This week sees the 25th Edition of the annual PROVINCETOWN FILM FESTIVAL with five days of “unflinching cinema”. This 5-day festival showcases over 80 American and international independent narrative, documentary, and animated features and shorts as well as panel discussions and special events. Like the Cape Cod town it is situated in this is one of the most diverse film festivals ever in the US, and like its population, has a very significant queer presence.
As usual, the whole QUEERGURU Team has scrutinized all the queer movies for
OUR TOP PICKS OF MUST-SEE FILMS
It’s not surprising to learn that BIG BOYS, the debut feature film of Corey Sherman, is based on an incident in his own life, as it has such a convincing authenticity to it. In fact, the premise of his heartwarming tale of a confused teen coming to terms with his burgeoning sexuality is something that most of us gay men can relate to on a personal level.
Big Boys is the tale of 14-year-old overweight Jamie (Isaac Krasner) who is a bit of a geek and verges on being shy around others. Whilst other boys his age may be splitting their attention between sports and girls, he is just obsessed with developing his culinary skills. He is on the verge of going on his annual camping trip with his older brother Will (Taj Cross) who he tolerates and their twenty-something cousin Allie (Dora Madison) who is extremely fond of. However, his mother shares the news that not only is Allie now dating but her new boyfriend Dan (David Johnson III) is coming on the trip too. It doesn’t sit well with Jamie at all
PS. You may also like to check out Queerguru’s interview with filmmaker Corey Sherman HERE
BLUE JEAN is a brilliant new lesbian drama set in Thatcher’s Britain“Do you know what the phrase ‘Fight or Flight’ means?” asks gay Geordie PE teacher Jean (Rosy McEwen) of her teenage students at the beginning of the brilliant new drama Blue Jean. It is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival. It’s obviously on Jean’s mind as she navigates life as a queer teacher in a northeastern secondary school during bleak late 1980s Thatcher-era England in the shadow of controversial new anti-gay legislation, clause 28 of the Local Authorities Act.
Nancy Buirski’s excellent documentary “Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy” was the perfect excuse to re-think about not just how Midnight Cowboy made such an impact on the world in general but also on me in particular. The time was 1965 and this was British filmmaker John Schlesinger’s fifth movie and the first one he made in the US. This story of two hustlers living on the fringe of the bad side of New York City was so quintessentially American it surprised many people to learn of the Scheslinger’s heritage.
Midnight Cowboy and Sunday Bloody Sunday are both groundbreaking movies and Buriski does them both a great service by discussing the major effects they had on our culture then and now. I will never forget when Midnight Cowboy came out and how mesmerized I was by every minute detail of the film. Then later by the time Sunday Bloody Sunday came out, I had finally come out too.
This compelling film is a must-see not just for die-hard Schlesinger fans but for anyone curious to know how the 1960s/70s impacted our journeys to arrive at the present day.
FAIRYLAND. Although it’s over 30 years since the AIDS pandemic decimated the queer community it’s still a very raw memory for so many of us. In the new millennium, we were inundated with fictional movies on the subject, and the majority of them were appalling. Sensationalized, morbid, alarmist, and even excuses to promote rampant homophobia.
Once in a while, we get to review a movie that gets it pitch-perfect. Andrew Durham’s excellent FAIRYLAND is such one case. True it did reduce us to tears in part, but part of its authenticity was to show how we did come through in the end. Well, some of us.
Durham, the writer-director and co-producer (alongside co-producer Sofia Coppola) based the film on Alysia Abbott’s “Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. So we see much of the story unfold which will tell how both her and her father’s journeys as they struggle to find their own identities and be true to themselves
PS You may also like to check out Queerguru’s interview with ANDREW DURHAM when he talks about his totally unmissable film HERE
The linear narrative of the film takes us to the 1920s when an eighteen-year-old handsome George, who always lived out of the closet, travels to Paris to become a friend of Gertrude Stein and a member of her salon, where he met other habitués such as Man Ray, Colette, and Jean Cocteau to name three. After that promising debut in the circle of artists and intellectuals, he goes back to America to live his life fully due to his close relationship with Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Westcott, they told him he had a natural gift for photography, he dedicated to it self taught, developed an artistry on lighting, and also elaborated surreal and mythological settings. He worked as a freelance portrait photographer and collaborated with several fashion magazines and more. Important to say that in 1932 he exhibited his work along with Walker Evans at the Julien Levy Gallery.
Their journey on how the film came to be made starts when out of pure frustration after D Smith suddenly got blackballed from the music industry when they started to transition. They went from being in great demand producing songs for Lil Wayne, Keri Hilson, Billy Porter and André 3000. to being unemployed, broke, and homeless. In fact, Smith was still homeless when she began working on the project, with a camera being purchased by a host where she was once staying, and a laptop by a producer.
After being ousted for being transgender, Smith had the idea for a documentary film revolving around sex work, after wondering what would happen if she had to turn to it to sustain herself, and those who had no other options. So Kokomo City explores the lives of four transgender sex workers in New York and Georgia who were found by simply searching the internet.
ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED: Bafta Nominated American filmmaker Stephen Kijak’s latest film has captured the narrative of the life of one of Hollywood’s golden matinee idols ROCK HUDSON. The star of such great movies as Giant, Hudson enjoyed a career that lasted more than three decades. Although discreet regarding his sexual orientation, it was known among Hudson’s colleagues in the film industry that he was gay. This didn’t become public knowledge until 1984 when Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS. The following year, he became one of the first celebrities to disclose his AIDS diagnosis. Hudson was the first major celebrity to die from an AIDS-related illness, on October 2, 1985, at age 59
Hijak’s film is a wonderful celebration of a great actor who even in the closet enjoyed a rather fabulous life, and how his death unwittingly propelled the AIDS Pandemic finally into public conversations that were so long overdue.
This affectionate profile of a real star will be unmissable to those of us who remember him BUT it should also be compulsory viewing for young gay men who haven’t, so they can appreciate such an important era in our community’s history
PS You may also want to check out the interview Queerguru has with filmmaker Stephen Kijak talking about his unmissable doc HERE
Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music is a riotous concert film that documents the New York theater legend’s joyous, challenging, and ostentatiously queer 24-hour musical performance as this glittered ringmaster guides an enthralled audience through a transformative cycle of birth, death, and national rebirth.
Confession time: Queerguru is a major fan of actor, playwright, director, producer, and singer-songwriter Taylor Mac who we consider one of the best performance artists of his generation The fact that Mac’s cathartic celebration, is captured in gorgeous detail by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman makes this film even more unmissable
THE STROLL was recently the Opening Night Gala Film at London’s BFI Flare Film Fest, and Andrew Hebden, one of our Contributing Editors raved about it. ‘The Stroll’ refers to that space unique to the LGBTQ+ community’s history. If you were too young to get into a gay bar, too queer to be accepted at home, too non-conforming to get traditional paid work, and therefore too poor to get by, then there was The Stroll. That geographical space where the LGBTQ+ community, particularly the trans community of color, hustled off the boundaries of legality to make money through sex work.
Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker ‘s compelling doc literally blew minds away in London …. we think other audiences will fill the same.
Who I Am Not is a fascinating documentary chronicling the lives of two engaging, very different, black intersex people; South African ex-beauty queen Sharon-Rose, and unemployed fellow South African, Dimakatso, both of whom live in Johannesburg.
Intersex people are people born with any of several sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that do not fit binary notions of male or female bodies. Exact numbers are unknown but it’s estimated there are globally a couple of million intersex people.
Intersex people are often ignored in the current debates on gender identity. The movement towards more and more people identifying as non-binary will help their cause. The vast majority of what we do every day as humans are not governed by our gender, and that needs to be remembered. A great piece of work.
Will O The Wisp is director Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ unique queer fantasy romantic musical comedy. Both sexy and fun, prepare yourself for an unforgettable hour of craziness. A range of themes, including climate change, race, fascism and colonialism, combined with comedy moments and a nod to art history, brings the two protagonists together and they develop a sexual relationship. Amalia Rodrigues’s racist fado song is played as the two men have sex in a burnt-out forest, finishing with a funny cum-shot scene. Another humorous moment is when the two men look through a selection of dick pics, comparing them to various tree types. Will the unlikely prince and the pauper be able to survive the challenges to their love?
Provincetown International Film Fest begins on 6/14 and will end on 6/18 To see the whole program and book tickets, https://www.provincetownfilm.org/festival/
for full reviews of over 1500 queer films check out www.queerguru.com and whilst you are there be sure to subscribe to get all the latest raves and rants on queer cinema …best of all its FREE
Labels: 2023, 25th Edition', Must See Picks, Provincetown Film Festival, Top Picks
