atlanta arts tagged interest

Editor’s Note: Due to Tropical Storm Helene, the in-person screenings of Young Hearts and Riley will now take place Monday, October 7.

When it first began 37 years ago, Out On Film was like a peephole into the wider world of LGBTQ films and filmmakers — a world happening far beyond a city that wasn’t known then as a booming town for movie-making. On that front, the metro area’s change has been enormous but still relatively recent.

“When I first tried to bring Atlanta filmmakers together for the festival, there were like four or five,” says Jim Farmer, the festival’s executive director since 2008. (Disclosure: Jim Farmer is an ArtsATL writer and editor-at-large.) “Now there are literally hundreds. And there is so much Atlanta product to choose from … I never thought I would see a time when people from Los Angeles would move to Atlanta.”

Organized under this year’s theme — Queer Joy — Out on Film 2024 kicks off this week at Midtown Art Cinema with 11 days of film screenings, QandAs with filmmakers and a series of daytime panels with industry professionals September 30 through October. 3.

Out on Film was one among few of its kind when it began in 1987, and plenty of LGBTQ festivals have sprung up in the years since. But the Atlanta festival distinguishes itself in a couple of ways. The winning films in its short narratives competition automatically become eligible for consideration at the Academy Awards. As of this year, winning films in that category also qualify for the British Academy of Film andamp; TV, making Out on Film the only BAFTA-qualifying film festival in the South.

While Out on Film is a global festival, it’s also chock full of local work. “I’m so happy that we have so much of Atlanta in this,” Farmer says. That includes the world premiere of Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps, the film adaptation of former Atlantan Scott Turner Schofield’s one-man play, in which the writer-performer spins engaging stories about his gender transition. Feature documentaries with Atlanta connections include Transcendence, Light Up and Join the Club.

For quick takes on the Atlanta experience, patrons can check out two separate programming blocks of short films. The narrative shorts include Nine Lives (writer-director-star Millie Rose Evans’ meet-cute tale involving a dead cat, a broken taillight and some disarmingly fun non sequiturs) and Take Note (writer-director Ciera Thompson’s sweetly earnest tale of a lesbian school teacher who takes some professional risks to help a couple of love-crossed students).

Here are a few of my takes on the films I was able to watch ahead of time.

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Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps

Atlanta theater-goers may know an early version of this from writer-actor Scott Turner Schofield’s performance of it way back in 2008 at 7 Stages Theatre. A clip from that shows up in this filmed version of the performance piece, which the charismatic storyteller presented around the globe. Directed by Andrea James, the film’s selected stories include bits of humor — like the dangerous thrill of being an unsuspected spy among horny, virginal Croatian men talking smack about women — and joy, like a trans child on getting to wear genuine boys’ underwear. Schofield includes the tale of falling in love deeply as a man but also shares his early challenges and suicide attempts. (Personal disclosure: I know Scott, so I may not be the most objective viewer!)

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Cashing Out

When he came up with the notion of viatical settlements, allowing people suffering from the then-death sentence of AIDS to sell their life insurance policies for immediate funds, Scott Page was interviewed on TV by folks like Phil Donahue in the 1980s. Many critics saw him as a sort of ghoul, but that easy money helped many sick people who had no safety nets or families to rely on. Matt Nadel’s documentary is an informative look at Page, now an Atlanta resident, and shows us the actual ghoulish part of the story: the avarice of some investors in those life insurance policies, who got angry when cocktail therapies kept the policies’ owner alive. The film also profiles Atlantan Dee Dee Chamblee, a transgender, HIV-positive woman who survived the worst AIDS years without the benefit of a policy to cash out — but founded La Gender in 2000 to draw attention to the overlooked Black transgender community’s needs.

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Duino

Still haunted by the crush he had on male Swiss classmate Alexander when he studied in the 1990s at an international college in Duino, Italy, Argentinian film director Matias (co-writer and co-director Juan Pablo Di Pace) is making a movie about those days. We see that story played out by actors Santiago Madrussan and Oscar Morgan as young Matias and Alexander. In this tale of unrequited love and cultural/class differences, the notion of a film camera as a disinterested spy, gathering evidence that people fail to see with their own eyes, is an interesting one. But for all the rich context here, for me, the filmmaker doesn’t communicate the exact story he wants to tell in what is nevertheless a layered, interesting story.

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All Shall Be Well

A clear-eyed heartbreaker from Ray Yeung, maker of Twilight’s Kiss, here’s another moving drama about gay love in later years. Hong Kong seniors Angie and Pat have a charmed longtime relationship in Hong Kong. But when Pat dies, her formerly loving biological family disagree with Angie over the disposition of Pat’s remains and ownership of the women’s apartment. You can guess where this is going in a film that’s wise, melancholy and a good reminder that we still need to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s, legally speaking, with our loved ones.

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High Tide

A handsome Brazilian named Lourenço (Marco Pigossi) finds himself stuck in a scenic limbo. Abandoned by his American lover, he’s taking under-the-table work as a housekeeper and handyman, and his tourist visa is about to expire. Writer-director Marco Calvani’s closing night film follows Lourenço as he seeks options while living in kindly older gay man Scott’s (Bill Irwin) guest cabin. He paints the house of a local, sympathetic artist (Marisa Tomei) and starts to fall for a Black American nurse, Maurice (James Bland). Lourenço is also lying on the phone to his mom back in Brazil (like Matias in Duino, he still isn’t out to his family). Some of Calvani’s dialogue for his characters, especially Maurice’s observations about racism, sometimes feels too on-the-nose. But there’s much to admire here, starting with Pigossi’s performance. The fond but compromised relationship between Lourenço and Scott itself has the seeds for a whole other, fascinating exploration of generational differences among gay men.

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In the Summers

Sisters Violeta and Eva (played by three sets of actors as they age from tweens to adults) spend their summers in New Mexico visiting their loving, hapless dad Vicente (René Pérez Joglar, AKA the rapper Residente). As they grow older, Violeta cuts her hair, becomes interested in girls and bonds with tough bar owner Carmen (a sympathetic Emma Ramos). Slow-paced, building its observations from cumulative details (the pool in dad’s backyard is a pretty good indicator of his well-being and sobriety) and delivered in both English and Spanish dialogue, Summers sometimes has the feel of documentary. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury and directing awards, writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s heartfelt work is a film you may admire more than love.

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Join the Club

A deep dive into both San Francisco gay culture and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Kip Andersen and Chris O’Connell’s documentary would make a fine double bill with Cashing Out. The late Dennis Perone is the focus, a fellow who came back from Vietnam (where he refused to fight) with three pounds of pot and an entrepreneur’s dream. Selling weed above a restaurant he founded in the Castro after his lover died of AIDS, he recognized the medicinal value of marijuana as both painkiller and appetite stimulant. Like viatical settlement leader Scott Page, Perone’s motives were challenged: Was he helping people with AIDS or profiting off their vulnerability? The SFPD was less interested in a moral debate, raiding Perone’s Cannabis Buyers Club and prosecuting him. Club is a fascinating look at a time that, happily, is now behind us.

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Light Up

A celebration of sexual, creative and Atlantan identity, this documentary brings together four Black gay men and one transgender woman to, basically, brag about themselves. You won’t begrudge them. The group includes a fashion designer (whose public marriage to another man inspired one of the younger members of the group to come out), as well as a former pastor who recalls the imperative in the macho, male Black community to “create a version of me that will be loved and acceptable.” That’s a struggle recognizable to LGBTQ people of any background, but Light Up is an educational and entertaining look at the multiple frontiers Black individuals have to navigate.

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What a Feeling

Walloped by her husband’s request for a divorce at their anniversary dinner, physician Resi (Caroline Peters) wanders drunkenly into a lesbian bar in Vienna, flirts with notorious lady-killer and carpenter Fa (Proschat Madani), then wonders in her hungover haze the next day if she, you know, did it with that charming lesbian. You can guess where this is going in a sweetly obvious comedy that has a nudgy, broad tone reminiscent of films of the 1990s. But, hey, what’s wrong with that? (Along with Duino and High Tide, this is another drama featuring parents in denial or disapproving of their children’s sexuality — a persistent, thematic reminder that the coming out story is eternal.)

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Young Hearts

They’ve been best friends for so long, everyone thinks 14-year-old Elias (Lou Goossens) and classmate Valerie are a couple. Things change when a new kid arrives in their small town from Brussels: Alexander (Marius De Saeger). Elias quickly bonds with him, but he’s a little surprised when Alexander admits his ex, back in the city, was a boy. Director and co-writer Anthony Schatteman sets his coming-of-age story in a timeless world, a rural, friendly place where Polaroids and smartphones co-exist, but kids like Elias and Alexander ride bikes and skinny-dip rather than stay glued to screens. As Elias realizes he’s falling for Alexander, the movie lets him make mistakes but keeps a safety net under him (and us). Young Hearts is so emotionally generous, it almost makes you hurt. It wouldn’t work nearly as well if not for Goossens — as Elias, he gives a vulnerable, translucent performance that would awe actors three times his age.

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