
![]() 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.
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Narrative Features![]() Bare It's first in alphabetical order, though it's the last film we'll show, and well worth waiting for. The Closing Night film is a strong, edgy drama starring Dianna Agron (thankfully released from her cheerleader outfit in Glee) as a restless young woman stuck in a deadsville Nevada town, who encounters a troublemaking drifter (Paz de la Huerta) who opens her eyes to new horizons. It's well performed, burns with some R-rated heat, and has something deeper to say about what it takes to discover your own road. ![]() _I Am Michael The provocative true-life story of a gay youth activist whose search for spiritual meaning takes him down a strange path toward renouncing his homosexuality. With surprising and fine performances from James Franco and Zachary Quinto, this film helps complicate the possibilities of gay cinema...it's a counter-narrative, with an anti-hero, and yet never stops being a gay-positive film. Huh? See it and you'll know what I mean. It's the opening night film - discuss it at the party. ![]() Mariposa (Butterfly) I love this romantic drama from Argentina's Marco Berger. Its structural premise is a bit like Sliding Doors, following two alternate versions of the same story, intercutting what might have happened if a crucial action had gone a different way at the beginning of the story. It's sexy, intelligent and ingeniously constructed. This is also one of 11 or so Latin American features in the festival, an especially strong year. ![]() Stories of Our Lives A stirring and beautifully filmed anthology of five fictional vignettes distilled and inspired from more than 200 interviews with Kenyan LGBT folks. An unusual and revealing window onto African lives. ![]() Sworn Virgin This ravishingly photographed film shot in Albania and Italy centers on the story of Hanna, who, in order to escape the hardships and limited choices faced by young women in her extremely traditional village culture, chooses to become Mark and live as a man...but years later begins to question her decision. ![]() Those People One of several strong American debut features in Frameline39, this stylish comic drama by Joey Kuhn is set among the young social elites of Manhattan's Upper East Side (the post-prep school types you'd find in a Whit Stillman movie), spinning a tale of unrequited love among two best friends (Charles and Sebastian), with whiffs of Brideshead Revisited...and Bernie Madoff. Filmmakers on Screen: dramas & docs exploring the lives of pioneering moviemakers Cinephiles rejoice! The festival boasts 7 features that dramatize, parody, lionize or actually document the lives and loves of pioneering LGBT or queer-adjacent filmmakers. We didn't go looking for this theme, it bubbled up as part of the zeitgeist. Maybe it's because 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the birth of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whom we honor with a new documentary as well as a retrospective screening of his dark and erotic final film, Querelle. Other notable cine-centric films include: ![]() Eisenstein in Guanajuato The latest film from British virtuoso Peter Greenaway is an over-the-top glitter-bomb, a visual feast that imagines the sexual awakening of the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein during his time in Mexico in 1931. Funny, brazen, and self-consciously gorgeous, the film features a bravura comic performance by Elmer Bäck as Eisenstein the tragic clown. ![]() Jason and Shirley In this fascinating faux documentary, director Stephen Winter turns the tables on the seminal, controversial 1967 film Portrait of Jason. Even if you don't know the original documentary--a groundbreaking example of confessional biography in which director Shirley Clarke seemed to coax her eccentric black gay subject Jason Holliday into an on-camera breakdown--this new film, taking a mock "behind-the-scenes" approach, gives us an engrossing take on the power relationship between artist and subject, and touches on important themes of race, sexuality and moviemaking. ![]() Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer San Francisco's own Jack Walsh delivers an absorbing homage to pioneering modern choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, a San Franciscan herself, still a bracing and committed artist-activist now in her 80's. ![]() Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn Men of a certain age may remember the frisky and sex-positive underground movies of Peter de Rome (with goofy titles like Adam and Yves), but everybody else will be surprised and charmed by the courtly, puckish Englishman who in the early 1960s blazed a sexy 8mm trail for the likes of Andy Warhol, John Waters and today's multibillion-dollar adult gay porn industry. Though much of his imagery is X-rated, this excellent profile makes a strong case that Peter de Rome is an artist worth discovering...an opinion shared by the august British Film Institute, which is now busy archiving and preserving much of his (delightfully obscene) oeuvre. (More) Documentaries![]() Alex & Ali Berkeley filmmaker Malachi Leopold's terrific thriller of a documentary tells the story of his uncle Alex, who fell in love in the 1960s while serving in the Peace Corps in Tehran and has held the torch for beautiful Ali over the decades. Despite the separation imposed by the Iranian revolution. they attempt to reunite, complicated by the changes each man has undergone in the intervening years and the very serious danger Ali faces if he is outed. ![]() The Royal Road Jenni Olson's mesmerizing and illuminating meditation on California history, urbanization, Father Junipero Serra, LA-SF cityscapes and much more. A rewarding and transporting viewing experience, shot in 16mm film (talk about dedication) by Sophie Constantinou and edited by Dawn Logsdon. ![]() Tab Hunter Confidential A clip-filled, behind-the-scenes look at the Hollywood heartthrob who had to remain closeted to maintain a career, ably directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, who will receive this year's Frameline Award. And of course...Tab in person at the Castro! ![]() The Yes Men Are Revolting The latest hilarious antics of Andy and Mike--the brilliant eco-pranksters known as The Yes Men--come to life in their most personal film yet, in which Andy (the gay one) reveals how he can't keep a boyfriend because of his globetrotting activism, and they take an emotional trip to Uganda, where their anti-corporate enviornmentalism may be far less controversial than Andy's coming out. Game Changers: Sexuality & Sports |
Lenny: The talented musician/playwright/ performer Hershey Felder—you may have seen his one-man show about George Gershwin last year at the Berkeley Rep—has a new solo piece called Maestro, all about the lives and loves of the inimitable Leonard Bernstein. I’ll get a chance to chat with Hershey Felder in an onstage conversation after his performance on Sunday evening June 15, as part of a benefit evening organized by the great people at Jewish Family Children’s Services of the East Bay. Come out and see an interesting show and support a fantastic organization. Tickets for this special performance are here. |

LGBT Movies: I’ve had a great time this spring working as Senior Programmer for Frameline, the upcoming 38th annual San Francisco International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Film Festival. We have curated a fabulous collection of 214 films from more than 30 countries. The festival runs June 19-29 – and the program is now online! Tickets go on sale Friday May 23 for members, next Friday (May 30) to the general public. I’ll post another blog entry with some personal favorites and observations, but start browsing the lineup now, it’s pretty hot! Of special pride and interest: a very timely and (I believe) necessary spotlight on new Russian features, documentaries and shorts with LGBT subject matter, highlighting some especially brave filmmaking in this difficult moment for Russian LGBT artists and citizens.

If you visited my grandparents any Thursday morning at their house on Beaumont Avenue in San Francisco, you were likely to find my grandfather noisily slurping his coffee and munching on a piece of matza. Thursday was when you also might meet Mrs. Fujimoto on her weekly visit to their house. Mrs. Fujimoto – we never learned her first name, it was just Mrs. Fujimoto. Kind of like in that old TV series where the Japanese housekeeper was just called “Mrs. Livingston”—the nice lady who would call Bill Bixby “Mr. Eddie’s Father.” In our family, we already had a Mrs. Livingston —it was my grandmother. That was her name. Mrs. Fujimoto called her “Mrs. Livingston.”
In 1939, my grandparents had left behind their house on Viktoriastrasse, a leafy lane in the town of Elberfeld, where generations of German Jewish women like my grandmother had kept impeccably well maintained, intimidatingly scrubbed homes...Cleaning was something of a sub-religion, a new denomination in the ever- more-secular Jewish world of my grandmother. This was something she had in common with Mrs. Fujimoto, who, I should clarify, was not a German Jew. My grandmother went at housecleaning like a demon, and even in the Weimar years, when my grandfather’s ribbon factory in Elberfeld was doing well and they had the money to hire housemaids, my grandmother was loath to turn over the cleaning to anyone else. Oh, she had no qualms assigning the intimate task of breast-feeding my mom to a wet nurse, but polishing the silverware?--ach Du lieber, now that was personal.
My grandparents had left a lot behind in Germany—their language, which upon arrival in America they pretty much refused to speak, except unconsciously when counting out playing cards and totting up points in their weekly bridge games, or in the occasional nursery rhymes they would sing to my sister and me. Hoppa hoppa Reiter, wenn er fällt dann schreit er...
So they left behind their language, if not their accent. And their house on Viktoriastrasse, if not their cleaning habits. And they left behind their mothers. My grandfather had to make a bargain with the Kommandant at Dachau—said he already had visas to leave with his wife and children, just release him and they’ll get out on the first available ship to America, stop waiting for the mothers’ visas to come through.
No time for the bread to rise: my grandparents, like the Jews of Egypt, left in haste. They threw their clothes into suitcases, they hid my grandmother’s jewelry in the insulation of the icebox door, and they left their house and their mothers in Elberfeld. The icebox got out. Their mothers didn’t.
My grandparents’ house in San Francisco still felt to me like a piece of the Old World: there was a certain Prussian formality, tempered by very warm and generous surprises—a secret candy drawer...toys hidden in the piano bench...a foosball game in the closet. Reluctantly as she aged, my grandmother yielded more and more of the housework to Mrs. Fujimoto—a fellow San Franciscan who had her own family story of wrongful imprisonment. Her family too had left their homes in haste, spent the war in internment camps, and had returned to San Francisco simply to carry on their lives.
My grandmother loved Mrs. Fujimoto, respected her talents. She may have been the only housekeeper who actually exceeded my grandmother’s exacting standards. Before a Thursday morning visit, my grandmother would go around the house anxiously fluffing the pillows...tidying up for the housekeeper. And Thursday mornings were the only time that my grandmother allowed her husband—the man she had married at age 19 and with whom she would eventually spend 72 years— yes, Thursday mornings were his one weekly appointed time to eat his beloved breakfast treat: matza. You see, matza was simply too crumbly to risk being eaten on days when Mrs. Fujimoto was not on hand to vacuum away the offending shards.
I don’t know if my grandmother ever explained to Mrs. Fujimoto what the little cracker crumbs were that she vacuumed up every Thursday. But I can imagine how it might have sounded, the way my grandmother would say it as we gathered around the seder table:
“This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.
Let all who are hungry come and eat.
Let all who are in need come and celebrate.
This year we are slaves: Next year may we all be free.”
--Peter L. Stein
April 2014
San Francisco
commissioned by and presented at the City Winery's Downtown Seder, San Francisco, 4/9/14
In 1939, my grandparents had left behind their house on Viktoriastrasse, a leafy lane in the town of Elberfeld, where generations of German Jewish women like my grandmother had kept impeccably well maintained, intimidatingly scrubbed homes...Cleaning was something of a sub-religion, a new denomination in the ever- more-secular Jewish world of my grandmother. This was something she had in common with Mrs. Fujimoto, who, I should clarify, was not a German Jew. My grandmother went at housecleaning like a demon, and even in the Weimar years, when my grandfather’s ribbon factory in Elberfeld was doing well and they had the money to hire housemaids, my grandmother was loath to turn over the cleaning to anyone else. Oh, she had no qualms assigning the intimate task of breast-feeding my mom to a wet nurse, but polishing the silverware?--ach Du lieber, now that was personal.
My grandparents had left a lot behind in Germany—their language, which upon arrival in America they pretty much refused to speak, except unconsciously when counting out playing cards and totting up points in their weekly bridge games, or in the occasional nursery rhymes they would sing to my sister and me. Hoppa hoppa Reiter, wenn er fällt dann schreit er...
So they left behind their language, if not their accent. And their house on Viktoriastrasse, if not their cleaning habits. And they left behind their mothers. My grandfather had to make a bargain with the Kommandant at Dachau—said he already had visas to leave with his wife and children, just release him and they’ll get out on the first available ship to America, stop waiting for the mothers’ visas to come through.
No time for the bread to rise: my grandparents, like the Jews of Egypt, left in haste. They threw their clothes into suitcases, they hid my grandmother’s jewelry in the insulation of the icebox door, and they left their house and their mothers in Elberfeld. The icebox got out. Their mothers didn’t.
My grandparents’ house in San Francisco still felt to me like a piece of the Old World: there was a certain Prussian formality, tempered by very warm and generous surprises—a secret candy drawer...toys hidden in the piano bench...a foosball game in the closet. Reluctantly as she aged, my grandmother yielded more and more of the housework to Mrs. Fujimoto—a fellow San Franciscan who had her own family story of wrongful imprisonment. Her family too had left their homes in haste, spent the war in internment camps, and had returned to San Francisco simply to carry on their lives.
My grandmother loved Mrs. Fujimoto, respected her talents. She may have been the only housekeeper who actually exceeded my grandmother’s exacting standards. Before a Thursday morning visit, my grandmother would go around the house anxiously fluffing the pillows...tidying up for the housekeeper. And Thursday mornings were the only time that my grandmother allowed her husband—the man she had married at age 19 and with whom she would eventually spend 72 years— yes, Thursday mornings were his one weekly appointed time to eat his beloved breakfast treat: matza. You see, matza was simply too crumbly to risk being eaten on days when Mrs. Fujimoto was not on hand to vacuum away the offending shards.
I don’t know if my grandmother ever explained to Mrs. Fujimoto what the little cracker crumbs were that she vacuumed up every Thursday. But I can imagine how it might have sounded, the way my grandmother would say it as we gathered around the seder table:
“This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.
Let all who are hungry come and eat.
Let all who are in need come and celebrate.
This year we are slaves: Next year may we all be free.”
--Peter L. Stein
April 2014
San Francisco
commissioned by and presented at the City Winery's Downtown Seder, San Francisco, 4/9/14