VIDEO
Festival de Cine Internacional de Ourense
It is such a pleasure to hear the Irish language spoken fluently as it is throughout “Fairytale of Kathmandu.” Cathal Ó Searcaigh (pronounced Ca-HULL O’Sharkey) is a well-known Irish-language poet. I have one of his books acquired in the mistaken belief it was a bilingual edition, and on the flyleaf a review by Maire Mhac an tSaoi is quoted: “Ó Searcaigh is Mozartian, following the Gaelic classical convention of the dramatic first person, which disinfects the ‘I,’ moving easily from traditional metres to free verse and back, distilling the intense emotions of same-sex love into a lyric form that has not, I think, been equaled since the days of the Greek anthology.”
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MOVIE REVIEW
Steam (2009)
Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
"Steam’s" inclusion in the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is a bit tenuous, as only one of the three interweaving story lines has a gay theme. But any film with Ruby Dee, Ally Sheedy and Lane Davies is an embarrassment of riches. What a pity writer-director Kyle Schickner didn’t know what to do with the talent he had to work with.
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Dime Western Productions
One could almost bet the farm that “Lady Trojans” director Elizabeth Hesik was the little sister of the focus her film, Annameekee Hesik. Known as Anna, she played basketball throughout her high school career in early 1990s' Tucson, Ariz., and the team and its players were the means through which she discovered her sexuality. A quick Google reveals, to my surprise, the director is actually the older sister, who appears to have been away at college during the events depicted. (Good thing I don’t have a farm.) This closeness to, yet distance from, the events depicted in “Lady Trojans” gave her the means to make this film, perhaps it didn’t also give her a sufficient remove to be objective about the story she is telling.
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Providence Productions
When a young, white gay man, Matthew Shepard, was beaten up and tied to a fence to die in Wyoming in 1998, there was international outrage, huge coverage in the mainstream American media, anti-hate crime legislation drafted in his name and even a movie as a result. But Sakia Gunn’s equally homophobic murder five years later was largely ignored – because she was black? A girl? Someone whose sexual identity was a little harder to describe? For whatever reason, Charles Bennett Brack decided to make "Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project" in an attempt to redress the balance.
Continue reading “Dual Identity Makes an Outcast in Two Communities” »