THE NASHVILLE GAY AND LESBIAN FILM FESTIVAL

OCTOBER 21-24, 2004

at the Historic Belcourt Theatre

2102 Belcourt Avenue

(21st Avenue South and Belcourt Avenue in Hillsboro Village)

• Ticket prices reflect regular Belcourt film admission.

• Individual tickets may be purchased at the box office the day of the film.

• An all festival pass may be purchased in advance at the Belcourt Box Office or OUTLOUD! for $50. Special offer for student groups: Groups of 10 or more students may purchase festival passes for $35 each at the Belcourt box office only; passes must be purchased as a group for this special price.

• Festival patrons enjoy added benefits for $100 single, $175 couple. For more information about becoming a patron or sponsor, either as an individual, organization, or company, .

• Belcourt Film Society members receive regular membership discount.

• For more film or ticket information please call 615-846-3150.

Festival Program and Schedule

Though not specifically noted in the program descriptions, viewers should assume that each film program—with the exception of the children’s and youth focus programs—may contain nudity and sexual situations. Youth films may also contain strong language. The films in the festival have not been rated; viewers should use their own discretion.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21:

6 pm: Festival sponsors, patrons, and guests opening reception (invitation only)

7:30 pm: Opening Gala Film: Eating Out

Winner Levi’s First Feature Award—Frameline: San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; Best Film—Rainbow Honolulu Film Festival; Best Film of the Festival  and Best Gay Feature, Audience Award—Phoenix International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

Nashville salutes up-and-coming filmmaker Q. Allan Brocka with this opening night program devoted to his first feature film and recent shorts. What began as a joke for Brocka in a screenwriting class became Eating Out, a delightful romantic comedy in which a group of young friends becomes tangled in love and lust. Caleb is a hunky poli-sci major with an affection for aggressive girls. Gwen is an aggressive girl who falls for gay acting boys. It’s a match made in therapy. In a plan hatched by his crafty roommate Kyle, Caleb finds himself pretending to be gay to woo Gwen, but their scheme is thwarted when Gwen decides that Caleb would be the perfect catch for her own gay roommate, Marc—the object of Kyle’s affection. Caleb is faced with a confusing proposition. Gwen wonders if she'll ever find a straight guy. How far will the straight guy go to win the girl? More than the hottest phone sex scene ever on film has left film festival audiences cheering for Eating Out!

Dir. Q. Allan Brocka 2004 USA 90 min. Tennessee premiere

Special festival guests in attendance: actors Jim Verraros (American Idol finalist) and Emily Stiles

WITH Brocka’s multi-award winning shorts Rick and Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in the World, episode 1 (2000, 8 min.); Roberta Loved (2002, 23 min.); and Seventy (2003, 8 min.).

Meet Jim Verraros, Emily Stiles, and other festival guests at the gala opening night festival party at TRIBE, 1517 Church St.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22: 

3:30 pm: Way Far Out After-School Special

(Youth Focus program; suitable for teenagers and above)

Not like we used to see on television, our after-school special highlights the joy, humor, and awkwardness that all queer youth face. In I Am a Boyband (Dir. Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay 2002 Canada 5 min.) a cloned boyband co-opts an Elizabethan madrigal to express its heartbreak over lost love. The Lego adventures from opening night continue in Rick and Steve, parts 2 and 3 (Dir. Q. Allan Brocka 2000-2001 USA 8 min. each). Goth high school senior Adam gears up to face Matt, the boy of his fantasies, in One Fine Morning (Dir. Scott Boswell 2002 Canada 16 min.); after a summer of wondering, the morning has come that Adam will find out if Matt understood a song's hidden meaning. Alabama director Cade Saint explores an awkward high-school crush and mixed messages from the popular jock in Caley’s Friend (2003 USA 26 min. Tennessee premiere).

Co-presented by One-in-Teen Youth Services with sponsorship support from the Vanderbilt University Office of GLBT Life

5:00 pm: Way Far Out Shorts

Gay filmmakers have been up to some pretty strange things lately, and these short films reveal aspects of gay life that are somewhat familiar yet out of the gay mainstream. As a group, they range from sweet to strange to (some might say) sick. Hammer of Hope (Dir. Phillip B. Roth 2003 Canada 2 min.) is a chirpy music video celebrating the leather scene. In Pink (Dir. Michael V. Smith 2003 Canada 3.5 min.) an effeminate cross-dressing man and a female voice-over confession clash. A boy's love of space, rocket ships, and self-love come together in Looking Towards the Stars (Dir. Peter Kingstone Canada 2003 6 min.). See what happens when Sigmund Freud goes to the gym in Freud Slips (Dir. David M. Young 2004 USA 7 min.). An overly talkative guy finds the perfect boyfriend in Love and Deaf (Dir. Adam Baran 2004 USA 8 min.). A twink finds out where milk comes from in The Milkman (Dir. Ken Takahashi 2001 Canada 8 min.).  Diego is approached by a lonely woman to provide a service to her dying husband, but there is no happy ending in Beso Nocturno (Night Kiss) (Dir. Boris Rodriguez 2000 Canada/Mexico 14 min.) In the age of silicone injections, Bigger (Dir. Alberto Ferreras 2003 USA 13 min.) asks whether size really does matter. Precious Moments (Dir. Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen and Jan Dalchow 2003 Norway 16 min.) is based on true events; an underage boy answers a personal ad, agreeing to meet an older man. A bear finds true love in A Bear’s Story (Dir. Vincent Mtzlpick 2003 USA 20 min.).
A Bear’s Story is sponsored by Music City Bears in loving memory of Chip Evans, Vice President of the Music City Bears, Oct. 1, 1955-Sept. 21, 2004. You will be missed by all of your Bear Brothers.

7:15 pm: Rise Above: The Tribe 8 Documentary

A candid, often humorous, look into the private world of the sexy, radical dyke punk band Tribe 8. Through filmed performances and intense personal stories of addiction and loss, Rise Above captures the beauty and resilience that lies just beneath the rough exterior of a controversial and gender-bending punk rock band.

Dir. Tracy Flannigan 2003 USA 80 min.

WITH Booty Dance (Dir. Paula Durette 2003 Canada 4 min.) and Hummer (Dir. Guinevere Turner 2004 USA 10 min. Winner Best Short, Milano International Lesbian and Gay Film and Queer Culture Festival). The laws of physics reveal that lesbians and gay men can exist in harmony on the dance floor; Casey obsesses on a trait in the girl she is dating.

9:30 pm: Wild Side

Winner Best Feature Film 2004 Berlin International Film Festival; Outstanding International Narrative Feature, Out Fest: Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

Stephanie is a transsexual prostitute caught in a love triangle with two men. Set in the gritty streets of Paris and the beautiful countryside of northern France, Wild Side follows Stephanie as she returns to her rural childhood home to care for her dying mother. Her lovers Mikhail and Djamel, both sex workers, accompany her and together they reveal an unbreakable bond of love and companionship that unites the threesome. In her childhood home, Stephanie is haunted by memories of a long-forgotten past – distant childhood loves, recollections of her beloved late sister, and the truth of who she once was, a young boy named Pierre.

Dir. Sébastien Lifshitz 2004 France/Belgium/United Kingdom 93 min. Tennessee premiere

WITH Homo Zombies (Dir. Let Me Feel Your Finger First 2003 United Kingdom 5 min.) and Seafood  (Dir. Robin Baker 2004 United Kingdom 10 min.). Animated zombies cruise a public park; an after-work chance meeting turns into a night out on the town in central London.

After party at the Lipstick Lounge; details announced at the festival

Saturday, October 23:

11:00 am: Young Children’s Program

An assortment of animated films suitable for children of all ages and families of all sorts. Two royal magicians with magic pencils get into trouble but have a happy ending in Love Is Strange (Dir. Phil Mulloy 1995 United Kingdom 7 min.). The prince and the princess are not destined for marriage in          Fairy Tales: Next Gen (Dir. John Goodwin 2004 USA 15 min.). Oliver  Button Is a Star tells a story of bullying, embracing difference, and striving to achieve one’s dreams (Dir. Dan Hunt 2002 USA 56 min. Winner Angel Award for Excellence in Media).

12:30 pm: Masha Mom/Cause of Death: Homophobia

Three documentaries sharpen our focus on the struggles that lesbians and gay men have throughout the world for justice and parental rights. Filmed over a seven-year period in Russia, Masha Mom (Dir. Michal Bukojemski 2003 Poland 35 min. Tennessee premiere) follows a Russian-American Jewish lesbian in her quest for motherhood. Masha will face many challenges: her search for a potential sperm donor, the breakup of her relationship, and even her own unexpected longing to become a mother herself. Cause of Death: Homophobia (Dir. Ran Kotzner 2003 Israel 51 min. Tennessee premiere) investigates a string of murders of gay men in Israel and delves into the homophobia in the Israeli media and the psychology of the relationships between the victims (older gay men) and their murderers (young men they picked up for sex).

WITH  EVERYONE. EVERYWHERE. (Dir. Renée Rosenfeld  2004 USA 14 min.) Narrated by renowned British actor Ian McKellen, this short film chronicles the work of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and demonstrates how the power of public pressure promotes change across the globe. (Information at www.iglhrc.org.)

1:30 pm: Reception with actors and filmmakers for glbtq youth. Contact Jim Williams (jhwillia@mtsu.edu) for information.

2:30 pm: The Graffiti Artist

(Youth Focus program; suitable for teenagers and above)

From the director of Eban and Charley comes a new film about drifting “taggers” in the Pacific Northwest. Nick is a post-modern urban hero asserting his anarchistic agenda on the endless maze of virgin exterior walls that comprise downtown Seattle and Portland. For Nick the vast wall surfaces of deserted alleys and trainyards are at once a daunting symbol of capitalist oppression and a texturally rich, seamless tableau ripe for exploitation to amplify his artistic dialectic of anger and rebellion. His own virtually anonymous existence is interrupted by friendship with another young tagger. But eventually their assumptions about one another are disproved as political, emotional, and ethical issues arise, and the artists themselves emerge only further atomized and alienated by the experience.

Dir. James Bolton 2004 USA 80 min. Tennessee Premiere

WITH A South Bronx Tale (Dir. Janis Astor del Valle 2004 USA 14 min.) and Fairies (Dir. Thomas Gustafson 2004 USA 21 min.). When Ariana, a 15-year-old Latina feels her life and reputation are threatened, she must choose between honoring herself or her familia; a boy facing homophobia from his classmates imagines a world of music, glitter, and acceptance.

Co-presented by One-in-Teen Youth Services with sponsorship support from the Vanderbilt University Office of GLBT Life

5:00 pm: The Cookie Project

An upstanding Black man Derwin Fields, ex-Marine Corps, supports his wife and two children and is now an LAPD cop. Derwin however does not feel complete and saves up for a sex change to become Cookie, an out lesbian. But can you really be a lesbian if you are born male? Cookie and her girlfriend know they can only be resolved when Cookie gets a genuine 'coochie.' She takes the long journey to Thailand to undergo gender reassignment surgery performed by a very skillful surgeon. (Twenty minutes of the surgery is shown.) Cookie has to deal with ambivalent reactions from her children. Do they call her Mum or Dad? Cookie's girlfriend however can't wait to try out the new goods!

Special guests in attendance: Cookie and director Stephanie Wynne, whose appearances are possible through support of Women's History Month at Middle Tennessee State University.

Dir. Stephanie Wynne 2003 USA 60 min.

WITH Boygirl (Dir. Aurora Reinhard 2002 Finland 12 min.)Three interviews with girls who look more like boys and feel themselves to be somewhere in between the male and the female sex.

7:00 pm: Dominatrix Waitrix

Former Nashvillian Edith Edit delivers a video featurette inspired by frustrations with the service industry and the power imbalance between owners and managers, managers and servers, servers and customers. Fueled by revenge fantasies from over ten years waiting tables, Edit transforms these fantasies into a reversal of power play for sexual pleasure by combining narrative, sci-fi, sadomasochism, and elements of musical theatre to conjure an ideal forum for questioning power dynamics in the service industry and among lovers.

Dir. Edith Edit 2004 USA 44 min. Southeast premiere

WITH a collection of short films that explore fantasies of other sorts. What happens when a mad scientist and her girlfriend use their lesbian powers and try taking over the world? Find out in Succubus (Dir. Bill Kelman 2003 USA 25 min. Tennessee premiere), a send-up of bad 1950s sci-fi and scream queen movies. You’ve never had a lunch break like the guys in Liquid Lunch (Dir. Jaimz Barton 2004 Canada 3.5 min. US premiere), or maybe you have? Albrecht Becker (Dir. Hervé Joseph Lebrun 2004 France 7 min. US premiere) was a “super sadomasochist” and a survivor of the Holocaust. A slave to Suleiman the Magnificent has a foot fetish in Makbul—His Favored One (Dir. Huseyin Karagoz 1999 Turkey 7 min.). And a guy into harnesses and saddles gets what he wishes for in Horseyboy (Dir. Sam McConnell 2004 USA 14 min. Southeast premiere).

9:15 pm: Testosterone

Fans of sexy underwear model turned actor Antonio Sabato, Jr. will know that he goes full frontal in Testosterone, but there’s more to this sexy thriller than his willy. Dean Seagrave (David Sutcliffe), a brilliant graphic novelist with writer’s block, hasn’t been himself lately. Not long ago his sex-bomb Argentine lover Pablo (Sabato) left their California beach house on a cigarette run, and he hasn’t been seen since. Unable to work, sleep, or even drag a razor across his face, Dean does what any self-respecting romantic would do in this situation: he blows off his deadline, throws some clothes in a bag, and books a flight. Destination: Closure. Once in Buenos Aires, Dean tries to track down his beloved Pablo, but Dean gradually discovers that practically everyone he encounters—from Pablo’s domineering mother (Sonia Braga) to the beautiful café owner Sofia (Celina Font), all the way to a guy he picks up in a bookstore (Leonardo Brzezicki)—is not what they seem. Dean abandons all better judgment, and with his broken heart practically leaking blood and testosterone pumping through his veins, he puts a machete on his credit card and heads off to have one last talk with Pablo.

Dir. David Moreton 2004 Argentina/USA 105 min.

WITH Christopher and Gordy (Dir. Frank Mosvold and Tom Petter Hansen 2004 Norway 5 min.). Find out what Norwegians think of American politics in this South Park-like animated short.
 

11:30 pm: The Raspberry Reich

Explicit sexual content. No one under 18 admitted.

Winner Best Film Melbourne Underground Film Festival

Fans of Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White, Super 8 ½), sometimes called the John Waters of Canada, will appreciate his latest offering, a romping sex-filled meditation on terrorism, politics, and sexual orientation in our post-9/11 world. Modeling themselves on the radical left-wing movements in Germany in the 1970s, the Raspberry Reich instead bungles its way through a kidnapping of the gay son of a wealthy industrialist. Their leader is Gudrun, a charismatic young woman imitating one of the main members of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang. She believes that heterosexual monogamy is a bourgeois construct that must be smashed in order to achieve true revolution.  To that end, she forces her straight male followers to have sex with each other to prove their mettle as authentic revolutionaries. When Holger protests that he is her boyfriend, Gudrun tells him not to be ridiculous, that the revolution is her boyfriend! You will leave shouting one of Gudrun’s slogans that flash frequently across the screen: “Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses!” And you may even wonder along with LaBruce if politics and violence, not sex, are what’s really pornographic.

Dir. Bruce LaBruce 2004 Canada 90 min. Tennessee premiere

WITH Rick and Steve, episode 4 (Dir. Q. Allan Brocka 2001 USA 8 min.). The Lego adventures conclude with this final installment of Brocka’s shorts series. (Episodes 1-3 are scheduled earlier in the festival.)

After party at Club Blu; details announced at the festival

12:30 pm: Proteus

Based on a true story about Claas Blank, a young Khoi (native South African) herder who in 1725 is sentenced to hard labor on Robben Island, Cape Town's penal colony that later housed Nelson Mandela. Virgil Tyne, an English botanist working in South Africa, is entranced by the quick-witted Blank, who soon finds ways to manipulate the repressed botanist. Blank works alongside a Dutch sailor, Rijkhaart Jacobsz, who is serving time for sodomy. Despite mutual prejudices, the two prisoners are strongly attracted to each other and begin a tentative affair, accidentally witnessed by Tyne, that transgresses vast cultural taboos and unleashes confused feelings of desire and jealousy. Tyne returns to Amsterdam and a decade passes during which the prison authorities continue to ignore the ongoing 'friendship' of Blank and Jacobsz. Then Tyne returns to the Cape, fleeing a sodomy scandal in Amsterdam. His return is catastrophic, inadvertently triggering the arrest of Blank and Jacobsz on sodomy charges. Tyne makes a desperate intervention to the court, intent on saving Blank, but the herder refuses to play along. For the first time in his life, Blank tells the truth, and he must now pay the price. Beautifully shot by Giulio Biccari with jarring anachronisms from the apartheid era.
Dir. John Greyson 2003 Canada/South Africa 97 min.
 

2:30 pm: Mommies and Daddies Dearest Shorts Program

If glbt people have anything in common, it must be their sometimes strained, sometimes wonderful relationships with parents. The bumper crop of films about gay people and their parents reveal in their own ways how lesbian and gay filmmakers the world over wrestle with their own family relationships. In the animated Listen (Dir. Susan Justin 2004 Canada 3 min.) a daughter’s “coming out” to her mother falls on deaf ears. The mother of Fancy-Boy (Dir. Phillip B. Roth 2003 Canada 8 min.) takes the cake for pushing her son to get a job. NGLFF is pleased to present the world premiere of Nashvillian Will Akers’s Homecoming (2004 USA 10 min.) in which the black sheep of the family faces a bitter welcome on a visit home. The boy in All over Brazil (Dir. David Andrew Ward 2003 United Kingdom 10 min.) fancies glam rock over soccer in the 1970s. The Snow White story gets an update in Memoirs of an Evil Stepmother (Dir. Cherien Dabis 2004 USA 18 min.), but this time the stepmother’s in jail and Snow isn’t after a prince. A mother still goes to great lengths to change her gay son in the futuristic Oedipe n+1 (Dir. Eric Rognard 2002 France 27 min.). And a teenager is caught between his spacy mother in a Santa suit and the lusty manager of a trailer park in What Grown-Ups Know (Dir. Jonathan Wald 2002 Australia 30 min.).

5:00 pm: Golfers, Queens, Bears, and Brides

In the struggle for equality and acceptance, glbt battles are not always fought in street protests and the capitols of North America. Poor Billy doesn’t understand why he can’t fulfill his crush on George W. Bush in Holy Matrimony Billy! (Dir. Mark Kenneth Woods 2004 Canada 4.5 min.), a spoof of McCarthy-era propaganda films. Bears—including a female bear—talk about the essence of being a bear in More Than Hair Care Products (Dir. Pendra Wilson 2004 Canada 14 min.). The townsfolk of Palm Springs adjust to circuit-party lesbians “taking over” the Dinah Shore golf tournament in the fast-paced Where the Girls Are (Dir. Jennifer Arnold and Tricia Cooke 2003 USA 27 min. Tennessee premiere). Southern hospitality and redneck homophobia clash in Dixie Queen (Dir. Miles Christian Daniels 2004 USA 47 min. Southeast premiere), an intimate portrait of a farmboy who grew up to be drag queen Tara Nicole, “Bitch Goddess of the Port City” in Wilmington, North Carolina.

7:30 pm: Closing night spotlight film: Brother to Brother

Winner Special Jury Prize—Sundance Film Festival 2004; Best Feature Film, Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; Audience Award, Best Feature, Frameline—San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; Showtime Vanguard Award—New Fest; Outstanding American Narrative Feature—Out Fest: Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

In his multi-award winning film Brother to Brother, director Rodney Evans invokes the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance through the memories of Bruce Nugent, co-founder of the revolutionary literary journal Fire!! As an elderly man, Nugent meets a young black gay artist struggling to find his voice and together they embark on a surreal narrative journey through the inspiring past of Nugent, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wallace Thurman in flashbacks to the gay and lesbian subcultures of the 1920s. Evans notes, “The film strives to acknowledge the diversity and complexity within the African-American and gay and lesbian communities and to give voice to experiences that have been vastly underrepresented in cinema for far too long.”

Special guest in attendance: Rodney Evans.

Dir. Rodney Evans 2004 USA 90 min.

Many thanks to our festival sponsors!

Cool Springs--David Neal, General Manager

Donald Easton

Brian Glenn

Ron Veasey and Mason Hall

Robert B. Hofstetter

 Even more thanks to those who have supported the festival in many ways!

Festival Staff

Festival Coordinator and Lead Programmer: Jim Williams
Festival Programming Team:
Debra Dickey
Terrance Flynn
Pippa Holloway
Justin Leh
 

Requests for press and industry credentials should be directed to Kimberly Hall: kimberly@belcourt.org or 615-846-3150