It's June again! So with all the usual caveats about how every one of this year's 153 films is worth your time, I am providing here a little cheat sheet of films, screenings and events I am particularly looking forward to at the upcoming Frameline festival, the fifth I have contributed to as Senior Programmer. I'm especially proud this year that 52% of all the films are directed or co-directed by women! And also that (having concentrated quite a bit on our world cinema section) we have films representing 39 countries.

And Breathe Normally
An exquisite drama from Iceland that won a Directing Award at Sundance, this slow-burn feature is our World Cinema centerpiece for a reason - it's a deeply rewarding exploration of how two vastly different women from different continents forge a connection in a harsh world.

Hard Paint
This moody, sexy and ultimately uplifting romance is set in the gritty Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, featuring a lonely young protagonist who dances on his webcam to earn money. Hard Paint deservedly won the Teddy Award at this year's Berlin Festival for best LGBTQ narrative film -- it's terrific. And the directors will be here in San Francisco too!

L'animale
Not your typical coming-of-age story, L'animale introduces us to tomboy Mati and her Austrian family in a crucial moment of their lives, as she explores what real friendship (and love) mean and her parents try to sort out their complicated needs. I really enjoyed the smart script - director Katharina Mückstein will be here from Austria.

Naturally there's so much more I could be crowing about - celebrities in the house, light comedies, artful experiments...email me if you want more highlights or are wondering about a film I haven't mentioned here. The full program is here and tickets are on sale now.

I have been struggling to accept that Sam Shepard is gone. I never met him, but his fierce dreamscapes, the theater he conjured from the detritus of the American West, were profoundly meaningful to me as I came of age, another son of the West wondering where, and how, the myths had gone. For those of us who were exposed to his theater in the Bay Area of the 70's-80's, or who (like me, in college), have had a chance to perform those hallucinatory--yet somehow emotionally precise--raving monologues and stripped-bare showdowns before an audience, his theatrical voice was a mysterious revelation, an incantation, gushing from some ineffable psychic wound that made his work deeply human. A shaman is gone, but the crack that he opened in the language, and our imagination, remains.

Please also read Patti Smith's beautiful remembrance of her friend.

Earlier this week I delivered the following introductory remarks to Frameline's retrospective screening of Looking for Langston by Isaac Julien. I thought I'd share them here.

When Moonlight won the Oscar for best picture this year, it occurred to us on the programming team that it was an extraordinary breakthrough for LGBT film…but also that this film did not emerge fully blown, out of a vacuum. It is a direct descendant of a long line of fierce and poetic depictions of black queer lives, running back through artists like Patrik-Ian Polk, Cheryl Dunye and Marlon Riggs, to the filmmaker whose work we will see today. To help us and our audiences take some measure of the progress and current state of art-making for LGBTQ filmmakers of color, we’ve put together a special multi-film program called “Barriers and Breakthroughs: Illuminating Filmmakers of Color Before and Beyond Moonlight” – 14 films and 2 panels that together help paint a picture of the past achievements and current opportunities and challenges facing artists working across multiple racial and sexual identities.

We kick things off today by going to the source: what is arguably the first black queer film by a black queer filmmaker: Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, today presented in a beautiful new digitally restored format.
 
Isaac Julien, who received the 2002 Frameline Award for his pioneering filmmaking, is a hard-to-categorize British visual artist: filmmaker, installation artist, video poet, trickster, who often addresses the intersections of histories, migrations, identities, and sexualities in his visual assemblages. Queen Elizabeth herself seems wise to his talents: just this week she used her annual Birthday Honours to name him a Commander of the British Empire – pretty heady stuff for the son of Caribbean immigrants from the island of St. Lucia, who grew up in the gritty East End of London quite far removed from Europe’s high-art circles.
 
His breakout film in 1989 is the work we are going to see today, Looking for Langston, a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance, the poet Langston Hughes, and both the legacy and the future of Black queer desire. Isaac had been moved and inspired on a visit to New York in 1987 to think about these matters not only because he was steeping himself in Harlem Renaissance poetry and photography—work created by artists many of whom were gay or bisexual, closeted and out—but also because his visit happened to coincide with the funeral of James Baldwin, which he witnessed with his partner Mark Nash. He returned to London and fashioned this dreamlike, theatricalized film scenario: part funeral, part club rave, part homage and part imagined love story - using images and sounds that leap across decades to create a dense intertextual pattern that is suffused with wit and passion. The passion is there from the start: the first voice you hear is that of Toni Morrison in her eulogy for James Baldwin….but the wit is right there too—as the camera floats through a stylized 1920’s funeral home, the body in the casket is none other than Isaac Julien.
 
The film is all about Looking—not just “Looking for” some kernels of truth about the elusive essence of Langston Hughes, but also "Looking at": the film is a luscious celebration of the black queer gaze. And you can spell that last word any way you want.
 
On its release, the film fought off an attempt by the Langston Hughes estate to block the use of several of the poems used in it—in fact at its first festival screening in New York, someone had to stand by the projector and push a mute button every time Hughes’ poetry was read in order for the festival to avert a court injunction. But over the years most of those wrinkles were ironed out. The layered audio track is worth paying close attention to—featuring not only Hughes’ words but the rapturous poetry of Essex Hemphill and Bruce Nugent, and wonderful period music as well as contemporary songs written by Bay Area composer Blackberri.

Today the film stands as a milestone – or more accurately the Rosetta Stone – for what queer filmmaking could be. As the film scholar B. Ruby Rich mentions in her Frameline catalog note, given the context of both the triumph of Moonlight and our current threatening political climate, this may be “the most essential film revival of 2017.”

We’ll precede it with Isaac Julien’s rarely screened short film The Attendant, completed just a few years after Looking for Langston. Here the setting is also a kind of theatrical tableau – this time in a museum, where a middle-aged Black gallery guard locks eyes with a beautiful white boy—played, by the way, by John Wilson, who also appears as a fetching object of desire in Looking for Langston.  This loaded moment in the museum sets off a witty sequence of erotic and symbolic encounters that manage to reference everything from the history of British slavery to Tom of Finland. Writing in the New York Times, Holland Cotter observed that “the film presents a complex sexual and racial dynamic of dominance and submission and a poignant sense of loss, which serves as a reminder that the piece, [like Looking for Langston,] was made at the height of the AIDS epidemic.“

We are really grateful to Isaac Julien and his gallery team in London for making these films available, as well as to Brian Freeman for first suggesting this timely program. Isaac is traveling to South Africa and not able to be here, but noted in an email to me that it was a special honor to bring these films to Frameline, since even though they have appeared in San Francisco before, they have actually never played here officially as part of the Frameline festival – and have never been seen at all in these digital restorations.

I'm a bit late with this round-up but want to point out a few don't-miss screenings at the upcoming festival, which opened Thursday June 15 and runs through June 25, featuring 147 films from 19 countries. It seems that this year (my fourth as Senior Programmer), LGBTQ film has leapt to new levels of sophistication, so the program feels especially strong from a cinematic standpoint. (I say this not to take any enhanced credit for the quality of the program; in fact I played a somewhat smaller role for Frameline this year because I was finishing my Jacques Pépin documentary.) For a sense of what might be happening in the zeitgeist for LGBTQ film, check out the programming team's thoughts in David Lewis' insightful article from last week's San Francisco Chronicle. Now on to a few picks for Frameline41.

The Wound
A striking, haunting drama set during a coming-of-age initiation ceremony among South Africa's Xhosa community, where notions of masculinity collide with forbidden affections. Sensitively written and performed.

God's Own Country
Set on a rugged Yorkshire sheep farm, this tale of a love that begins to take root between a sullen lad and the new Romanian farmhand is a slow burn, featuring muddy (torrid) frolicking and memorable scenes of animal husbandry. What's not to like? Director Francis Lee in person at the Castro!

I Dream in Another Language
Deep in a Mexican rain forest, a handsome anthropologist travels to a remote village to record the last two remaining speakers of a dying indigenous language, only to find the the two men refuse to speak to each other. His quest takes him on mystical, spiritual and wonderful journey into the past.

Against the Law
I was fascinated and appalled to learn the tragic history of the persecution of gay men in the UK during the 50s and 60s. This drama recounts the story of one man, Peter Wildeblood, and skillfully interweaves documentary testimony as well.

Chavela
A marvelous, archivally rich and revelatory look at the fierce, iconoclastic Mexican torch singer Chavela Vargas. Pedro Almodóvar may have re-discovered her in 1990s, but here her whole messy and thrilling life gets its due.

The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin
While yes, it's an unabashed valentine to the city of San Francisco and the charms and openness that attracted its favorite son to live and write here, it's also a poignant look back at the last four decades of gay and lesbian life in America, through a novelist's eye.  Well-crafted and told. It was our opening night screening (sold out) but just added an encore screening by popular demand.

The Lavender Scare
A gripping account of the decades-long effort at the highest levels of U.S. leadership to rid the U.S. government of homosexuals starting with the Cold War--and the battle for justice led by civil rights pioneer Frank Kameny.  Filmmaker Josh Howard & author David Johnson in person.

After Louie
The incomparable Alan Cumming will be here to receive the 2017 Frameline Award and bask in what I know will be a thunderous reception to his beautiful performance as a man of a certain age trying to bridge a gap between generations.  Wilson Cruz also expected in the house!

Signature Move
The festival boasts some terrific South Asian-themed films this year. Jennifer Reeder's delightful feature traces a budding romance between a Pakistani-American lawyer and a former female lucha libre wrestler...while she also negotiates bringing her traditional mother around to a more modern acceptance of 21st century love. (Mom is played wonderfully by the veteran actress Shabana Azmi, who starred in Deepa Mehta's controversial Fire some 20 years ago!)

Freak Show
A celebration of being your true oddball self, this is a fun, music-filled, affirming--but not trivial--coming-of-age story set in a high school, where the resident gender-expansive "freak" has a few lessons to teach the mean kids. Starring the wonderful Alex Lawther (who played young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game) with a memorable turn by Bette Midler as his boozy mom, and cameos from Laverne Cox, John McEnroe and Abigail Breslin.

Looking for Langston
A new digital re-mastering of Isaac Julien's 1989 classic meditation on the Harlem Renaissance and queer black desire--an especially timely reminder that the poetic, boundary-crossing Moonlight has deep and fierce precedents. A perfect set-up for attending our panels focusing on opportunities and challenges facing LGBTQ filmmakers of color.

Stumped
Don't be fooled by the apparent grimness of the topic (it's the story of a quadruple amputee) - this is a unique, uplifting, wry and funny documentary about resilience and the quirks of the human spirit.

Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves
The longest title in the festival and definitely the longest film (clocking in at just over 3 hours), this is a cinephile's must-see. In a fictional re-imagining of the iconoclastic political activism that led to Canada's 2012 "Maple Spring" (think "Occupy" on steroids), the film deploys a brilliant arsenal of cinematic styles to ask some pretty deep questions about what real change demands. It critiques youthful rebellion while also eviscerating the status quo. Epic in every way. Bring a cushion.

For the last 3 years I've been asked by friends and strangers to give my insider "favorites" among the films I've had a hand in programming at Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival. Alert: any programmer worth his/her salt doesn't talk about "favorites," because we've worked too hard to winnow down a huge number of films to a very competitive few, and we want you to see them all! That said, with 155 films this year from 24 countries - including films about LGBTQ life in countries and cultures we rarely hear about, including China, Cuba, Myanmar, and the Canadian Inuit - I understand the temptation to request something of a cheat sheet.

But rather than calling these "favorites," I am simply calling out here those screenings I personally am especially looking forward to, whether for selfish reasons (e.g., a shorts program I am proud of) or because of special guests, or simply a beautiful film that should be seen on the big screen.

A reminder that the festival runs June 16-26, including a full week in the East Bay. And if a film you made, or are excited to see, isn't listed below, it's not because I don't love it. It's that I don't have room on this blog to reproduce the entire Frameline40 website!

2016 brings a strong slate of international films telling stories centered on the experiences of young people. In the new normal, these kids aren't necessarily battling parents and society over being gay. In a more accepting world, the complications of their lives are diverse and nuanced.

Girls Lost
Three misfit high school girls in Sweden discover a magical plant that allows them to be transformed for short periods, werewolf-like, into boys...and they make the most of their adventure. This brilliantly realized fantastic tale has elements of both horror and humor, and ultimately is a quite poignant depiction of three young women's different experiences of gender identity.

Rara
Told from the point-of-view of a 13-year-old girl, Rara is the story of two moms in Chile who are raising their daughters while trying to shield them from both the judgments of their conservative town and the custody battle that is brewing with an ex-husband. Well written, acted and made.

Kiki
Our Opening Night film is an exuberant and politically engaged look at the current ballroom scene in New York City, centering on the lives and inspiring fierceness of talented voguers who are mainly queer and trans youth of color. Think of it as a savvy, contemporary update of Paris Is Burning for the age of #BlackLivesMatter.

We have 15 different shorts programs this year, including the usual classics Fun in Boys Shorts, Fun in Girls Shorts, Worldly Affairs and Only in San Francisco. But I also had a lot of fun curating two new offbeat programs:

It's Frameline's 40th anniversary, so there are some terrific retrospective screenings of films like Tongues Untied and The Celluloid Closet that have had a social impact and paved the way for the new crop of social justice documentaries. There's a fun program - Flashback 1977 - remembering Frameline's founding year (though my Lowell High School graduation will not be memorialized, I'm afraid). And I am moderating a panel on social justice documentaries as well: LGBTQ Films as an Agent of Social Change - Then & Now.

And I hope you all come out to meet (or get introduced to) the legendary Bob Hawk, recipient of the Frameline Award this year and mentor-muse-"film-whisperer" to generations of queer indie filmmakers. We'll be showing the new film about his life, Film Hawk.

"When I was in my very early 20's I decided that theater was not really what I should be doing - I had seen a photo of Mother Teresa holding a very tiny baby - the two smiling/beaming at each other and it struck me like lightning that this is what I should do - go to India, find her, own only a sari and a bucket and go around picking up and caring for the sick and dying.

"So I was working temp jobs, trying to raise money to go to India and in the midst of this Mother Teresa makes a surprise trip to NYC. I call all the places she had been, call her convent in the Bronx, trying to find out how I can meet her. Someone at my job suggests I call the Indian Consulate, and when I do the man tells me that she will actually be there for a talk in about 45 minutes or so.

"I dash out of the job - saying goodbyes to all - call my friend Max to try to meet me and head up - the building is in the east 60's off Central Park as I recall...I get there and Mother Teresa has not arrived and the guard will not let me in. While I wait, two cars pull up...out of one exits a flock of nuns, and out of the other tiny Mother Teresa between two tall men. They come down the sidewalk towards me - jumping foot to foot - and she nods to the guard to let me in. My friend Max arrives and I grab her hand and we both follow Mother Teresa, the tall men, and flock of nuns up the stairs trailing behind like the duckling Ping in the Chinese folk tale.

"Max and I stand at the back of a large ballroom filled with beautiful Indian people, women in gorgeous saris, feeling out of place. Mother Teresa speaks eloquently about her work - at one point a man says, 'They say that rather than give a man a fish, one should teach him how to fish.' She says 'most of these people are not strong enough and need to be given what they need..but I will make a deal with you, I will give them a fish and when they are strong enough you can teach them how.' Booya.

"She is funny, she is tough and I am hearing angels of purpose singing in my head. At the end of the talk she is about to be taken into a smaller room and I think now or never. I fling myself at her, she takes my hand in both her hands and looks up at me (she is TINY) First I think - wow, she looks like Elizabeth Swados, and then I am caught by her eyes - which are just like burning coals. I tell her I want to come to India and pick up dying people and she asks you feel you need to do this, and I say yes and she looks at me and says no, you can not come.

"The angels stop singing. I have been rejected at first glance by Mother Teresa. She says, 'When you are so filled with love for these people that you cannot stand to be away from them for another second then you can come' and I get it - it's not about me. She asks what I do - I mumble about theater and singing...nonsense. She says, 'There are many famines. In my country there is a great famine of the body, and in your country there is a great famine of the spirit....that is what must be fed.' And she pats my hand and spins around and enters the room...I stand there and Max has to come up and take me away ....and I still carry those words with me today."

Earlier this year,  I and my film programming colleagues at Frameline—the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival—met to begin the always agonizing process of selecting our favorites from several hundred new films submitted by filmmakers from around the world, to assemble a representative snapshot of our cinematic moment.

There are a few obvious trends  that we could spot immediately: strong narratives from Latin America with gay male or transgender protagonists (In the Grayscale, Mariposa, Carmín Tropical, among many others); fascinating stories emerging from areas like the Balkans, which have rarely produced queer work (Sworn Virgin, Love Island, Xenia); a spate of bracing documentaries about North American athletes, created in the wake of Michael Sam, Jason Collins, and the Sochi Olympics (Game Face, Out to Win, To Russia with Love).

But there’s one development that has taken me a bit longer to identify as it isn’t as clear-cut. Call it the Year of the Bad Queer.

Some of the most memorable North American narrative films of the past year have featured GLBT protagonists—not side characters, but principals—who are deeply, irredeemably flawed. I’m not talking about the traditional flaws of antiheroes—quirks and oddities, suspect motives, disarmingly human failings. I’m talking about polarizing, problematic, occasionally awful people who happen to be gay. Their journey is at the center of the film, so we are asked to care about their fate, but their behavior is offensive, they are morally impoverished, mean, vain, passive-aggressive, violent, immature, or, in more technical language, generally fucked up.

Some examples of the Bad Queer phenomenon would include the following, all of them quite accomplished films with theatrical distribution deals in place or at least a lot of festival accolades and buzz.

  • The title character of Justin Kelly’s I Am Michael—based on the true story of Michael Glatze, played by James Franco—goes from being a committed gay youth activist to a homophobic evangelical preacher intent on hurting the community he once loved.

  • The screenplay of Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby is almost sadistically constructed so that its central character—a garden-variety Brooklyn performance artist, played by Silva himself—transforms (spoiler alert) from likable prospective gay dad in the first half to brutally violent criminal in the second.

• In her feature debut, writer-director-star Desirée Akhavan creates in Appropriate Behavior a central character, Shirin, who’s best described as a lesbian, Iranian-American version of Hannah Horvath from Girls—socially awkward, narcissistic, immature for her years, and incapable of taking responsibility for her failings.
 
•  In Joey Kuhn’s debut feature Those People, the film’s most volatile, charismatic gay character is Sebastian Blackworth, a self-absorbed, manipulative, Upper East Side socialite who may have abetted his swindling father’s crimes (think Bernie Madoff).

  •  Lily Tomlin’s title character in Paul Weitz’ Grandma, while admittedly a fierce and admirable advocate for her pregnant granddaughter, is mean, self-pitying, occasionally violent, and a self-described “asshole.”

  •  The irreverent Canadian black comedy Guidance is about a self-loathing, alcoholic former child star who’s in denial about his homosexuality and, in career desperation, lies his way into a job as a high school guidance counselor, offering the children vodka shots and such affirmations as “I want you to be an inspiration to all the other sluts.”

Rather than be appalled by this newly hatched cast of fuck-ups or lament the scarcity of queer heroes, I think we should see this trend as reassuring—precisely because these films refuse to repeat the tropes of two decades of GLBT protagonists. Unlike their predecessors, the dramatis personae in this new generation of indies are not defined primarily by their sexuality, and their struggles are not about their sexual orientation. They’re dealing with a host of dysfunctions— bad parents, economic distress, addiction, grief—but they’ve largely integrated being gay into their otherwise messed-up lives. What’s most striking about these new antiheroes is that their flaws usually get the better of them. Most of these films’ denouements do not come with a side order of redemption (with the possible exception of Elle in Grandma, which, interesting enough, was created by a heterosexual writer-director).

So why this sudden proliferation of queer jerks and nasties? (Okay, there have been a few such characters in the past, like Aileen Wuornos in Monster or Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, but they were once the exception.) I believe we’re seeing a new generation of writers and directors who are eager to create characters that veer away from the well-worn track of indie queer protagonists to date. Ironic and unsentimental, these filmmakers have moved beyond brave teens coming out to disapproving parents, misunderstood rural folk heading for the big city, or anything smacking of martyrdom for a gay cause. They’ve seen enough episodes of Modern Family to know that America may not need another likable homosexual on the screen on whom the audience can project its sympathy or approval. They’re feeling emboldened, or even entitled, to present what might be considered offensive gay or lesbian characters. Perhaps they wish to be seen as provocateurs as well as auteurs. They certainly show a healthy disregard for accusations of “internalized homophobia” (which have been leveled by some critics of these films). And they seem to trust the audience is ready to embrace stories that aren’t, in the end, an exercise in community pride.

As a result, queer film audiences finally have a narrative pleasure that has long been afforded to straight audiences since the dawn of film noir: a central character who is highly problematic, but fascinating.

There is an instructive parallel to this phenomenon that happened nearly fifty years ago involving another minority, namely American Jews. In the wake of growing social acceptance of Jews and waning anti-Semitism at home, a wave of cinematic “bad-boy Jews” swamped the screen in the late ’60s and early ’70s.” Think of the cad played by Richard Benjamin in Goodbye, Columbus, the matricidal George Segal in Where’s Poppa, or several of Elliott Gould’s rakes, cynics, and reprobates. This loosening and complicating of Jewish characters on-screen reflected a newfound confidence among young Jewish writers and directors, who were willing to risk offending people in order to widen the spectrum of Jewish personae beyond the pleasant pigeonholes of scholar, singer, soldier, milquetoast, or suburban assimilator that predominated in the postwar period.*

Could we be witnessing an analogous “bad queer” moment now, even as we witness the onset of marriage equality and I Am Cait? I suspect we are in for an extended run of “gays gone bad” on the big screen, if only because screenwriters now need something spicier than vanilla queerness to flavor their films. Expect a rash of Patricia Highsmith adaptations (two are already around the corner) and, who knows?, maybe another biopic about J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and Jeffrey Dahmer.

I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing documentarian Marcel Ophuls at the recent Mill Valley Film Festival, and penning an appreciation of his contributions to the field for the festival's program. Part of preparing for the interview and the essay was reviewing a good portion of his body of work...no small feat when it comes to his lengthy career and lengthy films! You can read my essay here or in the PDF below.