Now that a very jubilant Democratic Party have literally stopped partying in the City., the next real treat for Chicago is Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival . This legendary event is the second longest-running film festival of its kind, and prides itself on showcasing the best LGBTQ+ films and videos each year
From award-winning international feature films to social documentaries to experimental shorts, Reeling has always presented a range of genres that demonstrate the rich diversity of work being produced. Not only has Reeling become one of the most important cultural events for Chicagoans, it also attracts LGBTQ+ people from throughout the Midwest who consider the festival to be the highlight of their cinematic year.
We’ve had Queerguru’s Team scour the whole program to come up with our
TOP PICKS OF MUST SEE FILMS but this year they couldnt agree on just 10 ......
so for once there are 15 unmissable movies that we Know you will love, Here there are in alphabetical order:
“All Shall Be Well “is a new lesbian drama from Hong Kong director Ray Yeung that is moving and beautifully made. It opens with a scene from the everyday life of two women, shopping at street markets and then unloading the food at home. We intuit that they might be lovers, especially as they prepare a meal together wordlessly in synch, with the familiarity of a very long-term couple.
But before much more occurs, Pat passes away in her sleep, leaving Angie shocked and grieving. Ray Yeung has cleverly used the family drama genre to uncover the truth behind the “acceptance” of queer people.”
Just as you think there can’t possibly be many more high-profile queer figures from the past for film makers to profile, up pops another compelling documentary. This time the spotlight shines on pioneering 1960s Black trans soul musician/performer Jackie Shane. Any Other Way – The Jackie Shane Story details the extraordinary journey of Shane whose star shone brightly in the 1960s before she abruptly disappeared in the 1970s, remaining a recluse for fifty years until a brief comeback before her death in 2019.
ASOG . For some people, the description of this movie will read like a nonprofit funding application. It covers climate change, colonialism, poverty, and trans issues. It ticks a lot of progressive boxes. And that would be to completely miss that it is also an irreverent, and sometimes very beautiful mix of magical realism storytelling and necessary truths about the hard parts of life. Directed by Sean Devlin It is set in the Philippines in the wake of Super Typhoon Yolanda. When the storm came Jaya (as themselves), a trans TV presenter, lost their job and had to revert to being Mr Andrade, a middle-aged nonbinary teacher. The children they teach are traumatised by the impact that the storm has had on their lives and Mr Andrade gets little respect for the hard work of trying to both teach and heal.
THE ASTRONAUT LOVERS :In this romantic comedy from Argentinian Teddy Award Winner Marco Berger (one of Queerguru’s very favorite queer filmmakers) Javier Orán and Lautaro Bettoni are Pedro and Maxi, friends from childhood reunited years later at a beach house with a group of friends, during a weekend. Well chosen locations, camera angles that provide intimacy and the appeal of the two male leads are the hooks in this talky picture that strongly, refers to Marco Berger´s early films where tension is latent but nothing erupts. There is an additional ingredient in Astronauts´ story, Pedro and Maxi agree on playing a game: to tell their friends they are interested on each other as a couple.
DAYS OF HAPPINESS (Les jours heureux) is a lesbian romance that has to compete with a toxic paternal relationship. Emma is a young and promising conductor at the Montreal cultural scene, she provides the weight of feminity on stage with elegance and a revealing gaze. Since childhood, she has had a toxic relationship with her father Patrick (Sylvain Marcel) due to intra-family violence; the father happens to be also her agent. Emma is romantically involved with Naelle (Nour Belkhiria) a cellist in the orchestra and a single mother with her son Jad (Rayan Benmoussa). It is said in the film that Emma has been a model student, there is a reminder that model students can be boring if they do not break the rules and show a bit of rage and passion… It is Emma’s turn, a quest for freedom, if so, with the promise of happier days ahead.
FALLEN FRUIT, the debut film from queer filmmaker Chris Molina , is the tale of 20-year-old openly gay Alex (Ramiro Batista) who has very reluctantly moved back to his childhood home in Miami after a bad break-up with his boyfriend in NY. He discovers his father’s old movie camera in a pile of junk and rescues it and starts filming his daily life. Sadly much of what it captures is his low-esteem self pitying life which even a quick random pick up with Chris doesn’t lift his spirits or change his negative attitude,
Miami is about to face one of its regular summer hurricanes which for those of us that live here so often turns into no more than a lot of hot air and heavy rain. In this case Molina is using it as a metaphor for the ‘turbulence’ that Alex believed he has to face and deal with if he is ever to be able to head back to the next stage his life in NY.
Some 18 months ago Italian/American queer filmmaker Marco Calvani unexpectedly found himself staying in Provincetown for 6 months in the off season. This is the time of year when this gay mecca at the tip of Cape Cod, is completely empty of all the summer tourists and has a full time population of just 3000 souls. Its when Calvani fell in love …… with the town that is …. and the result is that he ended up writing/directing High Tide his debut feature film.
I’m not sure how Calvani pulled it off but for a small budget feature (shot in just 14 days) it also has a remarkable first class cast of supporting actors that included Marisi Tomei, Bill Irwin, Todd Flaherty and Tangerine’s Mya Taylor. But even so despite their performances , and an exceptional one from the remarkably talented Pigossi, (the actual real-life BF of Calvani) the real star is Provincetown.
PS You may also like to check out Queerguru’s Interview with filmmaker Marco Calvini HERE
An excellent new documentary, A House Is Not A Disco, directed by Brian J. Smith, takes a deep dive into the Fire Island Pines community of today. Smith details one six-month season on the island, from its opening up in April, the build-up to the annual Pines Party on the beach fundraiser, through to the closing Halloween party at the end of October. We follow a bunch of residents, both long-term and new, as well as business owners, house-sharers, drag performers and the organisers of the Pines Party. The resulting documentary is an interesting, eye-opening profile of one of the most iconic queer places on the planet.
PS You may also like to check out Queerguru’s interview with filmmaker Brian J Smith HERE
Barnaby Thompson‘s MAD ABOUT THE BOY is a compelling and affectionate portrait of one of the greatest quintessential English man of the first half of the last century is such a sheer joy to view. Noel Coward, later to be Sir Noel, and universally known as The Master was famous as a playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, and one of the wittiest flamboyant men of his generation.
Coward had been closeted publicly and even in the 1960s refused to acknowledge his sexual orientation publicly, wryly observing, “There are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don’t know.” Despite this reticence, he encouraged his secretary Cole Lesley to write a frank biography once he was safely dead. But now there is this joyous tribute detailing an extraordinary life of a extraordinary men which needs to be viewed more than once.
SEBASTIAN Writers are always advised to ‘Write about what you know.’ Aspiring twenty-five-year-old Scottish writer Max, (the handsome Ruaridh Mollica), is living in London and working on his first novel, a story about a sex-worker, Sebastian. He’s good-looking and ambitious, energetically forging his career and soul. To improve the authenticity of his work he creates an online escort profile and starts seeing clients himself, as his alter-ego Sebastian, and writes about each gig afterward. His potential publisher is impressed with his work, which he credits to interviews with sex workers. This third feature from Finnish Mikko Måkelå, confirms him as one of the most exciting queer filmmakers today
PS You may also like to check out Queerguru’s interview with filmmaker Mikko Måkelå,
A stunning debut film by Fawzia Mirza The Queen of My Dreams whose human insights are entertainingly luminous. For a film that is set around the death of a father and husband and the funeral that follows it, The Queen of My Dreams is so fresh, and super saturated in color that its vim, sparkle, and humor cannot help but shine through. The conflict between a mother and a daughter is shown, but rather than trudge predictably towards reconciliation the more interesting story of the parallels between their lives is shown.
Warhol superstar and trans icon Holly Woodlawn (Trash, Women in Revolt) gets another bite of the cherry with the re-release of the Academy Film Archive remastered 1972 Robert J Kaplan comedy camp classic Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers. Woodlawn stars alongside fellow fabulous Warhol associate Tally Brown as a goofy aspiring actress, Eve Harrington, from Kansas who moves to New York in search of fame and fortune. There she meets eccentric, Divine-like, real estate agent Mary Poppins (Tally Brown) who tries to fix her up with a room-share with various zany characters. Whilst doing so, Eve resides at the infamous Chelsea Hotel. As well as the weirdo potential room-mates, everyone else Eve meets is off-the-scale freaky. We follow Eve from sketch to sketch as the characters get weirder and weirder. Amongst the oddballs she encounters are a peculiar film producer Rhett Butler (also played by Woodlawn), identical lesbian twins Baby and Jane Hudson (Katherine and Margaret Howell), a leery acting coach called Walter Mitty (David Margulies) and Joe Buck (Sonny Boy Hayes), a dwarf wrestler. With the singing voice of Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin playing an unseen telephone operator, this film is a veritable smorgasbord of fabulous oddness.
The Summer With Carmen : two friends on a beach plan a movie about their lives. Bright and sunny Greece, summertime and Demosthenes, a good-looking man that captures the eye from beginning to end of the film, an educational one (instructions included) on how to write a script, develop characters, and write about fiction based on facts. A comedy that embraces us, viewers into a platonic friendship.
We follow the hero (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and the hero´s friend Nikitas (Andreas Labopoulos) with a distinctive hairstyle, while they take sun baths and relax at a rocky gay beach by the sea, and talk about “Sissies” an audiovisual project that may refer to their experiences two summers ago, the screenplay will be Nikitas´ feature debut”
We have to admit to part in-trepidation and part excitement when it came to watching Greyson Horst‘s debut THROUPLE .A throuple, or menage a trois as the French call it, is defined in the dictionary as “a relationship between three people characterized as balanced, committed, and non-hierarchical. “Three” + “couple” = “throuple” — and that’s called queer math. It however should not be confused with a threesome which is only about sex.
Horst’s captivating tale starts with Michael (screenwriter Michael Doshier) a gay 30-something-year-old business admin assistant who actually dreams of making music all day instead. However he has a chance encounter at a club one night with a gay couple (Tommy Heleringer and Stanton Plummer-Cambridge) who have an ‘open marriage’ and this is about to change everything
What A Feeling: when Andrew Hebden reviewed this for Queerguru he described it aJolly Germanic Lesbian Romcom. And added “It’s not often we get to put those three words together in a sentence that doesn’t include ‘Never have I ever’
Marie Theres known as Resi (Caroline Peters) is a German doctor living and working in Austria with her wealthy husband Alexander (Heikko Deutschmann). It is their anniversary dinner with friends and he has just come back from his first tree hugging men’s retreat. While there not only has Alexander rediscovered himself but he has also discovered he no longer wishes to be married to Resi. Alexander announces it to Resi and all her friends over the schnitzel. In a devastated drunken delirium Resi staggers towards home on her own but decides to stop off at a bar she has never noticed before – the Pussycat Club. There she recognizes Fa (Proschat Madani) who had almost ran her over in her van the morning prior. Fa is beautiful, studly and charismatic. An Iranian immigrant who is a carpenter by day, with a coterie of married female customers who can’t get enough of her handyperson skills, and an open mic night slam poetry rapper in the evening.
Reeling: Chicago’s LGBTQ+ International Film Festival begins on 9/19 and will end on 10/06 To see the whole program and book tickets https://reelingfilmfest.org/
for full reviews of over 1800 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
