Film Review:
Outfest 2007
By Robin Menken


Outfest’s lively 25TH combined camp entertainment and thought provoking lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender tales with plenty of narrative meat for the straight audience to chew on.

Regent Releasing is releasing Angelina Maccarone’s exquisite Vivere, winner of the Outfest Outstanding Artistic Achievement award. Judith Kaufmann’s magical cinematography details a nighttime road trip to the heart of three women’s lives on one lonely German Christmas Eve. Maccarone tells her nuanced circular from each woman’s point of view: Cocky Francesca (Esther Zimmering) rescues a semi-conscious woman from a wrecked car. Her accidental passenger joins her search. As Gerlinde, a world-weary older lesbian deserted by her married lover, Hannelore Elsner mesmerizes. You can’t take your eyes off her. Rejected by Gerlinda, Francesca flirts with a horny bartender in the empty bar where Antoinetta was last seen. His edgy mating dance is a highpoint. Waifish Antoinetta negotiates a surprise pregnancy with her selfish rocker beau. On the brink of womanhood, Schnitzer’s performance recalls moody teens from Lukas Moodysson’s work. Interesting close-ups and powerful performances capture a memorable intimacy. The three stargaze, trading philosophy as they find strength in each other.

Jerome Foulon’s transgender drama Another Woman explores how a parent makes amends for the damage he/she creates leaving a family behind. Gentle, unhappy Nicolas (Nathalie Mann) leaves on a business trip and never returns. In Geneva he negotiates his gender reassignment and reemerges as attractive, up-tight pharmaceutical executive Lea (Nathalie Mann). Ten years later, haunted by flashbacks, Lea stalks her family. Pretending to be a Swiss journalist she interviews prodigy daughter Emma (Lizzie Brocheré). Visiting her house, no one recognizes her. Micky Sébastian is marvelous as Anne, the overwhelmed ex-wife who’s new marriage is threatened when Lea fights her way back into the family’s life as a second “mother”. High production values and gentle surprises add to the unusual melodrama.

Christian Liffer’s Two Homelands. Cuba and the Night explores the life of gay men in Cuba. The film was shot unofficially, at illegal gay parties, homes and the Malecon, Havana’s meeting point for gays and straights. Liffers interviews six men, each representing different class & socio-political experiences: young Raudel takes us to rural, underground gay parties, photog Eduardo explores Cuba’s machismo in his work, HIV-positive Imperio is an illegal drag artist, Alexy’s father is a Communist party official. Isabel, a stunning black transsexual with the most marginal life of the six, ends the film with a haunting song about acceptance. She owns the outdoor party that is the Malecon, swaggering past the groups of gays, hoping for a miracle. Each man reads lines from the suppressed Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. Guitarist/songwriter Michael Espinosa Rodriguez’s acoustic songs tie the stories together. Beautiful digital photography is remarkable considering the “illegal” shoot.

The 2007 Platinum series, Outfest’s experimental section, Queer Fossilization, Or, A Tour Through the Museum of Gay Unnatural Herstories curated by artists Jose Muñoz and Nao Bustamante highlights included Robert Coddington’s Nelson & Christina, edited from video artist Nelson Sullivan’s documents of 80’s life in the Lower East Side, Bustamante’s reworking of Alexis Del Lago’s silent Mata Hari, and Daniel Barrow’s delightful Artist Statement, Barrow layers and manipulates serial drawings on Mylar transparencies. “Platinum Shorts” hits were Moona Martinez Muniz”s UFO UnForgettable Object or Unidentified Flying Object (a ravishing black and white dance short that recalls McLaren’s multiple image Pas de Deux ) Ho Tam’s “Discopedia and Greg Atkins scary, deadpan, confessional Slideshow. Fest highlight was the tribute to Barbara Hammer, grand dame of lesbian filmmaking, a celebratory pioneer in experimental film. A humanist, formalist, comic collagist, and interactive satirist, Hammer’s revolutionary work reframed how women & men looked at women in film. Her classic Nitrate Kisses features older lesbian in fetish ware tenderly making love. A white woman and a black man make love while the infamous Hayes Code scrolls by on the screen. She uses pre-code footage from the homoerotic Lot in Sodom, (1933) shot by Melville Webber and philanthropist James Sibley Watson, Jr. In the glorious Double Strength (1978) Hammer shoots lover/ trapeze artist Terry Sendgraff in the nude. The sinuous tone-poem compresses an entire relationship (erotic longing, through playful intimacy to loss and grieving) all tracked on Sendgraff’s body. In Superdyke Hammer’s friends rampage through San Franciso, then stroll hand in hand in hand through a meadow, Barbara places her lesbians in the midst of nature, at home in a world they redefine.