It must be awfully difficult to keep on having to top yourself, year after year, when you're the best film festival in town and nobody will let you forget it.
And yet, that's exactly what The Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has been up against for 12 years now. It's a lot of pressure, but the result, as lucky local movie lovers will confirm, has been a dozen solid years of (mostly) wonderful films that (mostly) continue to surprise and satisfy us in a startling variety of ways. Twelve years of raising the bar of excellence.
The Gay and Lesbian Film Festival's basic game plan remains true to course, with only minor variations on the winning mix of artful esoterica and crowd-pleasing hits, which was honed some years back by longtime prime mover Dorothy Abbott. This year, TIGLFF (can't we just say Pride, pretty please?) has a new director — local film curator extraordinaire Margaret Murray — but the festival's content is as solid as ever. If anything, this edition is the most consistently high-quality festival in years.
The festival kicks off at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4, with an opening night bash at Teco Plaza, complete with food, drink, cabana boys and girls, and a very special visit from the Pope of Parties, Sterling Powell. Opening night films should be tons of fun as well, with a 7 p.m. showing of the much ballyhooed Iron Ladies, a based-on-a-true-tale Thai import about the trials and tribulations of a transvestite volleyball team. Then, at 9:45 p.m., anyone who just can't get enough of Queer as Folk should make certain to catch the first three episodes of Metrosexuality, the acclaimed BBC-produced series featuring an intriguing cast of gay, lesbian and straight characters. The final three episodes of Metrosexuality will be screened on the festival's closing night, Oct. 14, with director-star Rikki Beadle-Blair in attendance.
One highlight of the festival's program on Friday, Oct. 5, is sure to be director Mary Guzman's portrait of a lovelorn San Francisco Latina, Desi's Looking for a New Girl. Guzman, who originally hails from Tampa, will be around to answer questions from the audience after the screening. The evening's big draw, though, will likely be Big Eden, a film that knocked the audience for a loop at San Francisco's Castro Theatre, where it was reportedly rewarded with a 5-minute ovation. Personally, I found this warm and fuzzy tale of a gay artist's return to his hometown to be one of the weaker efforts of this year's festival. Still, it's not too hard to see how the movie's blend of Northern Exposure-styled sitcom quirk and well-meaning sentimentality might, in the right context, bring some to their knees, so to speak.
Festivalgoers will find a far more interesting range of options in store on Saturday, Oct. 6. The action begins at 2:30 p.m. with Gaea Girls, an intimate and often incredibly intense look at some of the women involved in Japan's colorful and ultra-extreme wrestling circuit. The movie takes us deep inside the women's individual mindsets via a fly-on-the-wall view of their grueling training regimen and their struggles to reach the top. Another highlight of the day is the 6:15 p.m. screening of Km. 0, a lively and pleasantly contorted Spanish sex farce that's a little reminiscent of early, kinky Almodovar. The evening closes with an 11 p.m. presentation of Hey, Happy! a love-it-or-hate-it cult flick about a bunch of sexy, antisocial weirdoes in Winnipeg, taking drugs, attending raves, overacting and waiting for the Apocalypse. The movie's brand of cine-trash anarchism is modeled after the films of Greg Araki and early, underground John Waters, but I have to admit to finding most of it pretty uninspired and more than a little self-conscious. Hey, Happy! is almost redeemed by the appearance of an evil drag queen hairdresser (clearly channeling the Wicked Witch of the West) and it's a safe assumption that the movie will play better late at night fueled by an appreciative audience.
Those who are able to rouse themselves and get over to Tampa Theatre by noon on Sunday, Oct. 7, will be rewarded with a look at one of the very best films in this entire festival. An exotic, richly nuanced and deeply moving portrait of one of India's self-contained communities of castrated "hijras," Bombay Eunuchs contrasts the societal perceptions and myths surrounding this mysterious, centuries-old caste with the realities of a group of people who turn out to be as sweet and good-natured and as tortured and complicated as people anywhere. Audiences who've seen Bombay Eunuchs at festivals around the country (including the recent Florida Film Festival in Orlando) have been happily blown away, and you can count this reviewer among them. Other safe bets for Sunday include a 7 p.m. screening of Family Pack, the latest dose of dysfunctional fun and games from the writer of Ma Vie en Rose, and Burnt Money (8:45 p.m.) a sexy Argentine film about a couple of gay bank robbers.
The big story on Monday, Oct. 8, is Come Undone (7 p.m.) the bittersweet and strangely lyrical tale of a quiet, 18-year old French man-child dealing with his exploding hormones, unpredictable new boyfriend and meddlesome family. The emotions in Come Undone (the title can be taken any number of ways) lie mostly beneath the surface, much like those of the somewhat repressed main character, and there's an interestingly understated, still quality to the film. The performances are strong and natural, and the film tells its story in a fragmented, resolutely nonlinear manner that makes it all seem, if not new, at least like some haunting, half-remembered dream.
Quite possibly the most astonishing movie in the entire festival, and certainly its most disturbing, L.I.E. screens at 8:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 9, and should not be missed. Michael Cuesta's remarkable feature unfolds like a more humane version of Larry Clark's Kids, with one particularly confused teen eventually becoming snagged in the web of an imposing, middle-aged chicken hawk who, at least in the beginning, comes off like a cross between Robert Duvall's fire-breathing officer in Apocalypse Now and a slippery, almost supernatural Hannibal Lecter — assuming Lecter's specialty was fellatio and he still talked to his mom on the phone every day. L.I.E. (which stands for Long Island Expressway, where many of the film's significant events take place) veers between hyper-reality and stylized dream state, between loopy humor and horror story, eventually coming home to roost as a sure-to-be-controversial story of redemption for a sexual predator.
Another fascinating and somewhat challenging offering is Trembling Before G-d, which screens at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 11. The mingling of the spirit and the flesh is usually a pretty risky subject, but Trembling Before G-d raises the stakes by painting a portrait of ultra-religious Orthodox Jews who walk a line so fine as to be virtually non-existent, between their faith and their homosexuality. The film digs deep and is never anything less than completely honest, making it an absorbing but sometimes sad and even painful viewing experience.
The festival's final weekend is jam-packed with choices, both entertaining and intriguing. The program for Friday, Oct. 12, includes the amusingly tongue-in-cheek Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc's Adventures in Plastic (7 p.m.) in which lesbian folk singer/performance artist Phranc explores her newfound passion for Tupperware. At 11 p.m., adventurous viewers can roam around for 90 minutes in the mind of photographer/filmmaker Bruce Weber in Chop Suey, a highly stylized and personalized study of beautiful young boys and other Weber obsessions. And on Saturday, Oct. 13, screenings take place from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., with all manner of movies ranging from the drolly eccentric, snowbound farce 101 Reykjavik (5 p.m.) to the sapphic literary thriller Monkey's Mask (7 p.m.).
There's so much going on during the festival's closing day, Sunday Oct. 14, that I barely know where to start. The all-day street fair and 2 p.m. free concert outside Tampa Theatre are sure to be packed, but the nonstop activities also include programs of youth-oriented films, a 4 p.m. screening of works by local filmmakers (including Edward Isin's Reggie Me) and a 6:30 p.m. screening of the picturesque Adventures of Felix, in which a young French Arab hitchhikes through the French countryside in search of the father he never knew. And if you still have any steam left by 8:30 p.m., don't forget the final episodes of Metrosexuality.
I've only scratched the surface here, offering some suggestions on what the festival has to offer. This is a big event, and there are numerous films that haven't even been mentioned here, either because I didn't have a chance to preview them or simply because of the limited space available in one column. Many of those films that we haven't included in our preview may very well turn out to be the very ones that best float your boat, so make sure to check out the festival's complete schedule, available online or over at Tampa Theatre. There are lots of different ways to approach this festival, and nary a bad route in the bunch.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2001.