The Places They Go
Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival 2009
Fri., Sept. 4, 2009
Below is but a small taste of the international buffet available at aGLIFF 22, which this year boasts more than a hundred short and feature-length films and plays exclusively at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. For more info, including full schedule and ticket info, see www.agliff.org. – Kimberley Jones
Are We There Yet?
The Reluctant Traveler
Writer and director Marco Orsini has an enviable life. Young and handsome, he has a well-heeled partner willing to whisk them off to any place in the world on a moment's notice (on his personal jet, no less). They have a gaggle of "European" friends – apparently members of that small group know as the idle rich – always ready for fun with a healthy sense of adventure. Orsini is down with all that, as long as the adventure includes a posh hotel, brunch, and mimosas following a nice massage. So when Orsini's partner arranges for them to take a 25-day ecotourist tour of Ethiopia, then drops out at the last minute, Orsini must discover how to cope in the less than five-star conditions. Orsini whines and pouts his way through most of the film, but in the end, and in spite of himself, he comes to recognize Ethiopia for what it is: pristinely wild, plainly unforgiving, demanding, and uniquely beautiful. It is one of the few places untouched by the first world and its mandate to conquer and "develop." Thankfully, Orsini avoids becoming an ugly American, developing his sense of adventure while learning about being a citizen of the world. – Belinda Acosta
Thursday, Sept. 10, 9pm.
Korean Delicacies
Antique
Fumi Yoshinaga's early-Aughties manga Antique Bakery sure gets around. Previously adapted in Japan both as a live-action television drama and as animé, Yoshinaga's hugely popular graphic novel about goings-on at a cake shop has now been airlifted to South Korea by director Min Kyu-dong. Ju Ji-hun stars as Kim Jin-hyeok, the irritable owner of a just-opened patisserie –this despite his dislike of all things sweet. Jin-hyeok then hires Seun-woo (Kim Jae-wook), a former classmate and master cake craftsman – this despite the fact that 10 years prior, Jin-hyeok, who is straight, rejected the lovelorn Seun-woo's romantic overtures. Did I mention that Jin-hyeok is strenuously homophobic? Or that Seun-woo –self-described as "a Gay of Demonic Charms" –has a habit of making all men, gay or straight, fall obsessively in love with him?
It takes some time for this ballsy but scattershot film to catch traction. It unfolds episodically, mimicking its graphic novel roots, and it takes quite a few of these episodes for Jin-hyeok to evolve into something less toxic. But the ultimate pleasures of Antique prove worth the wait: from the bizarrosong and dance numbers, which have the artificiality and pop of DayGlo dyed flowers, to the slow build of a quintessential odd couple finding a family with each other. And did I mention the cake porn? Sweet stuff, that. – K.J.
Friday, Sept. 11, 6:30pm.
Check All of the Above
Austinite Kai Salim explores the sexual spectrum in 'Bi-Definition'
You would be forgiven for mistaking Austin filmmaker Kai Salim's "Bi-Definition" for a "Now You Know" PSA or a Sex and the City outtake. There's a lot of polish packed into its eight minutes. The tightly paced, wickedly narrated story of bi-guy Max and his bi-dating evening – knocked off-kilter by a smarmy contest and a gay-upmanship debate – boasts standout production and a level of comic acting rarely seen in first-time festival movies.
In actuality, Salim's short – which is based on a one-act play by Doug Long and Dustin Wills – is an enjoyable delivery system for some heavy-hitting questions about identity and sexuality. Where those two things intersect, or don't, is a subject undergoing almost constant scrutiny and revision in the LGBTQI world (note the addition of letters to that shorthand over the years), and bisexuality often "falls to the wayside," as Salim puts it, with bisexuals dismissed as being sort of sexual tourists or simply not being out yet. "We like to set our definitions of who someone is and then keep them defined in that box," he explains. "And if they act outside of how we assess them, we find it weird.
"Movies are still very traditional," he says. "Even if they're mainly 'gay' movies, they're still very traditional about how a person goes about getting with a partner. ... It's never really, 'I wonder who I am'; it's 'this is what I want.'"
The beauty of Salim's smart little short is that it indicts bi-stereotypes without denying the frustrations incumbent in the identity. "Everything that they're saying that he is, technically he is – he can't decide what he wants," says Salim. "He's not confused about what he is, but he's confused about what he wants, because he wants both."
With its commercial style and provocative subject, "Bi-Definition," at least, gets to have it both ways. – Cindy Widner
"Bi-Definition" screens as part of Steam: Sexy Shorts, a narrative shorts program, Saturday, Sept. 12, 9:25pm.
When Worlds Collide
I Can't Think Straight
Great title. (I Can't Think Straight also looks great on the T-shirts sold on the movie's website.) It's this kind of thinking about the whole package that makes Shamim Sarif's cross-cultural coming-out story such a perfect opening night movie for the festival. Adapted for the screen by British filmmaker Sarif from her own novel (also available on the website), I Can't Think Straight is a familiar story about two women who discover their love for each other and then face the challenge of telling their families. Leyla (Sheetal Sheth) is a sassy but proper young British Indian woman when she meets older Tala (Lisa Ray), a Jordanian businesswoman who, after four broken engagements, appears to be ready to finalize a marriage. Drenched in humor, melodrama, and cultural specificity, the film's verve is expressed in vivid visuals and a carpet of music, ending with Katy Perry's upbeat "I Kissed a Girl." The sometimes abrupt editing and what appears to be a funky postproduction looping job can probably be chalked up to the trials of a first-time director and cannot get in the way of this film's fervor and passion to exist. – Marjorie Baumgarten
Tuesday, Sept. 8, 6:30pm.
Beijing Underground
'Tongzhi in Love'
Director Ruby Yang, whose short doc "The Blood of the Yingzhou District" nabbed an Academy Award two years back, returns to China with this poignant half-hour examination of the double lives of gays (aka tongzhi, or "comrades") in Beijing. Yang profiles three of these interior outsiders, all of whom have fled the tiny, remote hamlets of their birth to seek a more open lifestyle within the Chinese capital. While being openly gay remains a crime under both the precepts of Confucianism and Chinese law, the trio – introspective "Frog" Cui, chatty Xiang Feng, and willowy Long Ze – are far more concerned about what their traditional-minded families would think of their Beijing nights. "I'm gay, a tongzhi," says Feng, candidly discussing his increasingly complex shadow life. "Whenever I go home, new thoughts come to me. Should I find a girl and settle down? Isn't that the most natural thing to do? I am a man, but I am a torn man." Following her subjects as they cruise Beijing and return, eventually, to their families, it becomes increasingly apparent that no matter where they choose to seek love and understanding, their Stonewall has yet to arrive. (Screens with I Can't Think Straight.) – Marc Savlov
Tuesday, Sept. 8, 6:30pm.
Canuck Be a Lady
The Baby Formula
The Baby Formula imagines a world where, thanks to stem cell research, same-sex partners can produce a baby genetically all their own, with no third-party egg or sperm required. Turns out that world doesn't look so very different from the one we live in now: The Baby Formula isn't so much interested in the science of babymaking (the practicalities, the ethics, all that) as in the crazy-making dynamics –between partners, between extended families –that erupt after the baby gets made.
Expanding on their 2006 short "Succubus," director Alison Reid and writer Richard Beattie use a faux-documentary approach to explore the relationship of a married Toronto couple, played by the preggers-in-life-as-in-art Megan Fahlenbock and Angela Vint. Both women are impregnated with an egg that was fertilized with "faux-sperm" concocted from the DNA of the other. Sounds complicated, but that's nothing compared to their nutter families, whose own concerns (alcoholism, Alzheimer's, a born-again's self-righteousness) threaten to bump the pregnant couple from center stage. Despite its speculative premise, The Baby Formula is a conventional family comedy, and a funny, tender one, at that. Stay for the credits: Vint and Fahlenbock do a dance-off to "My Humps" that perfectly epitomizes the film's spirited sense of play. – K.J.
Wednesday, Sept. 9, 6:45pm.
Homeward Bound
A Place to Live: The Story of Triangle Square
Carolyn Coal's documentary explodes the myth that all gay people are young, beautiful, and possessed of gobs of disposable income. Like everyone else, members of the LGBT community grow old, oftentimes alone and broke. Lifelong friends and lovers may have died or otherwise departed, and family, especially among the current generation of seniors, may be either estranged, uncomfortable with the sexual orientation of their loved elder, or nonexistent. As one of the film's subjects says, "It's a shock to learn you're old, gay, and nobody wants to be with you." In Los Angeles, a city undergoing a general housing shortage, the crisis in affordable housing for seniors is dire. And for members of the LGBT community, who can present a unique set of needs, the crisis is even more keen. A Place to Live documents the development and construction of Triangle Square Hollywood, the country's first affordable housing facility for LGBT seniors. Seven subjects are filmed throughout the project's months-long lottery process, and through their personal accounts we learn why their desire to live in this new housing project is so intense. With their desire to move to the heart of Hollywood, these Los Angeles residents prove that, like seniors everywhere, LGBT seniors do not choose marginalization. – M.B.
Wednesday, Sept. 9, 6:30pm.
