamin Smoke, The Jaundiced Eye and The Delta, the feature debut of director Ira Sachs, one of whose shorts is included in "Shorts Stop" as well.

In Search of Mike

Out Loud Film Festival, a showcase of some of the best queer cinema covering 70 years of international filmmaking.

Last year's Out Loud Film Festival was a wonder: 26 feature-length films, new and old, fiction and documentary. This year Sundance ups the ante, bringing in 37 fulllength film and 12 shorts, packaged conveniently in their "Shorts Stop: An Hour of Short Films" Sunday night program.

The shorts cover every imaginable topic appropriate to the festival, from In Search of Mike, an hysterical, bitter look at one man's relationship with his mother, to Lady, a day in the life of a completely sexually impulsive, if ambiguous, woman.

Four of the shorts, Inside Out, hITCH, Just One Time and $30, are in Boys Shorts 3, but the other eight are just as impressive.

Family, for instance, consists of interviews with the teenaged filmmaker, his father, and the gay radio host who helped him come to terms with his sexual orientation. Starring, written and directed by Stephen Patrick Foery, it is an outgoing yet introspective look at one boy's life, delving into his emotions and those of the people who have had the most profound effects on his life.

Contrast that with the hilarious Birthday Time, directed by Lawrence Ferber. Christopher is just shy of his eighteenth birthday, is completely comfortable with his sexual orientation and has fooled around with other boys. But has never been kissed, a situation he will, by hook or by crook, remedy before his birthday.

From the humorous high of Birthday Time, the shorts go to the extended eulogy of Hope is the Thing With Feathers, an ode by director Andy Abrahams Wilson to two of his friends, a loving couple of artists, both of whom succumbed to AIDS-related complications. Happy, this is not.

Five of the feature films will be part of the

Taboo, director Nagisa Oshima's (In the Realm of the Senses) first film in fourteen years, deals with a young, beautiful samurai who inspires love and desire in all who see him. The love others have for him, however, ultimately degenerates into jealousy and violence, but is he the victim of it, or does he promote and propagate the mayhem?

Chuck & Buck follows writer Mike White as Buck,

a

twentysomething who fixates on a heterosexual childhood friend after his mother dies. Buck pursues Chuck, seemingly oblivious to his impending marriage and complete indifference, creating an emotional look at friendship, love, and childhood.

Childhood is also a major issue in The Jaundiced Eye, Nonny de la Pena's engrossing documentary looking at the accusations of child molestation leveled at Stephen and Melvin Matthews, a gay man and his father in Monroe, Michigan, just north of Toledo. When Stephen's ex-wife accused him, Melvin and a number of other family members of molesting their five-year-old son, it begins a decade-long nightmare of imprisonment and persecution.

The film consults a number of experts on child psychology and molestation, delving into whether an impressionable child can be made to believe that a fictional event actually occurred, and the horrors that can come from falsely accusing people of a crime viewed as the most vile in society.

The scariest part of the movie is that it is a documentary.

Another documentary being debuted is Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen's Benjamin Smoke, a look at the life and career of Robert "Benjamin" Dickerson, a cross-dressing gay punk rocker who became a fixture of the Atlanta punk scene. Interviews with Benjamin are interspersed with studio footage of his band Smoke, weaving a complete portrait of someone whose years of self-abuse were atoned for in his music.

Benjamin was a queer, latter-day Tom Waits, his raspy voice growling about life in non-sequiteurs.

He lived in an impoverished area of Atlanta known as Cabbage Town, "home of gocarts and kids who go to jail too young, whose parents are high on inhalants and methadone." That about sums it up.

Birthday Time

The cable debuts wrap up with The Delta, an odd, anxious look at a young man in Memphis, Tennessee, coming to terms with his desire for other men. His brief liaison with John, a half-black Vietnamese immigrant, leads to desire, beer, fireworks and, ultimately, murder.

Then there are the returns from last year's festival, including Floating, a movie about a gay college swimmer and Desert Hearts, Donna Deitch's seminal lesbian fave from the eighties. Two documentaries are included here, Paul Monette: Brink of Summer's End and You Don't Know Dick: Courageous Hearts of Transsexual Men.

Also reprised is the Ohio favorite Edge of Seventeen, a not-so-tender coming of age tale filmed in Sandusky and at Cleveland's late, lamented Legends gay bar.

The films this year literally span the globe and the decades. It's a fabulous selection, from the 1931 German film Mädchen in Uniform to the more recent Chinese films Happy Together and East Palace, West Palace.

Where else can you find Ingmar Bergman's Persona played on the same channel as the adaptation of Paul Rudnick's darned funny play Jeffrey?

The festival wraps up with a 241⁄2 hour marathon from 6 am June 30 to 6:30 am July 1. Some writers are not going to be getting much sleep this month.

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

Benjamin Smoke