Playing the odds
>> A guide to some of the best bets at the fest

by JOHN CUSTODIO

This is the 15th edition of the Image&Nation queer film festival, and I’ve attended all but two since its inception. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: it’s a gamble. Usually it pays off. Big time. Remember Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston? Gregg Araki’s The Living End? How about Rose Troche’s Go Fish? They all premiered at this festival.

I’ve had to sit through a lot of mediocre films too, though. That’s part of the experience, they say, but I’m just not that adventurous any more. Now I look for ways to avoid the crap in the crap shoot. (I can’t take another Broken Hearts Club. I just can’t.)

With that in mind, I spoke to festival programmers Charlie Boudreau and Catharine Setzer. Knowing that people go to films for different reasons, I came up with the following admittedly idiosyncratic categories and criteria, and they graciously filled in the blanks with suggestions.

Best Date Films (i.e., Films Most Likely to Get You Laid). For dykes, it’s Dayna McLeod’s Womyn Studies: Lessons in Porn, which Setzer says “plays with the conventions of both porn and feminism, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. And it’s hot.” For fags, Boudreau chose Second Skin (featuring Before Night Falls star Javier Bardem) and Todd Haynes’s underrated Velvet Goldmine. “Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale. Having sex. Need I say more?” For the transgender turn-on, there’s an entry from Hong Kong called Wu Yen, a contemporary take on an old Chinese fable that stars prominent Canto-pop actors.

Best Film to Take Straight Friends To Of course, we’re about more than just (!) getting laid. Whether for fags and their hags or dykes and their dudes, the clear choice is Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City, the third installment in the adventures of the housemates of 28 Barbary Lane.

Perhaps your friends are only nominally straight (i.e., “straight” in ironic quotes), and you want to get past the platonic stage with them. The Y Tu Mama Tambien Award for Best Film to Seduce That Straight Boy By goes to AKA, which Setzer calls “Ripley-esque” and “technically amazing.” The Gazon Maudit Award for Best Film to Seduce that Straight Girl By goes to Guardian of the Frontier. “Really hot semi-nude girls throughout the whole film!,” Boudreau enthuses.

Best Film to Take Your Parents To Of course, everything depends on the kind of relationship you have with them. If they’re PFLAGgers, there’s 21, by Erin Greenwell. “It’s the after-school special we all wished for,” says Boudreau. There’s also Prom Fight: The Marc Hall Story, an earnest documentary about the Durham, Ontario, boy who fought his Catholic school board for the right to take his boyfriend to his prom. In case things with your folks aren’t so rosy, there’s always Benzina, one of Setzer’s personal faves: “It’s really twisted: matricide and everything.” An object lesson for phobic folks or what?

Best Film to Take Your Priest, Minister or Rabbi To Anyone who saw Trembling Before G-d at last year’s festival will understand the need for this category, and local documentarian Joe Balass’s entry, The Devil in the Holy Water, fits the bill nicely. It shows the conflict that resulted when the first World Gay Pride and the Catholic Millennial Jubilee took place in Rome at the same time.

The ACT-UP/Lesbian Avengers Award for the Film Most Likely to Make You an Angry Activist Because sometimes our indignation just feels so… righteous. The aforementioned Prom Fight would be an obvious nominee for this category, but it apparently has stiff competition in another Canadian entry. Stand Together: A History of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Movement in Ontario from 1967 to 1987 promises to enlighten, enrage, and inspire.
Perhaps it’s appropriate that after 20 years, the Best AIDS film should be something that would enrage ACT-UP. According to Boudreau, Days (Giorni in its original Italian) “could only have been made in Europe. Americans found it offensive.” After living with HIV for 10 years, the protagonist of this film decides he wants to live his life differently, some would say recklessly.

The Margaret Mead Award This category is for all the armchair anthropologists out there who want to know how they “do it” in other cultures. Friends in High Places: The Art of Survival in Modern-Day Burma will surely appeal, with its portrayal of queers as powerful spirit mediums, as will Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place, which features, amongst other things, accounts of queer warriors in traditional Hawaiian lore. Yum. :

The Image&Nation Film Festival opens today, Sept. 19, and closes on Sept. 29. See www.image-nation.org for info :

>> Notable entries at this year’s Image&Nation

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