Sundance Still Gay
In a rush to summarize this year’s Sundance Film Festival, an article this weekend in the local paper The Salt Lake Tribune by Christy Karras ’s proclaimed “Sundance Comes Out: 40 films with gay themes show festival’s blooming acceptance of sexual diversity.” What an odd thing to say. In 1992, B. Ruby Rich coined the term “New Queer Cinema” from films screened at Sundance. And each year, gay films and filmmakers have shown up. What was remarkable this year is how gay and straight films and filmmakers were so well integrated. Malcolm Ingram’s documentary Small Town Gay Bar was executive produced by Kevin Smith. Wash Westmoreland & Richard Glatzer’s Quinceanera, which won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, is so much more about the LA Latino neighborhood of Echo Park than it is about the gay couple who are gentrifying it. Indeed Westmoreland and Glatzer (who are a couple) spoke up in Indiewire about working with the community: “we didn’t want this film to feel like it was made by two white boys peering in. It had to be insider. We cast people from our Echo Park neighborhood and constantly looked to them to let us know if we were on target.”
