Monthly Archives: November 2011

News & Updates

Keep The Lights On In Park City! by

by Jean Christophe Husson

We are thrilled to announce that Keep The Lights On has been accepted into the US Dramatic Competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, which runs from January 19 – 29th in Park City, Utah. Directed by Ira Sachs, Keep The Lights On is one of 16 films in the section, selected from 2,059 to apply. The film stars Thure Lindhardt (Into the Wild, Angels and Demons, Flame & Citron) and Zachary Booth (Damages, Dark Horse) as two men who meet in New York City in the late 1990′s and begin to build a home and life together. Over the course of the next ten years, they struggle to maintain their relationship while battling their own compulsions and addictions. A film about sex, friendship, intimacy and most of all, love, Keep the Lights On takes an honest look at the nature of relationships in our times.

Written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias (Madame Satã, Seuly in the Sky), the film co-stars Julianne Nicholson (Boardwalk Empire, Tully), Souléymane Sy Savané (Goodbye Solo, Machine Gun Preacher), and Paprika Steen (The Celebration, Applause, Open Hearts). The Producers are Sachs, Lucas Joaquin and Marie Therese Guirgis; and Executive Producers are Ali Betil, Jawal Nga, Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen; Associate Producers are Adam Hohenberg, Iddo Patt and Alex Scharfman.

The Sundance Film Festival and director Ira Sachs have a history that spans almost 20 years. Sachs’ films Lady (1994), The Delta (1997), Forty Shades of Blue (2005), and Last Address (2010) all premiered at Sundance, with Forty Shades of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize in 2005. Sachs has also mentored other filmmakers at the 2008 and 2010 Sundance Director’s Lab, 2010 Israel Film Lab, and the 2011 Screenwriter’s Lab. He is thrilled to be back at Sundance to premiere Keep The Lights On.

The Sundance Film Festival has a long history of supporting important new queer cinema, with the festival premiering and giving awards to now classic queer films including Paris is Burning, Poison, The Kids are Alright, Longtime Companion, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Sachs created both the popular New York IFC Center film series Queer/Art/Film, which selects artists to present films that influenced them, and Queer/Art/Mentorship, a new program that pairs emerging artists with established artists in their field. Keep The Lights On is Ira Sachs’ first feature film to feature gay subject matter since 1997′s The Delta, and comes at a time when queer films like Weekend, Circumstance, and Pariah have achieved widespread critical and audience acclaim.

We will be announcing screening dates soon, so please keep checking our Movie section for more news and updates and info about Keep the Lights On, and join us for more information on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter (@ktlomovie). These platforms will have the most accurate and up-to-date information about the film, including announcements of upcoming screening.

Gay New York

Walking With Ghosts by

polaroids119

The meatrack is a small forest tucked behind the beach and sand dunes of Fire Island. It bridges the gay and queer summer communities of The Pines and Cherry Grove. It is where people go to meet, have sex and make art. It is a place where dry bones breathe.

The first time I went through the meatrack I followed the sunburned neck of pioneering contemporary artist AA Bronson. I was working as his assistant; accompanying him and artist Ryan Brewer as they scouted locations for an art project they were doing involving rituals, and the use of a long black, Victorian Comme Des Garcons skirt AA had recently acquired.

As I kept on eye on AA’s long white luminescent beard, I struggled to take in everything. I had been hearing about Fire Island my whole gay life – the adventures of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Christopher Isherwood, as well as how, according to Larry Kramer, the island and it’s hedonistic vibe was the sign of the gay man’s demise. It was heady to be walking on the shifting ground, moved by the intense weight of emotions washing over me. As soon as I stepped into the rack I felt very unalone. More…

Art & Autobiography

My Thanksgiving Prayer by

Each year I try to watch this great video of the legendary William S. Burroughs reading his poem “Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986″, and think about how I would update it. The poem is taken from the collection Tornado Alley and the video above was directed by Gus Van Sant, who had cast Burroughs as a drug-addled priest in his 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. The video for me seems especially prescient this year and if could make my own 2011 Thanksgiving day prayers they’d go something like this: More…

Tell Your Story

OCCUPY RIO by

Occupy Rio

“Isn’t Brazil always occupied???” That was the one line first response to these photos that I got from my friend Chris. My response was a line from a poem by Ani DiFranco titled Self Evident where she’s talking about the USA: “Cause take away our Playstations and we are a third world nation.”

I’m in Rio because last week I was production managing for Trajal Harrell’s 20 Looks Or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church(s) at the Panorama Performance Festival. I was supposed to leave tomorrow but I cancelled my return flight to stay here and continue to help any way that I can at Cinelândia Square which is where the OCUPA RIO! Movement has set up shop. I especially feel obligated to stay because there is a complete and total local media black out here. (Thanks for publishing this!) And as soon as I can find the means, I’ll make my way over to São Paulo to see how things work there. More…

Art & Autobiography

Joan’s Digest: A Film Quarterly by

If you’re not Occupying lower Manhattan tonight, head over to Anthology Film Archives to kick off the launch of a new online feminist film quarterly called Joan’s Digest, which aims, according to editor Miriam Bale to “step away from the hubris and voyeurism of reviews and focus instead on long and personal relationships with the cinema, how we live with film over time and how it forms our sense of self.” Tonight’s screening is all about Joans on the beach, with Joan Crawford in the ultra-campy Female on the Beach at 6:45PM and then Jean Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach, starring Joan Bennett. From 8:30 to 11:30PM complimentary Joan-themed bourbon cocktails will be served. The program repeats on November 21st and 22nd.

Gay New York

The Beginnings of MIX by

To mark the occasion of the opening night of the 24th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, the festival’s co-founder Jim Hubbard has generously allowed us to reprint the following essay detailing the origins of the festival, first published in French to mark the 15th anniversary of Scratch Cinema in Paris in 1999. Much has changed within the festival since this article was first written, but the history of its birth remains the same.

Sarah Schulman and I were smoking pot one cold night in February 1987. As Sarah passed me the joint, she said, “We should do a lesbian and gay experimental film festival.” I said, “I’ve always wanted to do one. When should we do it?” “September.” “Do you think we could do it for two weeks?” “No, one week is more than enough work.” And so, the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival was conceived.

When we approached Howard Guttenplan, director of Millennium, to rent the space for the festival, he asked us if we thought there was an audience for this work. I replied that I had no idea, but we were going to find out. More…

Art & Autobiography

A Room of V’s Own: Mx Justin Vivian Bond at Participant Gallery by

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This summer I attended a farewell party at Mx Justin Vivian Bond’s apartment in the East Village. Actually, let me rephrase that. I attended a farewell party for Mx Justin Vivian Bond’s apartment in the East Village. From early afternoon through the midnight hour, friends and loved ones of V came to drink, dance, and bid a warm and sometimes angry farewell to a beloved loft space where over the course of 2 years, the adored NYC singer, author, performer and artist flourished. Within days of the party, the apartment would be vacated to make way for a new condo complex called Avalon. A few weeks ago the contents of Justin Vivian’s loft settled into a new home at the Participant Gallery for V’s gallery show The Fall of the House of Whimsy. I sat down for a drink with Bond to discuss the show and the increasingly autobiographical direction of V’s work.

Adam: Tell me about your new show at Participant.
Justin: It’s called The Fall of the House of Whimsy. I chose that because it’s opening on Halloween, and you know, in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher this house that this artist is living in disappears into a mist at the end. And, my house that I’ve been working in is disappearing in the mists of Avalon, literally, because the developers that have done the Avalon Complex are turning my part of the building into a 12-story condo unit. The original tenants will each get an apartment for like $10 each, but for the rest of us, we’re out on our asses. My intention had been a show of my watercolors, but shortly before we had to move out in spring I was lying in bed one morning and the light was so beautiful that I just got out of bed and started photographing my apartment. I really started meditating on how creative I had actually been in the two and a half years that I had lived there. I produced my record and did the Jackie Curtis book with Hilton Als. I did my ReGalli Blonde show at The Kitchen, and we rehearsed it in that loft, and we rehearsed the Christmas Spells shows in the loft. I wrote my book Tango, had amazing parties and met amazing people in the loft. More…

Gay New York

We Could Be Heroes by

One of the most significant and rarely seen films by the underrated German gay filmmaker Rosa Von Praunheim, Tally Brown, New York (1979) is a verite documentary that follows the now forgotten downtown performer through her life. As seen in Praunheim’s film, Brown was a short, stout woman whose warm and unique demeanor suggested a combination of Little Edie Beale and Edith Massey. Brown appeared in three Andy Warhol films (Camp, Batman/Dracula, and ****) and was a fixture at 60′s and 70′s clubs like Reeno Sweeney’s, S.N.A.F.U, and the Continental Baths. Brown’s specialty was her German-tinged takes on classics by rock legends like David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. In the clip above, which opens Praunheim’s film, the camera slowly zooms in, letting us hear the powerful voice, before meeting its owner in full frame. When the two come together, it’s quite astonishing. A perfect tune for a full moon.

Art & Autobiography

Earth Camp One by

Since the dawn of cinema, film has dealt with the subject of death in an unimaginable number of ways. Think of melodramas where the couple finds love only to have a sudden cough render the hero or heroine fatally ill, or action and horror films where death is inconsequential – sometimes cathartic – amusement. Documentarian Jennie Livingston’s astonishingly influential documentary Paris Is Burning also featured subjects - marginalized gay men of color participating in New York’s outrageous drag ball scene – dealing with death. The film ends on a heartbreaking note, as one of its brightest subjects is revealed to have been murdered by a mysterious john who was never caught. As Livingston pointed out at a Queer/Art/Film screening of the film this past June, nearly all of the subjects in the film are now dead. The death of the titular “Paris” – Paris Dupree last month underscored her point. Now Jennie is making a new feature documentary called Earth Camp One that explores the way we deal with death as a society and as individuals. The film explores a major loss she experienced in the late 1990′s, when her grandmother, mother, brother, and uncle all died within four years of each other. But she describes the film as “neither therapy nor diary; it’s an expansive and deeply humorous trip around the outer edges of what it means to be alive and human.” Jennie needs your help to make the film happen though, with just about 2 days left before reaching the end of her Kickstarter campaign, she’s raised $29,000 of the $40,000 she needs to reach. If she doesn’t hit her goal, she won’t get any of the money. So please take a moment to watch the video and visit Kickstarter to give what you can to help support this project. If you consider what an impact Paris is Burning has had on the culture at large, imagine what Earth Camp One can do.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/802151454/earth-camp-one?ref=live

Production Diary

Day 158: Pick A Date by

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Today, we lock picture, which means we make the final decisions about what images will be, and what images won’t be, in the film. After that, we move on to several weeks working on the sound — and working once again with the sound designer, Damian Volpe, who has been my brilliant collaborator now for 16 years — but as of some point this evening, the movie will be fully edited. I’m glad to say I feel very calm about it. There are a few last choices that Fonzie and I need to make, but after many months of listening, and taking in, and responding, to viewer’s notes and thoughts, I feel now that I know the movie very, very well. And I know how to finish it up. More…