Unearthing and polishing up some unpublished posts to reminisce over the time before the virus.
Another year, another Queerscreen Mardi Gras Film Festival.
This year’s was billed as the 27th.
I must have been at the first, in 1994. That was a more edgy event than it has since become.
Brochures from 1995 on are available online.
Apart from a few years when it was based at the now-gone Pitt Street cinema, the festival ran for many years mostly at the Academy Twin in Paddington. This was a good fit as Oxford Street was a natural precinct for meeting before or adjourning afterwards to discuss what you’d just seen or just chatting up someone agreeable.
Since the Academy Twin closed down in 2010 the festival “hub” moved first to the “Entertainment Quarter” at the old RAS Showground and now for the past few years to Event Cinemas at George Street. Neither neighbourhood has the same amenity, though Oxford Street too has suffered a decline.
There is a trajectory in the life of organisations such as Queerscreen. If they flourish, they inevitably professionalise and bureaucratise. At some point near the end of the time at the Academy, there was a shift in the volunteer culture. There were still volunteers but I got the feeling that they were now being recruited almost as “interns” for “event management.” A wonderfully over the top mother of a gay person who had made a big splash disappeared and was seen no more.
In the background and international gay/lesbian film festival circuit has also developed. One sign of this is that now we have programs designated as “Asian/Pacific.” That’s a North American appellation. Films can be procured much more “off the shelf.” Except for “Antipodean” content the choice of films seems increasingly less adventurous.
D is reluctant to go at any time to films unless they have an GLBTQI slant (and indeed is really only keen on the G and possibly Q in that alphabet soup). When the program for this festival came out, it looked as though D would be visiting his family in Shanghai. That plan changed for obvious reasons, but by the time we got around to doing anything about the festival only the last week was left.
So we missed a rescreening of the 1981 classic, Taxi zum Klo. I could borrow this from the City of Sydney Library (once somebody returns it) but this is a film which I would have welcomed seeing in the company of a gay audience. When I saw it in 1982 at an alternative cinema on George St in the company of my father (what must he have thought?) there were loud whoops from the audience when a slide came up reminding ladies to keep a watch over their handbags. Would the romantic scene where the lovers piss their initials and a heart into the snow stand up to my recollection of it?
We went to:
Are You Proud
This was a documentary about the history of London’s Pride parade. I found the earlier historical bits, albeit featuring all the usual suspects, the most rewarding. In a foretaste of what happened at this year’s Mardi Gras parade, more recent years have seen the burgeoning of proetests-within/against-the protest, as specific groups react against the mainstreaming of the event and on behalf of their own specific interests. The UK is ahead of us in that regard.
15 Years
Set in Tel Aviv. The title referred to the length of a relationship which, in the course of the movie, began to fall apart, as the more macho member of the pair reacted badly to a tide of baby-enthusiasm amidst his contemporaries and (though not really spelt out) issues with his near-to-death father. I can’t say I really warmed to this film or to the central character. I guess we were meant to find him muscular and attractive but that kind of man is not really my type and I couldn’t sympathetically warm to him at all.
It also seemed to me that the film could have been about any falling-apart 15-year relationship. What was specifically gay about that? And here’s a dilemma – in a perfect world we wouldn’t have “gay” films, but films which treat as “normal” gay characters – but I’m not satisfied with such a film when I see it. At this session time we could have gone to Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) the ultimate audience favourite of the festival. I’ve been told it is set in Sydney in the recent present. The ghost of the lesbian aunt returns to give 1980s dating and other tips to a pair of girls wanting to go to their school formal together. This would almost certainly have been more fun.
Los Fuertes
A Chilean film. Beautiful scenery. A romance between an urbanite, visiting his sister before escaping to Canada from Chilean homophobia and parental rejection, and a fisherman determined to make a life in his own community. The director was in attendance.
Films like this pose a variant of the dilemma referred to above. The battling-homophobia melodrama is hardly one whose time is past, but it’s a battle which in a way in my own life these days I can sidestep.
The Teacher
Credits at the end hinted that this Taiwanese film was based on a mid-nineties play by a now-deceased playwright, yet the film was set in the period of the anti-gay-marriage referendum in Taiwan and subsequent law reform (which was a result of a court decision over-ruling the referendum). This created a slightly odd disjunct because the central plot – a young gay teacher having a romance with an older man who ends up returning to his wife after giving him HIV – was medically inexplicable given subsequent developments in treatment options. Still, I enjoyed it.
And Then We Danced
Merab (played by a very charismatic Levan Gelbakhiani) is a young dancer in the training department of a Georgian state folkloric dance ensemble. His problem is that he is not going to be macho enough to be accepted into the main ensemble – you need only see the dances to see why, though at one point he is told (and it seems to me credible) that the macho-isation of at the at-least-homosocial aspects of Georgian dance is a development of about 50 years ago.
It is only in the course of the film that Merab recognizes his sexuality in a romance with a newcomer fellow dancer. They are competing candidates when a vacancy has opened up in the main company when a dancer is sacked after having been caught having gay sex, on tour, with an Armenian. (We learn later that family of this unfortunate sent him off to a monastery for gay conversion therapy; the “therapist” turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing; now he is selling himself in front of the Circus.) At the end, Merab has to leave Georgia. The love interest has gone home to get married and look after his family.
In some ways, this is a similar type of film to Los Fuertes, though as it deals with younger characters it also includes a coming-out aspect – Merab’s girlfriend (his dance partner since they were children) ends up having to play the cliched sympathetic female friend role.
As I hope my sketchy plot outline above suggests, Merab is up against a potent mixture of homophobia and cultural nationalism (anyone remember Tamar Iveri?). So was the film, which had to be made on a guerrilla basis (it was Sweden’s entry for the Foreign Film category of the Academy Awards though it didn’t make the shortlist). Locations were lost. A scene involving transvestite street workers was shot using people playing themselves and billed only by their given names. Police had to protect the opening night in Tbilisi against nationalist vigilantes. The name of the person responsible for the choreography has been kept secret.
I found myself more drawn-in by Merab’s predicament than by that of the characters of Los Fuertes – that’s the dividend of melodrama, I suppose. I’m a sucker for post-Soviet/Communist-non-chic, and there was much of interest in the depiction of life in Tbilisi and, as well as the dance, some terrific music. This was my favourite of the films I saw at the festival (and took second place in the audience vote).
An Almost Ordinary Summer
This was billed as the closing night gala. In fact it screened last year in the Lavazza Italian Film Festival. The premise was two grandfathers announcing to their progeny and descendants their proposed marriage. There was a bit of melodramatic homophobia (all of it eventually overcome). Most of the film could just have readily been about heterosexual grandparents repartnering and I seriously wonder if that is how the film started out. Neither of the “gay” (actually, “bisexual” – they’re always bisexual in Italian films – sigh) seemed particularly credible as such; one played a stereotypical limp wrist (he was in the arts so could have spent a lifetime like that). One of them still had a school aged son but apparently although announcing their impending nuptials they had not even discussed his living arrangements.
Possibly for Italians this is an amusing film – there is also a class ingredient in the unlikely meeting of families and I expect a lot of comic dialogue also involving regional variation as well as class – but for me it was a mainstream waste of space in a gay or even LGBTIQ (have I got them all?) film festival. I was disappointed that the festival organisers should have thought it worth including.
Stumbling on melons 