Tag Archives: featured

Art & Autobiography​News & Updates

Kiss and Tell: Marialy Rivas and Alicia Rodriguez by

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Marialy Rivas’ debut film Young and Wild (2012) premiered at Sundance and received the World Cinema Screenwriting Award. We got the opportunity to talk with Marialy Rivas and Alicia Rodriguez, the lead actor from Young and Wild, about their experiences at Sundance, their upbringings in Chile, and their times in New York. Marialy and Alicia will also be at the NewFest Closing Night screening of Young and Wild, tonight on July 31st.

Daniela (Alicia Rodriguez) wakes up on an anonymous naked man after a wild night. First, she masturbates. Then, she presses ignore on her cell phone to reject her mother’s third consecutive call. And finally, she rushes to her Evangelical church service. Marialy Rivas’ Sundance Award Winning film, YOUNG AND WILD (2012), depicts the life of a Chilean teenager caught between her Evangelical upbringing and hormone-driven, blossoming body.

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Gay New York​News & Updates

Good Odds for “My Best Day”: Interview with Director Erin Greenwell by

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My Best Day may be named after a (fictional) racehorse, but this new film by director Erin Greenwell has little need for luck to come out ahead of the pack. With a cast of quirky yet relatable characters and bittersweet comedic moments, My Best Day delivers a familiar small town slice of Americana while still retaining a unique voice all its own.

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Gay New York​News & Updates

FOUR: Interview with Director Joshua Sanchez by

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Fresh off its ensemble award for “Best Performance” at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Brooklyn-based Joshua Sanchez’s debut feature, FOUR, makes its New York premiere this Friday, July 27 as the opening night film for the newly revamped NewFest. The film is spare and elegant, with a real feel for how endless summer-time suburban sprawl seems to extend and exacerbate emotional longing. It’s anchored by Pearce’s excellent performance as Joe, a middle-aged married man on an internet date with a teenage boy. He’s confident, thoughtful, and at times completely repellant, yet always compelling and human.

Adapted from Obie-winning playwright Christopher Shinn’s 1998 play, Four tells the story of four different characters faced with conflicting desires and unexpected emotions on the fourth of July. A white teenage boy, June (Emory Cohen, TV’s Smash), meets up with a married, middle-aged black man, Joe (The Wire’s Wendell Pearce), whose confident mantras and sloganeering are seductive and unsettling in their certainty. Meanwhile, Joe’s daughter, Abigayle (Aja Naomi King) finds herself drawn to the clever Latino basketball player named Dexter (E.J. Bonilla).

Joshua Sanchez grew up in Houston, TX and graduated from Columbia University’s MFA Film Program. His previous shorts, INSIDE/Out and Kill or Be Killed, screened at festivals worldwide.

Among other things, Four is notable for a refreshingly frank sex scene between Pearce and Cohen.  Like Sanchez’s ongoing Screentests series of short video portraits,  it’s a movie with a rare, unassuming emotional intelligence and lack of moral judgement.

KTLO: How were the screenings in Los Angeles and San Francisco?

It was great. It couldn’t have been better, really. The screenings were all great and the audiences were really enthusiastic and seemed to really enjoy the film and get it. In San Francisco and LA, it was really like there were two different audiences, but they were both very enthusiastic. In San Francisco, we played at the Castro Theatre, which was really incredible. It’s like a big old movie theatre in the middle of the Castro that was just a really nice place to play, and the audiences there are always very lively and opinionated, so it was fun to play there.

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News & Updates​The Movie

Interview with Script Supervisor Veronica Lupu by

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On Keep the Lights On, script supervisor Veronica Lupu played a crucial part in translating an elliptical script, set over ten years, into a movie that could be deciphered by an audience.

Lupu started working as a “script girl” in Romania in the early 70’s before moving to New York in the 1980’s. She worked with some of the top-Romanian directors at the time, including Radu Gabrea and Geo Saizescu, and it’s clear she has a a rich understanding of cinema history. Her American credits include We Own the Night (2007), Enchanted (2007), and previously with Ira Sachs on  Forty Shades of Blue (2005). She also serves on the board of the Local 161, a production union that includes script supervisors.

When we met, Veronica was in pre-production on the Katie Holmes-vehicle, Molly (this took place before it became her divorce/defection was publicized). Her pre-production binder is is one of the most incredibly organized I’ve ever seen.

What is a script supervisor?

Someone who is in charge of continuity of the movie. The movie is being done in little pieces – it’s not done in the consecutive order according to the script. So the script supervisor is the one who makes sure that when these pieces will be put together, everything has to match.

And it’s not just narrative, it’s also performance related.

Everything! Camera angles…the right dialogue…wardrobe, everything matches from the scene you shot previously two weeks ago and is continuous in the story.
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News & Updates​Uncategorized

The Fagettes: Hair, ‘Tude, and Guitar by

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Love it or hate it, the name of Boston-based punk band “The Fagettes” is sure to start a conversation.

And that’s exactly the reaction they’re going for.

Formed in 2010 by Melanie Bernier and Ryan Major, The Fagettes have already stirred up plenty of buzz in the Boston underground music scene and beyond. Their catchy, lo-fi rock sound and retro style may call back to the ’60s and ’70s, but The Fagettes’s unique fun and flair is all their own.

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News & Updates​Tell Your Story

My Father, My Boyfriend, and Their Admirer by

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An introduction to the males I’ve been spending the most time with this summer: my father in the suburbs and my boyfriend in the city. This video is a condensed portrait of the two characters and places. You will be seeing more of my father and boyfriend as I document them through the summer, hoping to present their simple tasks in a way that reveals more about them.

Gay New York​News & Updates

Dear Biddy B by

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Biddy B – Mr. James Bidgood’s advice columnist friend is back this summer, to cool us down with her rapier wit and sagely advice. If you have questions for Biddy B, email jklorfein@gmail.com!

Dear Biddy B,

This is my first summer in the city, and as a young twenty-something, I was expecting to meet new people and have a lot of fun. Yet I find myself going from home to the train to the office and back again nearly every day, too tired or timid to socialize. I haven’t really had a chance to make many new friends, and bars aren’t really my thing. How can a quiet queer gal bust onto the New York scene?

Thanks,

Nerdy Newbie New Yorker 

Dear Mister Nerdy Newbie N.Y.er,

Well Dahling, I am only slightly dismayed Manhattan and its towers have not turned out to be the merrymaking or should I say Mary-making bacchanal you had so looked forward to. You might have done better had you headed west young man, to San Fransissy, which has been likened by many to one monumental picnic ground, a multifarious fête champˆtre as it were, an incessant outing of full baskets and wieners roasting with potholders at ready, all quite gratifying if you don’t mind the aunties. Pack citronella candles just in case.

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Gay New York​News & Updates

United in Anger: A History of ACT UP by

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United in Anger: A History of ACT UP is a unique feature-length documentary that combines startling archival footage that puts the audience on the ground with the activists and the remarkably insightful interviews from the ACT UP Oral History Project to explore ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) from a grassroots perspective – how a small group of men and women of all races and classes, came together to change the world and save each other’s lives.

Keep the Lights On spoke with director Jim Hubbard a few months ago, just before the premiere of United in Anger at the MOMA. Tomorrow, July 6, it will open at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village.

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Art & Autobiography​News & Updates

Francophrenia – Shots are Thoughts by

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In quantum labs you can see an object in two different places at once. Yes, at the same time. Laugh, I used to, but quantum physics is a radical science. I studied electrical engineering and was taught Heisenberg’s theory that atoms are not things but rather tendencies. Still I can’t totally believe that one object can be in more than one place at the same time. This was the first paradox I came across in my adult life, something I re-lived watching Francophrenia (Or Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is), an experimental film around James Franco’s appearance in a soap opera.

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Avery Willard​News & Updates

Thank you, ‘In Search of Avery Willard’ Supporters by

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The ISOAW team would like to express gratitude to the generous contributors who made our Kickstarter fundraiser a huge success. It’s been less than three weeks since our world premiere and the film has already screened at FOUR international film festivals on two coasts! The response has been simply overwhelming thus far. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have the opportunity to share and connect with such dynamic audiences around the country. Thanks to your Kickstarter contributions, we are able to continue our journey with upcoming screenings at the Connecticut Film Festival (July 1), Philadelphia QFest (July 14) and Outfest 2012 in Los Angeles (July 15 & 17).

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