Tag: Movies

Meet Pim, the only child of a single mother living in a small town in Belgium. As a young boy, he spent much of his time dressing up in his mother’s clothes and performing for an imaginary audience. At fifteen Pim continues to be very withdrawn, loves to draw and collect mementos of his mother and Gino, the cool and confident neighbour’s boy with whom he has a secret relationship. But all good things must come to an end, and over the next couple of years Pim must give up his fantasies and start dealing with the real world.

North Sea, Texas is quiet and reflective, slow-paced and equally full of gorgeous North Sea scenery and bittersweet moments. Interestingly for a queer coming-of-age movie, it does not involve coming out and finding your first love. Pim already had that, and is forced to grow up when the older Gino decides their relationship was just a childish phase and takes up with a girl. He has to grow up still further when his mother decides to run off with a suave gypsy carny who Pim also seemed to have a thing for.

Pim is left only with Sabrina, Gino’s younger sister; she had a crush on Pim but remained friends after learning about his relationship with her brother. In the end Gino does comes back, but for how long? Will he and Pim restart their relationship?

I’m actually conflicted over whether to label this film “bittersweet” or “depressing”, because there’s a lot more bitter than sweet. Is this what growing up means, that either you leave or people leave you—dying, dumping you for a French girl, or running off with the gypsy with the creepy moustache? Can you ever forge a permanent connection?

Pim shows great strength and maturity, and manages to get on with his life, but it seems to me life should be more than just enduring grief and pain. Pim outgrew his dressing-up dreams but still needs to find new ones. I hope he does, soon.

Ale is a sweet-natured homeless trans woman, living in a shantytown in Buenos Aires. To make ends meet she sews clothes and gathers garbage and recyclables. One day she finds the suicide note of a woman named Mia, a long diary addressed to her daughter Julia but which her now-widowed husband has thrown out. At first Ale only intends to return it but is soon captivated by Mia’s tragic story, so tries to connect with Julia and share what she learns.

This is a story the struggle to connect, and bridge the gaps between our different worlds: poor and rich, maricón and straight, queer and normal. And, conversely, how those gaps are huge and sometimes insurmountable obstacles. Our very first look at Ale sets the scene: she’s standing on the sidewalk, looking through the window of a fancy restaurant at a rich family having a lavish birthday dinner. People are laughing, there are gifts and cake. Ale is looking a little envious, maybe, but also a little sad, resigned to her place.

She seemed lonely to me, an outsider looking in… but then she returns to her cart, decorated with pretty balloons and butterflies, and her own name. She pulls it along with a surprisingly serene look on her face, meets with friends on the street, and eventually returns to her home. I was wrong: Ale isn’t alone, she has friends, family (chosen, but no less real), as well as a lover. And here’s the second theme of the film: family is where you find it. Most of the inhabitants of her shantytown are orphans, abandoned by their parents or rejected by mainstream society, who have found each other and built a community built on mutual trust and respect.

Not to say her life is all sweetness and light. The shantytown has no running water except the nearby river, no electricity or gas; they need mutual trust because all they have is each other; and they live in constant fear of harassment by the police for illegal squatting. Though they are in tentative negotiations with the city for a deal whereby they would all be relocated to a hotel and given a small stipend to live on, the town elders are opposed to this deal. Others, including Ale, support it, because it’s a chance for a normal life.

As Ale gets more and more into Mia’s sad tale of alienation and self-hatred, and more involved in Julia’s and Carlos’ lives, I wondered what what she was trying to do. Helping Julia deal with her grief, sure, but there was more to it than that. It looks like she was identifying far too closely with Mia; at one point she called herself “Mia” to one of her johns and later identifying Julia as her daughter. Mind you, that was to a homophobic asshole in a fancy restaurant and she had a knife to his throat; clarifying the nuances of the family dynamic swould probably have taken too long.

Still, as much as Ale wants to take Mia’s place in the story of Julia’s life, she eventually realises that could never happen. The incident in the restaurant makes it clear that she doesn’t belong in “normal” society; Julia is not her daughter, and needs to deal with her loss in her own way. Whether or not moving down south with her grandmother is the right thing to do, that’s not Ale’s call, and in the end she is powerless to stop it. The most she can do is add her own farewell to Mia’s suicide diary, then go back to her own life.

Her life, though, is her shantytown being demolished by the city authorities and its people arrested or chased back to the streets. There’s no happy ending here on this side of the fence either, though we close with Ale greeting the sunrise with the same quiet serenity she has always shown. Whatever additional hardships she now faces, she will have the strength to cope.

I hope I’m right. It’s possible I’m misinterpreting that shot.

A few more thoughts:

I know the circumstances are different, but the hotel deal that was floated for the shantytown residents sounds very much like a First Nations reservation. The elders were right to mistrust it: it was meant only to contain them, remove them from the homes they built themselves, and exert a more subtle form of control than naked fear of the police. Since they were probably unemployable for any normal job, the stipend would simply make them dependent on the government.

About the direction: as seems typical of South American cinema (from my limited experience), the film’s pace is very slow compared to the films I’m used to. I didn’t mind—it made the film an exercise in patience—and the slow pace was broken up with a few montages and such.

The entire movie feels like a subtle deconstruction of an old trope: the wise and magical homeless person, full of earthy wisdom and useful skills, who swoops in to help an innocent rich kid in her moment of need, then unexpectedly disappears. (I can’t name any examples off the top of my head, but the setup feels very familiar.) Here, we see it from the opposite direction: Ale has her own life and her own needs, and does not exist solely for Julia. Her many skills—cooking, sewing, housekeeping—were learned out of necessity or simply from a lifetime of devouring fashion magazines.

This excellent sampling of shorts presented by Out in Schools to BC students made laugh, made me squee, and made me think.

Change

In 2008, America elected its first Black president. At the same time, California voted by a thin margin to turn back the clock on same-sex marriage. This film takes place on Election Day and follows an inner-city Black high school student. Too young to vote, he nevertheless cares deeply about the election and believes Obama is the best choice for the country. However, of all his family he is the only one to oppose Prop 8, and only his little sister knows he’s gay; of all his friends he is the only one to not be a homophobic macho jackass planning to graffiti the class’s out gay student’s house.

When Obama is elected, it feels to his family like the dawning of a new age. When it turns out Prop 8 passed, it feels to him like things maybe haven’t changed that much. And when his friends do end up vandalising his friend’s house, he decides to stop hiding…

This was a very harsh and challenging film, smartly dealing with multiple issues of race, religion and sexuality. The change promised by Obama is hard and sometimes uneven, and there are no easy answers.

Rise Against Homophobia National Youth Short Video Contest Winners

The contest went national this year, with 260 submissions from (I believe) 8 provinces total. They were all excellent and gave me real hope for the future, but my favourite is the hilarious and nerdy The Olive Principle.

Only Fags Listen to Pop Music

As much as I despise Britney, I have to admit Stronger is pretty catchy, and can be a good anthem. The message is: be yourself and screw the haters, even if it means loving bad pop.

The Queen

A very funny little short, about a nerdy boy who draws muscly superheroes in his textbooks and fantasises about being the prom queen.

I Don’t Want To Go Back Alone / Eu Não Quero Voltar Sozinho

A super-sweet high-school romance from Brazil, between a blind student and the handsome new boy in school. Funny and endearing, and so far my favourite short film of the festival.

Flyer

A surreal little short about… well, I’m not totally sure. Denial and subconsciously outing yourself, probably. I think I get it, but it didn’t really work for me.

The Green is a harsh look at small-town homophobia, and how easily acceptance can turn to rejection. Though I found the resolution clumsy and unsatisfying, most of the film was excellently done, gripping and all-too-realistic with well-developed characters.

When Michael, an openly gay teacher at a New England private school, is falsely accused of inappropriate relations with Jason, one of his students, his life quickly goes to hell. He loses his job, is ostracised by the community he thought had accepted him, Daniel his partner of fifteen years (whose business is also in jeopardy) starts to mistrust him a little and eventually moves out, and even their closest friends are hesitant about associating with him in public.

In this film, most of the characters are very human and flawed. Michael is actually innocent of the charges against him, and does honestly care about Jason, who’s dealing with a bad home life (and, it’s later implied, physical/sexual abuse from his stepfather); he desperately wants to stay pure and above the legal fray, only concerned with getting the truth out, refusing to settle with Jason’s family because it would be an implicit admission of guilt… but he’s been keeping a major secret: many years ago when they were just starting to date, Michael cheated on Daniel in a public washroom, with a complete stranger, and was arrested as a result. Michael just wanted to put the sordid episode behind him, but now it’s blowing up in his face in the worst possible way.

In fact, I’d say there’s only unambiguous bad guy here: Jason’s stepfather, who only pressed these charges hoping for a big settlement cheque, and is also a recovering alcoholic who fell off the wagon.

Which leads me to the climax, where The Green morphs into a totally different movie. As a major thunderstorm hits the town Jason, who’d run away from home, goes to visit Michael for unexplained reasons but Michael only yells at him. Understandable, because if Jason had said anything at all denying the charges, nothing would have come of it. Jason freaks and runs back to his house with Michael hot on his trail, grabs a kitchen knife and goes to kill his stepfather. Michael intervenes but in the struggle accidentally throws the man into the knife (still held by Jason), inflicting what looks like a mortal wound.

And the storm blows over, literally and symbolically. The molestation charges against Michael are dropped, no new charges of murder or manslaughter are laid, Jason will stay in school and keep his scholarship, Michael apparently both gets his job back and loses his writer’s block (the very first scene shows him working on a novel and being stuck). Hell, I’m surprised there wasn’t a rainbow shining over the last shot of him walking to school! True, Michael and Daniel do not immediately get back together, but the conclusion gives us hope that this will happen eventually.

Overall, I very much enjoyed The Green. It was engaging and disturbingly realistic, with some quite beautiful New England scenery, and even the jarring conclusion didn’t detract from the appeal. Though it’s not my favourite so far (that honour still goes to Nate & Margaret) I definitely recommend it.

This isn’t going to be a long review, since I only managed to catch about half of the movie. I was sitting way too close to the screen and—as I should have expected—I started feeling sick and had to leave. Damn. That’s not how I planned to kick off the festival.

So, Romeos. As I remember Amber Dawn, in her introductory speech, described it as more of a farce. And sure, it’s got some farcical elements—who can forget Lukas at the party going to pee, placing his rubber dick on the bath, then running out in a panic on finding out the bath is occupied? or Fabio stepping out of the car stark naked, only covering his crotch with his shoes?—but overall, the story and character exploration are dead serious. We observe, and empathise with, the little details that go into being a pre-op transman: celebrating your 25^th shot of testosterone, watching your body hair grow, hiding your breasts under layers of baggy clothes, having to pack your jeans, communicating online with other FTMs. And the bigger problems, like having to live in a girls’ dorm because your official paperwork still says you’re female, being afraid of how your lust object will react if he finds out you’re FTM—sadly, I didn’t stay long enough to see that one resolved.

In addition to getting right up close and personal with Lukas, the direction occasionally takes a step back and lets us look through Ine’s eyes—Lukas’ best friend, who’s known him since high school, is understandably both a bit weirded out and fascinated by her female friend turning into this strange other person, one with muscles and pit hair and thicker eyebrows and chin fuzz. She’s definitely supportive but overall a bit clueless about what he’s really going through.

One thing that stunned me (which maybe shouldn’t have, but there you go) is that Lukas is actually played by a transsexual. At first I wasn’t sure, because the actor totally passed, except for the suggestion of breasts, but I couldn’t tell for sure since he always wore clothes to hide his chest. And then, one scene of him shirtless, and I was all, Holy shit, he’s got boobs. An FTM character played by an actual FTM actor? Who’d have thought? But this is the only casting choice that makes sense. Having a cis man play Lukas would have been a cheat.