Tag Archives: Queer Film

News & UpdatesThe Movie

KEEP THE LIGHTS ON Returns to NYC – Fri., Dec. 21 at Cinema Village! by

full_KTLO_3149_ThureLindhardt_ZacharyBooth_PhotoByJean-ChristopheHusson (1)

If you missed KEEP THE LIGHTS ON in theaters this past September, there’s one last chance to catch it on the big screen, when the film re-opens at New York’s Cinema Village, next Friday, December 21!

Ira will be present for Q&A at the 7pm Fri, Dec. 21 and Sat., Dec. 22 shows. Tickets are on sale now (additional showtimes will go on sale soon):

TICKETS (Additional showtimes on-sale soon)

Fri., Dec. 21, 7pm – Q&A With Director Ira Sachs

Sat., Dec. 22, 7pm – Q&A With Director Ira Sachs

KTLO was just named one of the top films of the year by both Time Out New York and Time Magazine.  Catch it if you haven’t, and hope you have a great holiday!

Gay New YorkNews & Updates

OPENING TODAY: The 25th NYC MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival by

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Whether it’s archival footage of activists protesting against the release of Hollywood’s offensive film  “Cruising”, or an alien drag queen leading an army of flying penis monsters, NYC’s MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival yet again provides an intriguing program for everyone. Paying homage to its 25 year span, this year’s festival will acknowledge its past while exploring what it means to be a queer person in today’s society.

MIX was founded in 1987 by activist/author Sarah Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard in response to the growing lack of original, limit-pushing films in other LGBTQ festivals. Since then, it has become one of the most anticipated annual events in the New York queer art community.

One of the programs everyone should be sure to check out is the Dirty Looks Selects: The First 25 Years of MIX program, which is guest-curated by Bradford Nordeen, programmer of the monthly queer experimental screening series, Dirty Looks.

 

Below is a statement from Bradford Nordeen on Dirty Looks and what we can expect from this year’s festival:

“Dirty Looks traces contemporary queer aesthetics through historical works, presenting quintessential GLBTQ film and video alongside up-and-coming artists and filmmakers. We exhibit a lineage of queer tactics and visual styles for younger artists, casual viewers and seasoned avant-garde film-goers, alike. So we’re understandably thrilled to be involved and to celebrate this momentous quarter-centennial! What we’ve done, here at Dirty Looks, is approached the entire back catalogue of the MIX film festival and selected one title per year throughout MIX’s history. In so doing, we tried to highlight works that either had a real significance or bearing over that moment of artistic production – or we selected titles or artists that have exhibited an amazing longevity and growth since their inclusion in the festival. Our “Selects” programs will be a REAL roller coaster, assembling very disparate titles and artists, voices and approaches – much like the festival itself!”     

 

The festival opens today and runs through Sunday November 18,  and is located at MIX Factory in Brooklyn (339 Butler Street).  Also at MIX NYC will be KTLO’s own In Search of Avery Willard, screening this Saturday the 17th at 8 pm!

Grab your Tickets now!

 

 

 

News & UpdatesThe Movie

A Treat to Celebrate KTLO’s London Premiere by

KTLO UK Poster

Keep the Lights On makes its London premiere tonight, October 16th, at the BFI London Film Festival. To celebrate, here’s a short behind-the-scenes documentary, shot by Jean Christophe Husson. There will be more footage on the film’s DVD. Peccadillo Pictures will release the film on November 2 in UK cinemas.

Edited by Alix Diaconis, score by Daniel Quinn.

News & Updates

FOURPLAY: Interview with Director Kyle Henry by

Jose Villarreal in FOURPLAY 01

Few films could score a scene of a woman’s sexual awakening with a dog to a romantic, ridiculous Pino Donaggio-like synth score, and pull it off, but in Fourplay director Kyle Henry creates a moment that’s as sensitive as it is funny. 

In Fourplay, a feature anthology of four short stories of sexual intimacy, the protagonists  (half of home live in middle-class cities cities, like Skokie and Tampa, that have rarely been associated with sex), all face life-changing sexual encounters.

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News & Updates

Tony Scott (1944-2012) by

Domino Harvey

Director Tony Scott’s shocking suicide (ABC News reports that Scott had inoperable brain cancer), is all the more sad as the past few years have been a critical renaissance for the director’s work. Since the triple-threat of Man on Fire (2004), Déjà vu (2006), and Unstoppable (2010), outlets like Mubi and Cinemascope featured passionate discussions of his films’ cinematography and editing that are both confidently tactile and frequently on the verge of abstraction.

Scott was no stranger to LGBT content, having directed Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in a sexy and sapphic love scene in The Hunger (1983). The underappreciated Domino (2005), loosely inspired by the life of lesbian model turned bounty hunter Domino Harvey (played by Keira Knightley), may seem to whitewash the character’s sexuality, placing Edgar Ramirez as a love interest. But in the last scene, the “real” Harvey appears on screen. She’s made to look like a Butch caricature – shaved head, black suit, and earring. In other words, not Keira Knightley. It’s a clever, sweet way to end the film – and completely in line with what came before.The film mocks the notion that media can offer any kind of representation to those outside of a small socio-economic bracket (which the privileged Domino eventually spurns).

Some argue that The Hunger’s lesbian-vampire love is meant for heterosexual titillation consumption, but with Domino, Scott does right by his queer, punk-rock heroine.

Gay New YorkNews & 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 YorkNews & 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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Gay New YorkNews & Updates

Matt Wolf’s “I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard” by

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Matt Wolf is a New York filmmaker whose documentaries focus on music, teenagers, and artists who he describes as gentle gays. He made the film Wild Combination (2008) about the avant-garde cellist and disco producer, Arthur Russell (whose music is used in Keep The Lights On). Currently, Wolf is working on Teenage, a documentary about the invention of youth. While working on Teenage, Wolf created a short film, “I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard”, where he pays tribute to one of his favorite artists and writers, Joe Brainard. Like Arthur Russell, Brainard’s life ended prematurely due to AIDS.

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