Queerguru's Top Picks of MUST SEE MOVIES AT NY's NewFest Pride

NEWFEST was founded in 1988, and is New York’s largest presenter of LGBTQ+ film & media and the largest convener of LGBTQ+ audiences in the city. It’s main annual festival is in the Fall, but at this time of year the mount a mini 5 day Fest to celebrate Pride. This hybrid event with a combination of inperson screening and online too always has an eclectic program that we always love, and this years Fest is no difference

Here then are QUEERGURU’s LiST OF MUST SEE MOVIES this time around.

A HOUSE IS NOT A DISCO : Actor turned filmmaker Brian J Smith’s debut behind the camera is his love letter to Fire Island The place is evocative to so many queers around the world. The narrow ten square miles sand bar of 600 beach houses, a hundred co-ops, a beautiful beach, wooden boardwalks, no roads or cars, and a handful of commercial businesses is 49 miles off the coast of New York City in Long Island Sound. It’s played host to generations of queer New Yorkers looking for community, sex, sea, drugs, gorgeous wooden beach houses, nudity, hedonism and a dancefloor

Smith carefully takes off his rose colored glasses to look at Fire Island’s past and to think ahead about its future. He tells us The Pines has always been a place that has been cared for by the people who live there, now going forward it must also be cared by all the visitors as well, if it is to survive …. we caught up with Smith to talk about the film.

Acclaimed director Dominic Savage (Nice Girl, When I Was 12, Freefall) examines family, both birth and chosen, in Close To You, a beautifully poetic drama co-written by himself and Elliot Page. There’s an extra nip in the air this year for Toronto-based trans-man Sam (Elliot Page – Tales of The City, Juno, Inception) who’s nervously preparing for his first trip back home in four years. He’s off to visit his estranged family back in small-town Cobourg, and it’s the first time they’ve seen him since his transition. He assumes that he’s a disappointment to his family and the ache in the pit of his stomach is palpable.

The largely unscripted, improvised story sees sexually fluid, thirty-something, Sam cautiously bid farewell to his housemate in Toronto and make the journey back to his hometown for his father’s birthday celebrations. The dull train trip home is broken up when he bumps into Katherine (Hillary Baack), an old high-school flame who’s also deaf. Sam’s slightly puppy dog joy at reconnecting with Katherine is not, however, fully reciprocated, and awkward Katherine, now a slightly frumpy mum of two, doesn’t share her number as the two part company on arriving back in Cobourg.

Fawzia Mirza is another actor turned filmmaker who proved in her stunning debut film THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS that her human insights are entertainingly luminous. In the film 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.

The performances are charismatic. It takes a little bit of audience attention as Kaur plays both Azra and the younger, flashback version of Mariam whereas Bucha plays Mariam in her later life. However, this adds to the sense of rhyme in their lives and the feeling that they are just inches apart – if they could get over Mariam’s guilty religiosity and unconcealed homophobia.

The film is shot in the most vivid of colours with a vibrant musical score that is pure Bollywood, or in this case maybe more accurately Lollywood. Cheeringly energetic and deeply emotive, the music radiates from the clips of old movies that both Azra and Mariam love, and accompanies the contemporary scenes, giving them bounce and impact.

Queen of My Dreams has an unreal, super vivid hue but the accuracy of its emotional content and its thoughtful but funny capture of the complex nature of expectations, disappointment, guilt, and grief mean that its human insights are entertainingly luminous.

Sebastian is the latest film by Finnish writer/director Mikko Måkelå, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival. (where it was been nominated for Grand Jury Prize World Cinema – Dramatic). Måkelå combines beautiful cinematography and a strong soundtrack with excellent casting to create a modern, refreshing, judgement-free narrative about the world of sex work. His two main actors are excellent, Mollica in particular at portraying the development of Max’s character as he explores his new life. The plot is authentic, as is Måkelå’s picture of contemporary London living. The cut-throat world of publishing, and the relatively powerless Max’s attempts to control his narrative in an environment of more powerful, but less informed, people are depicted well. The sex, drug, and social scenes are realistic. Sex work is presented without judgment as a positive career choice rather than an end-of-the-road no-other-option necessity. A very current, stylish view of a queer London life.

Summer With Carmen : 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. To learn about Carmen herself, you have to watch the movie.

Tig Notaro and her wife, Stephanie Allynne, have co-directed a female buddy “rom-com” for our times. They have elicited strong performances, most notably from Dakota Johnson as the lead character, Lucy, a 30-something woman who is adrift in her life, avoiding both her sexuality and calling as an artist. Lucy has always been attracted to women but has never acted on it. She reluctantly comes out to her best friend, Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), insisting that she doesn’t want to come out, she doesn’t want to be different or make a fuss about any of it. The friendship between these two women is the central relationship of the film. Jane has a boyfriend, appealingly portrayed by Jermaine Fowler, and she is far more career-driven than Lucy, but the two are so in synch and so genuinely supportive and fond of each other, that it seems not to matter.

NEWFEST PRIDE   
will begin on 5/30 and 
end on 6/03 To see the whole 
program and book tickets check out https://newfest.org/newfest-pride/

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