There are various dark and unnatural forces lurking about that would just as soon have our local gay population relegated to some out-of-sight, out-of-mind limbo. The Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is not about to let that happen, though. With Hillsborough's anti-gay-pride flare-up fresh in the memory, TIGLFF embarks on its 16th year as heavily buzzed as ever.
And here's the really good news: The festival has risen to the occasion and come up with its best program in years.
Running Oct. 6-16 at Tampa Theatre and Sunrise Cinemas, TIGLFF promises to be every bit as interesting and entertaining as we've come to expect from this award-winning event, but also eclectic enough to appeal to an even wider range of viewers than usual (and not excluding those of us of the straight persuasion).
This year's festival program booklet even includes a handy-dandy guide to 10 "hetero friendly films," as well as a full-page show of support from corporate mega-lords Pepsico (featuring a cheering, all-American crowd scarfing down Fritos while presumably taking in the latest Charles Busch drag extravaganza).
At the risk of going a little too far out on a limb here, I'd say that it's beginning to look like this festival may have finally arrived. Oh, sure, TIGLFF has arrived before — many times, in fact. Pretty much every time there's some positive seismic shift involving the gay community, or whenever TIGLFF finds itself a new programming director (which happens more frequently than you might think), voices start yammering about the festival having "arrived." But this time, it looks like it might just stick.
The festival does indeed have yet another new programming director this year, Joseph Cook, whose style and cinematic aesthetic seem very much in keeping with TIGLFF's most successful past programmers, Dorothy Abbott and Margaret Murray. Cook (who seems like a regular guy, despite a penchant for quoting heavyweight eggheads like film theorist Siegfried Kracauer) seems to have a knack for picking crowd-pleasers, as well as a solid understanding and appreciation for the edgier imports that put the all-important "international" in this festival's name.
This year's event features 88 films (although more than half of those are shorts, so the total amount is actually fairly manageable), and it all begins on Thursday, Oct. 6, with a 6:30 p.m. reception, followed by a 7:30 screening of Loggerheads at Tampa Theatre. (All films mentioned below will be screened at Tampa Theatre unless otherwise noted.)
Loggerheads is an interesting choice for an opening night film, appreciably more thoughtful and heartfelt than the wild rides and extravagant campfests that have almost always ushered in this festival over the years. Gay characters figure prominently in the film's dovetailing narratives of disconnected parents and children, but those characters are part of the overall texture of Loggerheads (which was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance), rather than mouthpieces for some grand "gay sensibility."
Quietly moving and sincere, Loggerheads sometimes tugs a little too hard on the heartstrings, but it's a brave and decidedly un-flashy way to open this year's festival. Oh, and it's one of those films on the "hetero friendly" list, by the way.
A movie most decidedly not found on the "hetero friendly" list, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green is the feature attraction on Friday, Oct. 7, and is probably just the film that many people would have expected on opening night. Filled with campy, catty, high-octane humor, sweaty sex, kooky characters and a perky, larger-than-life style right in line with the comic book upon which it's based, Ethan Green is as much fun and ultimately just as shallow as its adorably neurotic hero. Several of the movie's stars are expected to attend the screening and the festival's accompanying gala evening of live entertainment, food and dancing under the stars at TECO Plaza.
Saturday, Oct. 8, is a big day for the festival, beginning at 3 p.m. with an eclectic program of short documentaries about various aspects of the gay experience. At 5 p.m., the program gets a little silly with Drag Nuns in Tinseltown, a look at L.A.'s flamboyant Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. TIGLFF saves the best for last, though, and the evening's feature attractions just happen to be two of the most memorable films of the entire festival: the English beauty When I'm 64 (7:30 p.m.), and, from France, the ravishing but controversial Three Dancing Slaves (9:30 p.m.).
A basic synopsis of When I'm 64 threatens to make the film sound hokey — two lonely old coots strike up a friendship that rattles their respective worlds when it eventually reveals itself as love — but the movie sneaks up on us, seducing us into a pair of curiously entwined lives as precisely described as they are beautifully acted.
Veteran British actors Alun Armstrong and Paul Freeman are wonderful as the initially reluctant lovers — one a manly, working class widower and the other an apparently asexual, retired teacher — who wind up breathlessly chatting each other up on the phone into the wee hours like a pair of starry-eyed pre-teens. When I'm 64 is a small treasure that wasn't on the "hetero friendly" list, but should have been.
As for Three Dancing Slaves, a lot of people, gay and straight alike, are probably going to hate this film, but give it a chance. An enigmatic and deeply moody depiction of three French-Algerian brothers transitioning into manhood, Three Dancing Slaves belongs to a proudly seedy tradition extending from Jean Genet to Tom of Finland to Francois Ozon, where poetic meaning is extracted from attractive but ominous young men with well-muscled torsos engaging in frequently sordid behavior.
The film revels in male beauty as well as in the beauty of the subversive, positing a world without women that may strike some as the cinematic equivalent of an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue, or simply as so much navel-gazing (as well as gazing at other anatomical parts). There's some truth in those critiques, but director Gael Morel (Wild Reeds) also manages one of the more vivid and dangerously sensual portraits of post-adolescent angst in recent years.
There's a full slate scheduled for Sunday, Oct. 9, with one of the best bets being the Swiss film Hilde's Journey (2:45 p.m., Sunrise Cinemas), a moving and sometimes surprisingly amusing account of various characters feuding over a dead lover's ashes. Another recommended selection is The Journey (5 p.m.), a gorgeously photographed tale from India about a forbidden romance between two young women.
The Sunday line-up continues with Cote D'Azur (7 p.m.), a Euro-trifle that some are bound to consider charming or amusing, but that I found impossibly annoying. Basically just another boring sex farce with delusions of grandeur, Cote D'Azur is a coy, self-satisfied and often just-plain-stupid depiction of polymorphous partner swapping in a quaint French village.
You could forgo the sunny but brain-atrophied fluff of Cote D'Azur for the significantly darker, harder-hitting Good Boys (8:45 p.m.), but that might not be a perfect plan either. I admired the unflinching honesty and gritty, low-key approach of this Israeli film, but it's hard to shake the feeling we've seen big screen variations on the grubby lives of Good Boys' male prostitute anti-heroes one too many times before.
On Monday, Oct. 10, the festival goes documentary crazy, with a trio of films about everything from butch lesbians (The Aggressives, 6:15 p.m.), to queer folk musicians (Life in a Box, 9:45 p.m.), to the relationship between sexual orientation and eating disorders (Do I Look Fat?, 8 p.m.). It all begins at 5 p.m. with a happy hour and a free panel discussion on documentary filmmaking, featuring directors John Catania (The Lady in Question is Charles Busch), Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer (Life in a Box), Travis Matthews (Do I Look Fat?) and others.
The only film I was able to preview from the Tuesday, Oct. 11, schedule turned out to be only mildly interesting — Kiki and Herb: On the Rocks (9:30 p.m.), a meandering mockmentary featuring drag queen Justin Bond as an aging, overbearing chanteuse — but some of the evening's other selections sound more promising. A better bet might be Say Uncle (7:30 p.m.), a comedy about a gay man mistaken for a pedophile; or Ethan Mao (7:30 p.m., Sunrise Cinemas), a curious-sounding drama about a male hustler's violent confrontation with his family.
And that's only the first half of this festival. There's a lot more to come over the ensuing five days, including documentaries about the late, great performance artist/diva/alien Klaus Nomi and Tony Award-winning playwright Charles Busch; the frankly wonderful Wilby Wonderful; and the crowd-pleasing closing night film, Adam and Steve.
There are movies about Peruvian hermaphrodites, movies about Argentinean S&M freaks, movies about 9/11, movies about soccer players in love, and lots and lots of movies about lesbians in hot water because of their sexuality (Iran, Serbia and Canada are just a few of the trouble spots depicted over the second half of the festival). It's a full plate for sure, but rest assured we'll be here next week to tell you all about it.
For more information visit the festival's website: www.tiglff.com or call 813-879-4220. Tickets may be ordered online and purchased at several outlets throughout Tampa Bay. Visit the website, click on "Tickets."
This article appears in Oct 5-11, 2005.