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Reel queer

Image+Nation’s 19th annual
big-screen orgy heats up

PACKING A PUNCH: Champion

By MATTHEW HAYS

There were a few years during the life of Image+Nation, Montreal’s queer film fest, when people were openly questioning the need for such a cultural event. When so much queer content had been embraced by the mainstream, the idea went, why bother with a separate festival?

The question is now rather quaint. And the irony must be a rich one for organizers of queer film fests everywhere. Because given the collapse of independent film distribution, the need for queer film festivals (and for all independent films) couldn’t be more crucial.

This year’s Image+Nation line-up illustrates the point, with a complex, diverse spectrum of styles, genres and moods, much of which you won’t have a chance to see outside of the festival. Here are a few of the highlights I’m most looking forward to.

In Champion, a young lesbian (Syd Blakovich) aspires to become a master of the martial arts, and it looks like she’s going to become the next big thing in boxing. But her out-of-the-ring love life is increasingly difficult to manage—especially her adorable ex-girlfriend (Jiz Lee), and the fact that she’s seriously attracted to her main nemesis in the ring (Dallas).

In I Can’t Think Straight, Tala, a young Jordanian woman prepares for her marriage to her Jordanian fiancé, but meets a British Indian woman during the build-up to her massive wedding. The two soon fall in love, and Tala must explain to her Jordanian family why she wants out of the nuptials. A romantic comedy that has already received rave reviews on the fest circuit, starring the Canadian actress Lisa Ray (Water).

Canada’s queer agitprop superstar John Greyson returns with Fig Trees, a luscious low-budget movie about pills, AIDS and Gertrude Stein. As expected, Greyson experiments with his own unique foray into genre fusion: this entry is a documentary opera. Also as expected, it’s intellectually engaging and invigorating.


SHOW BOYS: The Big Gay Musical

Genre busting

Beyond Greyson, there is far more genre tinkering, including a good old-fashioned tribute to one of the gayest genres of them all, The Big Gay Musical. Directed by Casper Andreas and Fred M. Caruso, this feature has a couple of gay musical theatre actors trying desperately to find love in the world while appearing in an off-Broadway show together. And supplying this fest’s obligatory zombie flick is first-time director Kevin Hamedani’s ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction. Homophobia and anti-Arab sentiment collide in a redneck American town during a wave of zombie infection. Ultra-violent and deeply campy, ZMD manages a social-issue/horror combo, à la walking-dead godfather George A. Romero.

In the indie Brit film Shank, two young men fall in love amid the gritty confines of England’s underclass. Egos clash as the men discover their love and lust for each other while the pressures of their gang make such a bond unlikely in the long term. With a kickass young cast that includes Tom Bott, Alice Payne, Wayne Virgo and Marc Laurent.

And as usual, the fest offers some superb documentaries. In Against a Trans Narrative, filmmaker and activist Jules Rosskam (Transparent) delves into the experiences of a broad range of trans men. Rosskam is inspired by Marlon Riggs and Bertolt Brecht, and the result is a documentary/spoken word performance hybrid that is hypnotic. And in Annalise Ophelian’s Diagnosing Difference, a number of trans people discuss their dreadful treatment at the hands of clueless healthcare workers. American filmmaker Christopher Hines looks behind the “straight-looking, straight-acting” ideal obsession among gay men in The Butch Factor, interviewing academics, cross-dressing cowboys and all-out sissies about our cultural notions of what masculinity is.

Canadian filmmaker Bob Christie takes a cross-cultural look at pride events in Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride. Those who’ve become jaded about such events would do well to see this film. It points out that while pride parades in Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto might now seem ho-hum or passé, in cities like Warsaw and Moscow, they can evoke violent reactions that are truly terrifying. And the stellar Toronto-based art group General Idea gets a film tribute in General Idea: Art, AIDS and the fin de siècle. Filmmaker Annette Mangaard goes back to 1969, when General Idea was formed, marking the beginnings of queer Canadiana.

IMAGE+NATION FILM FESTIVAL
SCREENS FROM OCT. 22- NOV. 1.
INFO: IMAGE-NATION.ORG

The children’s hour

Jamie Travis makes sad, surreal
films about childhood trauma

by MATTHEW HAYS

The strange cinematic universe of filmmaker Jamie Travis is an unsettling place to be. The Toronto-based director has made a name for himself on the film-fest circuit with his disturbing short dramas, which are highly stylized, über-impressionistic meditations on surviving childhood trauma in the barren, soulless confines of suburbia.

His latest, The Armoire, will open this year’s Image+Nation, and it’s an impeccable choice. Winner of a short-film award at September’s Toronto International Film Festival, the film has an 11-year-old lad coping with the disappearance of a school friend. His method of dealing involves hiding in the armoire in his house—to the consternation of his baffled parents.

The film forms a trilogy with two of Travis’s previous shorts, Why the Anderson Children Didn’t Come to Dinner (2003) and The Saddest Boy in the World (2006), a trio Travis refers to as “The Saddest Children in the World.”

Travis concedes at least part of his ongoing inspiration is semi-autobiographical. “I can’t seem to get past my own childhood. My stories often pivot around the discrepancy of reality and memory. When I think back to my childhood, it is impossible though enjoyable to sift through my experiences, both real and fictional. There are lies I used to tell that I am now only realizing were lies. I invented a stalker, got the police involved—everything. The mystery of The Armoire is built around something that is halfway between a lie and a repressed memory. In children, I find fertile ground for my current ruminations.”

The queer imagination is often one where fantasy is a mode of survival for people caught up in horrid circumstances, and that’s true of Travis’s protagonists too. “All three of these films feature children—first seven-year-olds, then a nine-year-old and now an eleven-year-old—in compromising situations that can only be survived through imagination and artifice. With The Armoire, I wanted to soften the satire and turn the accusatory finger away from the poisonous suburbs and toward the self, toward Aaron [the boy himself]. This final sad child film is the most complex of the three films, and I wanted to embrace that. I also wanted to take the arguable darkness of the first two films’ conclusions and, with The Armoire, provide some hope for sad children everywhere.”

Still, Travis is quick to state that he doesn’t feel that his sexual orientation sways his stylistic and/or artistic choices. “My sexuality doesn’t dictate my creative decisions. My personality does—my fixations, my obsessions. I share with many other gay people a familiarity with longing and isolation, a history of repression and a love for self-conscious theatrics. But then again, I share these things with a lot of straight people too.”

And if gay filmmakers have historically been marginalized, Travis is only too aware that short films often get short shrift. But those things seem to be shifting in today’s increasingly digital universe, where YouTube has created a new wave of interest in short films and videos. “People, myself included, have tiny attention spans. Of course the market for short films is growing. The problem is that people want to watch free stuff online, and movies—both short and feature-length—require money. Or at least the kind of movies I want to make do.”

Does Travis have a feature-length film in the pipeline? “I am writing it now! I had been working for years on a project that didn’t suit me. The experience taught me to embrace my strengths and stick to the ideas that never cease to thrill me. No more sad children. My lips are sealed. Okay, twins, and babysitting and headstrong women. That is where my head is at.”

THE ARMOIRE OPENS THE 19TH ANNUAL
IMAGE+NATION FILM FEST TONIGHT,
OCT. 22, AT THE IMPERIAL CINEMA, 8 P.M.,
PRECEEDING HOLLYWOOD JE T'AIME

 

 

 
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