2002 Program

Thursday March 14th to Sunday March 17th, 2002
The Princess Cinema, Uptown Waterloo &
the University of Waterloo Davis Centre 1302

This second annual queer film and video festival features internationally acclaimed gay and lesbian works that present images of gay and lesbian lives and issues; emphasizes issues of multicultural diversity and gender; encourages local artists, critics and audiences to participate in the discussion of cultural identities and aesthetics and generally to present the public with an opportunity to see and discuss the thematic, aesthetic and political concerns raised by the work of lesbian and gay filmmakers.

The entire film festival is free admission(but we’ll accept donations if you insist). All films, except for opening night, are being screened in UW Davis Centre room 1302.

Last updated 4:30 PM, 11 March 2002

AT A GLANCE

Thu, 11PM – L.I.E.
Fri, 7PM – Author Shyam Selvadurai

Fri, 8PM – The Edge of Each Other’s Battles, The Vision of Audre Lorde
Fri, 9:30PM – Johnny Greyeyes

Sat, 7PM – Bombay Eunuch unavailable, replaced with A Boy Named Sue
Sat, 9PM – Hey, Happy!

Sun, 7PM – Drift
Sun, 9PM – Paragraph 175

Thursday March 14:

11:00 PM >>
L.I.E. (Long Island Expressway)
Canadian Premiere

At the Princess Cinema, 6 Princess St. W., Waterloo
Michael Cuesta, USA, 2001, 94 minutes
http://lot47.com/lie/

“L.I.E.” is about a boy who, in losing just about everything and everyone he has in the space of a single week, finds himself. Set in a world of contemporary suburban adolescence, “L.I.E.” begins as we join a group of boys who rob houses in the middle-class comfort of Long Island. While it seems that they break and enter strictly for kicks, they are good at it. Two of these boys, Howie and Gary, are the very best of friends.

It is Gary’s idea to rob the house belonging to an old guy named Big John, and when Big John quickly figures out exactly who to go to after the crime, Howie learns that his pal Gary has been leading a secret life.

Gary and Big John have been engaged in a sex-for-pay relationship, and this secret life fascinates Howie. Perhaps for the first time he realizes that he can truly live, like Gary, outside the bounds of school, of home, and that it may be OK that his feelings for Gary may run deeper than those for his other friends. Gary, in the meantime, has figured out how to run away from Long Island, and when he leaves it is Howie who suffers the greatest loss. Howie’s father – a white-collar builder with mounting legal troubles – is too wrapped up in his business and in love with his girlfriend to suspect that his son may be really hurting. And when his father finally gets busted by the FBI and taken to jail, Howie is truly alone. Alone, that is, until Big John steps in. But what, exactly, does Big John want, and just how much resilience can Howie – a mere 15-year-old – be expected to summon?

With “L. I. E.,” director Michael Cuesta and his co-writers show us a suburban world full of charming criminality, innocent perversion and most importantly a depiction of adolescence that neither whitewashes nor condescends. “L.I.E.” is a journey full of surprises that may lead us to question many of our preconceptions and assumptions.

Friday March 15:

7:00 PM Opening Gala with a reading by >>
Celebrated Canadian queer author,
Shyam Selvadurai (listen to his reading in mp3)

In UW Davis Centre room 1301 (the fishbowl)
http://www.interlog.com/~funnyboy/

Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. For years, Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority and Sinhalese majority have clashed over issues of power-sharing and local autonomy. This political unrest resulted in violent riots in the city of Colombo in 1983, and it was after these riots that the Selvadurai family immigrated to Canada. Selvadurai’s first novel, Funny Boy, was published in 1994 and received the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Set in Sri Lanka prior to the riots, Funny Boy is a story of young boy’s passage to adolescence and maturity, during a time of growing political unrest. His second novel, Cinnamon Gardens, was published in 1998. Meticulously researched, the story revolves largely around two characters, Annalukshmi and Balendran, and their quest for self-knowledge against the political and historical backdrop of 1920s Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Both novels reflect Selvadurai’s concern about the political and societal realities of Sri Lanka, and the challenges and triumphs that ordinary people face as a consequence. Selvadurai identifies his experiences as an immigrant to Canada as part of the reason he is able to write so capably and compellingly of his home country. Read some of his work here….

8:00 PM >>
The Edge of Each Other’s Battles:
The Vision of Audre Lorde

Jennifer Abod, 2000, USA, 90 minutes
http://www.jenniferabod.com

I am doing my work…are you?” Audre Lorde challenges participants at an historic transnational conference in 1990 with these words. Ten years in the making, The Edge of Each Other’s Battles is a labor of love and commitment to feminist art and philosophy. It is also one of t2he last times that we see and hear the remarkable Black lesbian feminist warrior poet, Audre Lorde, before cancer took her life. The film brings to life Lorde’s social vision and is a tribute, as was the conference itself, to her work and life. It captures her message of the need to create a more humane world and to continue the struggle for justice rather than giving in to apathy. See this film and get a much-needed dose of inspiration through the passion and wit of the deeply political Audrey Lorde.

9:30 PM >>
Johnny Greyeyes

Jorge Manzano, 2000, Canada, 80 minutes

http://www.johnnygreyeyes.com/

Johnny Greyeyes is the powerful story of a Native American woman struggling to maintain strength, love and spirit within the walls of a women’s prison. An official Sundance selection, the movie was also nominated for Best Picture at the 2000 American Indian Motion Picture Awards, and Jorge Manzano won Best Director. It also won the Freedom Award at Los Angeles Outfest 2000. Since the shooting death of her father, Johnny has spent most of her life in prison. There, she forms a new family and falls in love with her cellmate Lana. But her responsibilities to the outside world weigh heavily as she attempts to pull together her fractured natural family. With her release date near, Johnny valiantly strives to keep her two worlds together. The first feature film focusing on Native lesbians, Johnny Greyeyes is a deeply humanizing portrait of life behind bars.

Saturday, March 16:

7:00 PM >>
A Boy Named Sue

Julie Wyman, 2000, USA, 56 minutes

Julie Wyman’s compelling documentary chronicles the transformations of a transsexual named Theo from a woman to a man over the course of six years.The film successfully captures Theo’s physiological and psychological changes during the process, as well as the effect that the process has on his relationship with his lesbian lover. Close friends bare all for the camera as they too, deal with the transformation. Wyman takes full advantage of the unlimited access she received into an extraordinarily personal process to compose a moving story about gender identity, relationships, and how even the most permanent relationships undergo change.
A Boy Named Sue, ranked among festival favorites the world over, is a rare documentary, one that unflinchingly looks at personal issues, yet never intrudes upon its subject, allowing moment after moment of honest emotion to shine through.

“‘A Boy Named Sue’ is one of the best videos to date on female-to-male transsexual experience. Wyman spent six years taping Sue’s transformation into Theo and then organized a huge archive of material into a moving, informative and smart rendering of what a difference sex reassignment surgeries can make not only to the transsexual himself but also to all those in his immediate circle. Theo is a great subject and Wyman is a talented and imaginative documentarian. If you are looking for a sensitive and sophisticated representation of transsexual experience, look no further.” Judith Halberstam, University of California, San Diego.

Unfortunately, no screening copies of Bombay Eunuch were available in time for Rainbow Reels

9 PM >>
Hey, Happy!

Noam Gonick, 2001, Canada, 75 minutes
http://www.heyhappy.com

Following appearances at the Sundance Film Festiva and Toronto’s InsideOut, here comes home-grown badboy Noam Gonick’s outrageous debut feature Hey, Happy! , a brash and stylish treat that confronts his burgeoning reputation as a unique talent. Gonick’s film is a sexy, twisted fantasy that officially marks Winnipeg as the epicenter of Canadian and international cool. Set in an outlandish, pre-apocalyptic Winnipeg of the imagination, Hey, Happy! follows the adventures of Sabu (Jeremie Yuen), dj by night, porn store manager by day, who’s just about to complete his quest to sleep with two thousand men. His final conquest is in sight, and it just so happens to be Happy (Craig Aftanis), a cute, geeky UFO-ologist who spends his days receiving transmissions from aliens on his boombox. Unfortunately for Sabu, the evil hairdresser Spanky (the sublimely scary Clayton Godson), the self-proclaimed ‘biggest bitch in the world’ has his own nasty plans for Happy. Adding disaster to drama, the Red River is about to burst its banks and wash Winnipeg away. With a touch of voodoo, a little alien visitation and lots (and lots) of drugs, Sabu not only finds true love but also helps to save the world. Drenched in rave culture (with a kick-ass soundtrack) and dripping with cute boys and outlandish characters (including the fabulous Dita Vendetta and local gadfly Johnny Simone), Hey, Happy! is unlike any other Canadian film you’re ever likely to see. Ignore the emergency exits, cast away your inhibitions and dive into this strange and wonderful queer world. prairie boy’s libido triggers an apocalypse!

Sunday, March 17:

7:00 PM >>
Drift

Quentin Lee, 2001, USA, 90 minutes
http://www.marginfilms.com/drift/

Filmmaker and enfant terrible of the Queer cinema scene Quentin Lee delivers a provocative and probing examination of the idea of “what if” in his new digital feature, Drift. Ryan, a screenwriter, attends a party with his long-time boyfriend, Joel, only to find that he “clicks” instantly and deeply with a young writer and student named Leo. Their sudden and visceral bond underscores Ryan’s sense of confusion about his life and his relationship, inspiring him to break up with Joel and, à la Sliding Doors, into three very different scenarios. The decisions that Ryan faces – is his lover really the love of his life or is there someone else? Is he settling or unappreciative of what he has? Can anyone truly understand and see him? – are both common and deeply philosophical. Inventive, cerebral, and deeply moving, Drift’s exploration of the different paths that one man’s quest for understanding and insight might have taken will leave you wondering about the “what-ifs” in your own life.

Director’s Statement: “I wrote the script after breaking up a three-year relationship that has meant a lot to me. The script was a way to alleviate that pain and angst … Drift, like Flow, is in the genre of works that I love like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — the very self-reflexive genre about an artist’s identity and about the process of creating art … Drift is sort of an unofficial sequel to Flow in my own queer trilogy, a sort of more personal trilogy somewhat exploring sexuality and connection.”
Originally from Hong Kong, Quentin Lee emigrated to Montreal at fifteen, went to college at UC Berkeley, then to graduate school at Yale and UCLA. He first achieved notoriety after his first short video, To Ride a Cow, was banned from entering Japan. His first feature film, Shopping for Fangs, co-directed with Justin Lin, was screened at Reel Asian in 1997 and hailed as an important exploration of “Generasian X” identity politics. Quentin Lee currently divides his time between Vancouver and LA

9:00 PM >>
Paragraph 175

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2000, USA, 81 minutes
http://www.tellingpictures.com/films/5.html

By the 1920’s, Berlin had become known as a homosexual eden, where gay men and lesbians lived relatively open lives amidst an exciting subculture of artists and intellectuals. With the coming to power of the Nazis, all this changed. Between 1933 and 1945 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality under Paragraph 175, the sodomy provision of the German penal code dating back to 1871. Some were imprisoned, others were sent to concentration camps. Of the latter, only about 4,000 survived. Today, fewer than ten of these men are known to be living. Five of them have now come forward to tell their stories for the first time in this powerful new film.

The Nazi persecution of homosexuals may be the last untold story of the Third Reich. Paragraph 175 fills a crucial gap in the historical record, and reveals the lasting consequences of this hidden chapter of 20th century history, as told through personal stories of men and women who lived through it: the half Jewish gay resistance fighter who spent the war helping refugees in Berlin; the Jewish lesbian who escaped to England with the help of a woman she had a crush on; the German Christian photographer who was arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality, then joined the army on his release because he “wanted to be with men”; the French Alsatian teenager who watched as his lover was tortured and murdered in the camps. These are stories of survivors — sometimes bitter, but just as often filled with irony and humor; tortured by their memories, yet infused with a powerful will to endure. Their moving testimonies, rendered with evocative images of their lives and times, tell a haunting, compelling story of human resilience in the face of unspeakable cruelty. Intimate in its portrayals, sweeping in its implications, Paragraph 175 raises provocative questions about memory, history, and identity.

“Exquisitely lyrical” – Dennis Harvey, Variety
“Not to be missed! Devastating … elegant and powerful” – David Ansen, Newseek

Important Info :

This year’s festival is still a project of the Waterloo Public Interest Research Group (WPIRG) and has received generous support from the UW Federation of Students, UW Bookstore, and UW Graphics. Special thanks to the Princess Cinema, Generation X, and Club Ren.