Wrong isn't my name

LEENA MANIMEKALAI 

The 26th British Film Institute's Lesbian and Gay Film Festival showed that cinema is fast becoming a potent voice of the LGBT community.

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article3314451.ece

"I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own 
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on

my resistance 
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination 
may very well cost you your life"

June Jordan

(thanks to Pratibha Parmar’s “A Place of Rage”, a groundbreaking documentary on the role Black Women Feminists played in Civil Rights Movements.)

26^th British Film Institute’s LGBTi Film Festival besieged me from 23^rd March to April 1 with its trajectory of images populating the other world of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Trans sexual and Intersexuals, traversing a wide window of mainstream potboilers to art movies, documentaries, avant-garde erotic videos and transgressive experimenta. It was like a gender shadow walk through tangential cultural construction done with minority self imaging, oppositional film practices, bent aesthetics and queer sensibilities.

Kiss me

Being a bi-curious woman, I always thought of myself as a deceitful woman. I would, though, confess to myself that “deceiving” is a way to address one’s desires audaciously. When Mia who was already engaged with Tim falls hopelessly in love with openly gay Frida in the Swedish film “Kiss me” , Directed by Alexandra-Therese Keining,  the portrayal of love is very much the same as love in its innate form regardless of the gender of people in question. The love making sessions of Mia with Tim and Mia with Frida will only make you feel that there was no question of preference in the matter and there was nothing in the wrong either. A typical romantic drama with strong emotions and sharp conflicts, it surprisingly ends victoriously when everyone would want the queer tale to end tragically. The enchanting actresses Ruth and Liv charm you so much, you forgive the rather contrived moments of instant attractions and quirky situations.

Iranian Lesbian Cinema Circumstance

Though President Ahmadinejad has declared that Iranian homosexuality doesn't exist, it sure does here in Maryam Keshavarz's “Circumstance”. Chronicling the coming of age of two young women in contemporary Iran, the film has picked up various awards in the festival circuit, including the audience award at Sundance. At the center of “Circumstance” are two girl dreamers from two ends of the country which officially sanctions harassment and abuse of LGBT persons by Private actors and Police and the Religious Society which sees them as diseased, criminals or corrupt agents of western culture. For them, fantasy is the only avenue to live their freedom. Fantasy operates on many levels in the film (as the Director Maryam quotes in her own words), the daydreaming at school, singing and dancing underground, the subtitling of the gay cinema “Milk”, running away to Dubai where they are allowed to drink and smoke even if they have ovaries and living out their sexuality. When Mehran the Zealot, transformed from a washed out Junkie, installs a surveillance camera to monitor his own family and Shireen, one of those girls in love, whom he lusts after, the CCTV becomes the metaphor of the two eyes of the fundamentalist state and religion.

From the ages of Genet’s classic Chant d’ amour, Gay cinema characters are still trying to break away from their own prison of sadism, guilt and repression. Beauty(Skoonheid), a South African Film by Director Oliver Hermanus,  is a provocative piece on closeted desires. Refusing to be judgmental, the film which had won the Queer Palm at the Cannes 2011, challenges the viewer to understand the extreme life situations when one battles his own identity for a long time.

Belgian Dir. Bavo Defurne, a regular author of gay Love and Loss themes in his shorts, makes his debut feature again on overdone coming out genre with North Sea Texas. With a gorgeous cast and exemplary cinematography, the film reaches the heights of poetry in depicting the loneliness and despair that the lead teen Pim’s experiences in his process of coming out with his sexual orientation.

Dealing with the “taboo” subject of a teacher/student relationship, Argentinian film Absent is an absolute Cine Trans of Sexual obsessions and its complexities. Director Marco Berger brilliantly brings in the sexual tensions and power play and the composer Pedro Irusta scores domineeringly to unnerve the viewer. It is certainly a sinister flick but frustratingly slow in pace.

Pariah

Leave it on the Floor

     Pariah, Directed by Dee Rees, Leave it on the Floor, Directed by Sheldon Larry and Stud Life, Directed by Campbell X came to the center stage of the gala as a mark of celebration of Black Queer Cinema both in authorship and content. Pariah is a delight to watch because of its very personal filming style and soulful indulgences. When the Director explained in her sessions how she wanted her autobiographical character ‘Alike’ to be filmed with lot of “peeping” or “eavesdropping” camera movements, behind or between objects, with long lenses that further enhance the sense of her being secretive and hiding. Alike is a chameleon, and the entire camera movements and production design around her serve to amplify that. Lighting is used in such a way that Alike is “painted” with whatever colors are predominating at the moment in her environment. In the nightclub she’s “purple;” on the bus she’s “green;” in the bathroom she’s “orange,” etc. She turns “white” towards the end; she’s “sunlight” in the final scene of the film when she declares as a poet, “I am not broken, I am free”.

      Leave it on the Floor, touches on the down low lifestyle, bullying, and homelessness that endures among black LGBT youth (Los Angeles has almost 2000 African- American LGBT kids living on the street right now, more than twice the number of homeless white LGBT kids.) Most of the characters in Leave It have either been forced out of or fled an intolerant and sometimes precarious home life. Inspired by Jennie Livingston’s documentary, “Paris Is Burning”, Director Sheldon Larry spent a passionate twenty years to make this film. Worthy of the emotional investment, this vogue film comes across as a swanky, hot, musical with an exceptional screenplay and lyrics by Glenn Gaylord, an original score by Beyonce’s creative director Kim Burse, and heart-thumping choreography by Frank Gatson Jr.

Stud Life

      Stud Life by Campbell X moves out of the “coming out” narratives to the unknown subculture of lesbians of color. Multicultural and polysexual nature of London feels wickedly real. Funny and playfully dialogued, with characters JJ, a black lesbian stud and an old fashioned stone butch, her friend gay man Seb and JJ’s femme love Elle coming alive so endearingly with their standup performances, Stud Life is special with its warmth and humaneness, though very loud at times.

    The Gay lib documentaries “Love Free or Die” on the first openly Gay Arch Bishop Gene Robinson and “Vito” on the pioneering Gay Militant Vito Russo who is also a supreme chronicler of Lesbian and Gay aspirations and betrayals on the silver screen with his cult book “Celluloid Closet” and “This is what love in Action looks like on the ordeals of gay teenager Zach Stark and how his MySpace blog(referred to as gay boot camp) spread as a rapid fire gathering protesters, are ultimately films about hope, celebrating the power of the community to rally together, challenging the churches to courts to broadcasters to ministries and motivate political changes. So is “Revealing Mr. Maugham” which is a fascinating documentary on the celebrated writer of the 20^th century W Somerset Maugham and his homosexual love life.

    What makes me sick and angry is the dearth of Asian authors and themes in the entire schedule of the festival. “365 without 377” a documentary on three defiant Indian queer activists heading to celebrate the first anniversary of scrapping of Section 377 of Indian Penal Code (which criminalized homosexuality) is a powerful account of LGBT lives in Mumbai, though directed by an Italian Director Adele Tulli. I wish to believe that this vaccum is due to the fact that the majority of the 80 countries where homosexuality is an offense fall within the map of Asia. It reminds us of the fact that the fight for equality for LGBT community is not just a matter of justice but a matter of human prospect and we need to move on.

   Queer cinema has also come a long way in using porn as a platform to practice political activism. The sex positive punk feminist porn shown here fearlessly explore a multitude of queer possibilities with their luminous images about sexuality, the body, identity and history. Talking Vulvas, talking labia, talking nipples, talking frenula and orifices make ‘body’ a new performing apparatus of survival, empowerment and communication. Director and Porn actor Marit Ostberg’s stunningly beautiful “Sisterhood” is a reflexive imagery on knowing the obvious. The Homo Erotica of Peter de Rome send shock waves into the hetero minds and thoughts , but also put them at ease eventually. Not that I haven’t seen a penis before, but I seriously felt that every image was a riot, thrashing the practiced gazes of cinema.

Sexing the Transman

    Trans Cinema had mainstream feature flicks like “Gun Hill Road” which is a gripping drama on a prison return macho thug Enrique’s coming to terms with his transitioning teen son Michael(played amazingly by transgender actor Harmony Santana) to documentaries like “Sexing the Transman”, rudely shaking up both the transmale community and adult film world with the world’s first ever female to male transsexual Porn Star Buck Angel and “Girl or Boy, My sex is not my Gender”, which spans as a fag spotter from Paris to Barcelona to New York to San Francisco. These bold documentaries show the middle finger and asks “what is so great to be a hetero” and “what determines one’s gender is not what one has under the clothes”. This is what I imagine as exorcising the demons of gender binary.

    At the end of my sub cultural moments with 26^th BFI’s LGBT Film Festival, my vocabulary stood mouth wateringly enhanced with words like drag queens, faggots, circus, bagpipe, bell, whole, blind, mother, punk, rim, stud, sew, swing, trade, velvet, wolf, blackmail, prowl, bar, house, rag, club, tea room, top men coded with homosexual meanings and certainly that would help me understand more and be cautious about the murderous design of exclusion. If I have to subtitle the moments, then “it is the taste of rainbow”. If I have to sound track the moments then it is my own hip hop “I am too sexy to be straight”!