What dyke wouldn’t enjoy a road movie featuring two women in a camper van? Especially an old, beat-up camper that has been lovingly cleaned, restored, and decorated by the main character, Ele.
This subtitled movie from Italy begins with a blurry nighttime shot of a young woman running from a building, with men in pursuit yelling, “Come back! Give us that bag!” She tries to flee in her getaway vehicle, but it won’t start, so she runs off into the night with the bag and hides from them. Later we will learn that she is Mia, a Romanian working in Italy.
Next we are introduced to Ele, a 19 year old woman living unhappily with her mother and new stepfather. During one of Ele’s rare appearances at her school, she meets Mia while smoking in the bathroom. Mia is working as a custodian, and scolds her for smoking in the girl’s room, and then joins her.
This begins a friendship that is never explicitly defined as such, though the sparks fly between the two, and they go on to escape in the camper van when Ele agrees to drive her to the Northern border.
The film, released in 2022, stars Emma Benini as Ele and Anastasia Doaga as Mia, and was featured in Boston’s “Wicked Queer” festival, one of many hard-to-find treasures. Though “Girls Don’t Cry” is well worth seeing and deserves a wide audience, it is currently not screening or streaming in the U.S. Kudos to Wicked Queer for bringing it to our attention!
Wicked Queer is winding down as I write this, but we also salute them for including a throwback category with several gay, lesbian, and trans classics. For this reviewer, it was most powerful to see “Tongues Untied” (1989) again, and “Gay USA” for the first time in its entirety. Arthur Bressan Jr.’s 1977 film documents the rise of the gay rights movement by way of several large city Pride marches and festivals. It is tough to watch with 20/20 hindsight as so many newly out, liberated men celebrate their freedom, unaware that within just a few years so many of them will succumb to AIDS. Similarly, Marlon Riggs’ groundbreaking, poetic film “shattered the silence” around Black gay men and set off massive reactionary pushback in the “culture wars,” of the 1990’s. Poet Essex Hemphill figures prominently in the writing and performance of the films, but within a few years, we would be attending his memorial.
If you weren’t aware that Boston has an annual LGBTQ film festival, check out Wicked Queer
Review: Janet ProlmanJanet Prolman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where her mother nicknamed her “my little queer.” She has also lived in North Carolina and New York. A lover of short stories, theater, music, and performance, she knows the lyrics to almost every song or advertising jingle she’s ever heard. Now on Cape Cod, she enjoys kayaking and frequenting Provincetown.
