OUTFEST

A common refrain uttered by various staff members throughout OUTFEST ’99 (July 8-19) was that the Los Angeles-based gay and lesbian film festival, now in its 17th year, is finally "coming of age."

Well, it’s certainly bigger than ever before. This year it boasted its highest estimated attendance by both gay and straight audiences; debuted a three-city tour of Fresno, Santa Barbara and San Diego to exhibit festival highlights across California; and expanded to provide new and retrospective film and video programming year-round at The Village. Most indicative of the Festival’s self-conscious reach for high-profile prominence was Summit ’99, a weekend of structured forums for international programmers of queer cinema to network with filmmakers and confer with industry executives about studio relations, fundraising, and digital technologies, among other concerns. Nurturing these new developments were such powerful sponsors as Paramount, HBO, Absolut and United Airlines. Even the French government funded a series in their concerted effort to promote gay and lesbian tourism in France.

OUTFEST, it would seem, had come out to the world at large. But in seeking legitimacy through its widening alliances with old-guard institutions, has the festival risked losing its edge at 17? This question will probably nag programmers and audiences alike as OUTFEST experiences growing pains during its rite of passage to the mainstream. The rhetoric of this year’s theme, "Welcome Home," implicitly bespeaks this dilemma: by embracing a shift to Hollywood as the renewed center of exhibition, programmers have apparently pardoned the industry for driving gay and lesbian representation to the margins in the first place. True, a return to Hollywood may add glamour and attract industry types to the screenings, thus augmenting the value of OUTFEST as a market. Yet it also neglects the origins of the Festival as an alternative venue for unconventional artists to explore "queerness" without the pressures of ideological and economic conformity.

Of course, this issue of "difference versus assimilation" is nothing new to any queer venture with public visibility, and the OUTFEST staff has met the challenge with canny creativity by programming "events" that would appeal to mainstream curiosity seekers without necessarily alienating the queer majority. For example, the closing night screening of trick was a safe venture for heterosexuals and executives both, having already been picked up for distribution at Sundance and featuring an over-the-top performance by well-known celebrity Tori Spelling. It tells a gay love story in which personal intimacy wins out over sexual promiscuity. Similarly, the centerpiece film, Get Bruce, Andrew J. Kueh’s documentary about Bruce Vilanch, unsung joke writer for the stars, downplays his homosexuality in favor of his wit during interviews with the likes of Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, and Robin Williams – in effect, an act of Hollywood royalty inversely paying homage to its court jester. Or consider that the choice of Gus Van Sant as recipient of the OUTFEST Achievement Award at the Opening Night Gala held little chance for controversy, as gay audiences especially could embrace his earlier, homoerotic films (Mala Noche screened as a retrospective), while the mainstream could applaud his crossover into more conventional fare (Good Will Hunting earned him his first Oscar nomination).

So, yes, while some of OUTFEST’s edge may have been dulled a bit by age, the concern of a film festival is as much art as politics, and there were plenty of narratives, documentaries, and shorts that qualified in that regard. Features of note included Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love, a Swedish lesbian coming-of-age love story that manages to transcend the clichés of the genre through dead-on lead performances by Alexandra Dahlström and Rebecca Liljeberg; Andre Techine’s disturbing and elliptical Les Voyeurs, featuring "honorary lesbian" Catherine Deneuve as a philosophy professor tragically entangled in a self-destructive bisexual love triangle; the one and only Bruce LaBruce’s Skin Flick, a slyly woven provocation juxtaposing and parodying conventions of documentary, video porn, and narrative fiction to elicit laughs and erections in reactionary situations most spectators would rather not admit to; Ernest Dickerson’s Blind Faith, a thriller starring Charles Dutton as an African-American cop whose son is charged with murdering a white boy (Grand Jury Awards for Outstanding American Narrative Feature and Outstanding Actor); Chutney Popcorn (Audience Award for Outstanding Narrative Feature), a comic tour-de-force by actor-director-writer Nisha Ganatra, who, in a star turn as a lesbian seeking her mother’s approval by becoming surrogate to her sister’s baby, interrogates family values at the intersection of traditional Indian and queer American cultures; Head On (Grand Jury Award to Ana Kokkinos for Outstanding Foreign Narrative Feature), a brutal portrait of Ari (Alex Dimitriades), a young Australian gay man of Greek heritage who, over the course of an eventful 24 hours of sex, drugs, and general cruelty, struggles against the oppressive patriarchal expectations imposed by his community; New Zealand’s When Love Comes (Garth Maxwell), a deeply moving, if schematic story, of love among heterosexual, gay and lesbian couples, who discover the desire for love is not antithetical to that for success; and finally, if not conclusively, After Stonewall, John Scagliotti’s monumental documentary that received a standing ovation and Audience Award for Outstanding Documentary Feature for its chronicle of the gay rights movement from the 1969 Stonewall riots to the present.

This list of noteworthy screenings would be woefully incomplete (animated and avant-garde shorts notwithstanding) without spotlighting the Festival’s most impressive and revolutionary work, ironically not a film, but a British TV series entitled "Queer As Folk." Surpassing many of the features at OUTFEST in its sexual explicitness, complex characterizations and unwavering queer point of view, these 270 minutes of public broadcasting must seem like a miracle to American viewers programmed to evaluate "Will and Grace" as cutting-edge television. As written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Charles McDougall and Sarah Harding, the cads and comrades of the series’ multiple misadventures make Ellen Degeneres look like Mary Poppins, yet remain as loveable (and sexy) in spite of (no, because of) their lonely longings, selfish cruelties, and drug-induced over-indulgences as they hop from bed to work to bar to bed and back again. Although the single marathon screening was not well suited for a serial that benefits from intervals of contemplation and speculation between episodes, audiences were fortunate to have the chance at all, given American distribution is unlikely and that the London Daily Mail has cited the series as evidence that Great Britain needs censorship. This opportunity alone proves that, coming of age notwithstanding, OUTFEST is still the most welcome home we have for art at risk of exile.

Hawaii International Film Festival by Augusta Palmer
OUTFEST by Jim Moran
International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam by Wellington Love
International Thessaloniki Film Festival by Ray Pride
International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg by Diane Sippl