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February 26, 2010

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Yes, let's go there

Film festival's 10% Cinema takes us around the world

by Anthony Glassman

Cleveland-After 34 years, it gets a little difficult coming up with pithy catch-phrases. That might explain why, this year, the Cleveland International Film Festival went with the direct approach.

Their 2010 theme is, "Let's go."

At first glance, it might seem a little off-hand. "Do you want to go to the mall?"

Big Gay Musical

"Nah, let's do something more interesting.” "The film festival?" "Yeah, let's go."

But when one really digs into it, the question becomes, go where? Tower City Cinemas? Or to Canada, Uruguay, Israel and Vietnam?

Because, really, that's where going to the Cleveland International Film Festival, March 18-28, will take you with this year's selections.

And that is just where the 10% Cinema selections are set, the LGBT subsection of the festival.

The first is 8: The Mormon Proposition by Reed Cowan, a documentary examining how the Mormon church threw their vast coffers and religious fervor behind California's Proposition & constitutional amendment, ending wedding bells across the state for thousands of samesex couples.

8: The Mormon Proposition will play on Tuesday, March 23 at 12:15 pm and on Wednesday, March 24 at 7 pm. The Wednesday showing also features a film forum on the topic, "How separate are church and state in today's America?" immediately after the film.

Next up is Adrift (Choi Voi), the story of a hot, sticky summer in Hanoi. A young married couple, the bride's besmitten best friend, a rough-hewn sensualist and a young woman with her eye on another all find themselves in a cyclonic dance of newfound love in the sweltering Vietnam summertime.

Adrift plays on Monday and Tuesday, March 22 and 23, at 11:45 am and 9:25 pm respectively.

From the Great White North comes The Baby Formula, Alison Reid's tale of Athena and Lilith, a lesbian couple who dream of having babies without the need to go through the adoption process or having a sperm donor. Luckily for them, a new, experimental process can create sperm from the women's own stem cells. Athena gets pregnant, and Lilith becomes jealous and sneaks off to the lab to become pregnant herself, leaving the couple in a hormone-fueled state of chaos. Add in Lilith's gay dads and Athena's homophobic parents, and there is one insane Canadian mockumentary.

The Baby Formula plays on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 23 and 24 at 7:10 pm and 11:50 am.

Staying with a Canadian filmmaker, we move from mockumentary to documentary with Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride by Bob Christie. The film goes around the world talking to people marching in Pride parades, from the freedom of the big cities of the Western hemisphere to the threatened arrests and mob attacks on Eastern European festivals.

Beyond Gay will be shown on Thursday and Friday, March 25 and 26 at 2:20 pm and 9:25 pm, respectively.

On from the uplifting to the absurd with The Big Gay Musical, the tale of Paul and Eddie, who have created an off-Broadway musical, Adam & Steve, Just the Way God Made 'Em. Their lives, however, mirror their art, and the Bible,

televangelists, "ex-gay" summer camp and way too many parents all cloud up the creative process.

The musical fun plays at 2:20 pm on Friday, March 19 and at 7 pm the following day.

In the spirit of The Bubble, though hopefully with fewer explosions, comes City of Borders, a documentary about the Shushan Pub in Jerusalem, and the Israeli and Palestinian LGBT people

who go there to talk about love, life, and the turmoil surrounding them on a daily basis.

Pub owner Sa'ar Netanel was Jerusalem's first openly gay council member, elected in 2003, the same year he opened the club. There, Palestinians and Jews can leave their conflicts behind so they can live their lives in peace.

See City of Borders on Friday, March 26 at 5 pm or Sunday, March 28 at 7:40 pm.

Next on the list is Eyes Wide Open (Eynaim Pekukhot), another Israeli film. This one, however, is a dramatic film set in an ultra-Orthodox community. Butcher Aaron is a regular guy,

The Baby Formula

running his shop and raising his four children until a handsome yeshiva student comes into his shop needing a place to stay. When passion seizes the young butcher, it threatens his entire way of life.

Eyes Wide Open plays on Thursday, March 25 at 9:45 pm and Friday, March 26 at 1:45 pm. The next film is Handsome Harry, in which

a former sailor (Jamey Sheridan) gets called to the deathbed of an old Navy buddy (Steve Buscemi), who wants to absolve himself of a crime that the two of them, along with others of their circle, committed in the early days of their naval careers.

As Harry (Sheridan) goes to each of the old crew, more and more of the secrets of the past come to light, and Harry must deal with his own involvement.

The film is by Bette Gordon, who directed Variety, a feminist take on pornography from the early 1980s.

Handsome Harry will play on Friday, March 26 at 11:45 am and Saturday, March 27 at 7:10 pm.

Sharon Gless (Cagney and Lacey, Queer as Folk) stars in Hannah Free, playing an aging lesbian in the adaptation of Claudia Allen's play. Trapped in a nursing home after working in Alaska and South America, she and her partner Rachel are rooms away but worlds apart. Rachel is in a coma, and her religious daughter won't let Hannah visit her.

Decades before, Rachel was married and had children, but her husband soon died and she and Hannah moved in together, shocking their Midwestern community. Now, all that Hannah can do is carry on imaginary conversations with the comatose Rachel, until a young student plans a way to get the two lovers reunited.

Hannah Free plays on Friday, March 19 at 7:25 pm and then on Sunday, March 21 at 11:40 am.

Finally, to the land of Hannah's youth, we go to South America, more specifically Uruguay, for Leo's Room.

Leo is a sensitive young man who spends much of his time rebuffing his girlfriend Andrea's sexual advances and parrying his mother's thrusts towards him marrying Andrea.

Between his Star Wars-obsessed pothead roommate and online hookups with men who leave when he tells them he only wants to talk,

he begins to despair until he meets up again with an ex-girlfriend who has her own issues.

Head on into Leo's Room on Wednesday, March 24 at 4:35 pm or Saturday, March 27 at 11:30 am.

All these films will be screened in the Tower City Cinemas downtown. For more information, purchase tickets, go to www.clevelandfilm.org.

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