BFI Flare: Do the Work

My concluding post from this year's BFI Flare festival is concerned with history, the ways we remember things and the importance of passing on knowledge and skills. Two documentaries illustrate the challenges this presents.

AIDS Diva

In AIDS Diva: the Legend of Connie Norman, we hear about someone who is presented as forgotten, the trans activist Connie Norman who died in 1996 after a battle with AIDS. She advocated for many communities over her lifetime, moving from Texas to San Francisco and then settling in Los Angeles as the AIDS crisis escalated. Her work covered both street protests and lobbying of the local council, which called upon a range of skills: persuasion, agitation, research, etc. That she had little formal education is even more remarkable, given what she accomplished. Friends and colleagues remember her as someone who would reach out to others and who was a warm, engaging personality, which is backed up by the archive footage of her speaking at marches, debating bigots on television and hosting her own radio show. I did not know her, but our paths may well have crossed in the 1990s as I attended some of the same demos. Even at the end of her life she was still speaking about the work that was left to be done and the importance of collective action. She had wisdom.

Rebel Dykes

Rebel Dykes, my most eagerly anticipated film, centres on the lesbians who lived in London in the 1980s edging into the 1990s and has a plethora of charismatic figures but is very short on cultural context: squats, AIDS, clubs, protests are all in there but are not very well linked or mapped. How much contact did the Chain Reaction set have with Greenham Common dykes? Did the abseiling lesbians know the musical dykes? It is not at all clear and if the aim is to start an inter-generational conversation, why are there no younger voices? I loved the archive material and was keen to get to know the speakers, but was left quite confused. I also felt dismayed  by the lack of nuance in discussions of the so-called sex wars. Life is complex and the more information you put out there, the better. We all need to do the work to record our lives and struggles. Society will never do that for marginalised people. 

BFI Flare: Troubled Teens

 The teenage years are always ripe for cinematic imagining and this year's festival did not disappoint, offering up a summer beach holiday in Sweetheart and a going away party in Dramarama. 

Sweetheart

I actually thought both of these would be fun, light comedies and was startled by the quite heavy themes that emerged, but that is no bad thing. In Sweetheart, A.J., known to her mum as April, goes on holiday with her family to Freshwater, a seaside camp in Dorset. A.J. bemoans the lack of wi-fi and so begins a long week of drama and conflict. The film brilliantly captures the sulkiness of being 17, while adding enough specifics to make A.J. a memorable character who is exploring her sexuality and (it is implied) gender identity. When A.J. meets the lovely Isla, a lifeguard, sparks fly but things don't go to plan. Of course not, as there would be no film. I was impressed by the writing and direction in this Microwave film and look forward to seeing more from film-maker Marley Morrison. 

Dramarama features an ensemble of teens gathering at the Escondido, California home of Rose to bid her farewell before she heads off to New York for uni. They are all theatre geeks and arrive in costume, faux British accents at the ready, for a night of extreme murder mystery posturing. Then a pizza delivery guy arrives and kills the mood. Rivalries escalate, secrets are unearthed and dares are accepted. It's a brilliantly uncomfortable watch as the kids tear each apart psychologically and there are two repressed queer romances on the go, as well. Ouch. A semi-autobiographical story from dir/writer Jonathan Wysocki, it strikes a bittersweet tone as it sends its characters off into uncertain adulthoods. 

BFI Flare: Hot Topics

Today I will look at two documentaries that have screened online at this year's unusual Flare film festival. No Ordinary Man looks at the fascinating life of jazz musician Billy Tipton, while PS: Burn This Letter Please recovers the lives of 1950s New York City drag queens. 

One interviewee in No Ordinary Man explains why Billy Tipton's name is familiar. "It was in a Le Tigre song." That song was, of course, "Hot Topic", but I actually heard Tipton's name much further back and am pretty sure Phranc wrote a song about the musician who died in 1989. Back then the general understanding was that Tipton, who was born a woman but lived as a man, was a frustrated lesbian who thought dressing as a man would help her music career. Later this understanding evolved to recognise Tipton as a trans man. Interestingly, this same pattern followed Brandon Teena, who is also mentioned in the documentary. I pondered this, as nobody in the documentary seemed to really delve into this paradox: we recognise someone as queer but get the specifics wrong. 

No Ordinary Man used an unusual method to canvass opinion on Tipton, convening auditions to play him. Auditionees played out scenes and then offered their reactions. I was confused, however, as to whether there really is a biopic in the works or whether they understood their contributions were solely for this documentary. But, the real emotional heart of the film for me was the interviews with Billy Tipton, Jr., who found his father dying back in 1989 and has had to live ever since with the salacious gossip about his life and whether he and his siblings (never seen) or mother "knew" about Tipton senior. He comes across as rather damaged by life and incredibly grateful that so many trans people revere his father. "I thought I was the only one," he says. Where have we heard that before?

P.S. Burn This Letter Please

PS: Burn This Letter Please starts with a brilliant premise: a stash of letters found in storage in 2014 that turn out to be 1950s missives sent by drag queens to one man, their friend who was travelling for his radio job. And what letters, full of dish and gossip about the scene and its players, all signed with their drag names. Incredibly, many of them are tracked down by the filmmakers and interviewed in the present day to reflect on their lives back then. And what stories! The great Met wig heist lingers long in the memory. A must-see. 

BFI Flare: Arrivals

Still smarting from my woeful performance in the Big Gay Film Quiz (42/80), I am dusting myself off and pondering what might have been. It was all going well until the final round on lesbian couples on TV. I don't watch TV, so it was mostly guesswork. PFFT. 

Sublet

So, to more films viewed online for BFI Flare and I am focussing on newcomers arriving on foreign shores, a theme that features in several films. Top of the list is Eytan Fox's Sublet in which Michael, a mature New York journalist, arrives in Tel Aviv to research the city for his travel column. By rather contrived means he ends up sharing his sublet with Tomer, a young, chaotic filmmaker who shows him around the city. Michael is in a long-term relationship with his insensitive partner who Skypes him sporadically and seems completely emotionally detached. Ugh. It's no wonder he develops an attraction to hot younger guy. But will they or won't they? Well, actually, that isn't even the crux of this wonderful film, which deftly explores intergenerational communication, misunderstandings and family attachments in a beautifully funny and moving way. I found myself crying at some of the revelations in the third act. As Michael John Benjamin Hickey conveys a world of repressed pain and bitter experience while his opposite number Niv Nissim has charisma to burn. 

Boy Meets Boy

Not quite so great is the extremely talky Boy Meets Boy, which starts promisingly with two guys hooking up at a Berlin club and spending the next day together. Harry is a British doctor who finds them, f*cks them and forgets them, while local boy Johannes has a boyfriend but isn't so keen on their open relationship. Over 12 hours or so they wander Berlin and talk.... and talk. Much of the dialogue appears off the cuff but some of it is so on the nose it's painful. For such a short film (69 mins) it really does drag on. And the ending is one of those Eh moments, like what the heck was that about? The two leads are pleasant enough, but it feels like director Daniel Sánchez López thought their chemistry alone would carry the film without an actual plot. It really does not. 

And then there is Kiss Me Before It Blows Up (Kiss me Kosher), whose title(s) promises so much more than it delivers. Honestly, the trailer is brilliant, suggesting a comic farce of culture clashes and lesbian romance. Shira and Maria are about to move in together somewhere in Israel when they accidentally get engaged and their families get involved, sparking chaos. The film's premise is that since Shira is Israeli and Maria is German, there will be laughs aplenty from their two families mixing. Cue trips to the Holocaust museum and jokes about Nazis. No, really. I love bad taste, but this is just cringe, with sitcommy dialogue and clumsy direction galore courtesy of writer-director Shirel Peleg. A pity, as it does attempt to shoehorn in Middle East issues, inter-cultural relationships and some history along the way. Great scenery, too. Juliane Köhler looks pained as Maria's mother, perhaps remembering her great performance in Aimee and Jaguar all those years ago and wondering why someone can't write her something better than this. 

BFI Flare: Spooky Worlds

The Greenhouse

Continuing my festival viewing are two films I saw back to back, the dramas Jump, Darling and The Greenhouse. The former features the last performance of the late Cloris Leachman, an actress I grew up watching on TV. Here she is unrecognisable as an elderly widow living alone in a big house who is thrown together with her tearaway grandson when he comes looking for a handout. Leachman is the highlight of the film which features glimpses of a powerful family drama and intriguing characters without really delivering. The ending is a shock for all the wrong reasons. 

However, The Greenhouse really impressed with its odd mix of comedy and drama overlaid with sci-fi. A woman living with her mother in rural Australia discovers a portal to the past in a nearby greenhouse. The unusual family features two mothers and several adopted kids, all of whom bicker and have their own issues. As the daughter visits the greenhouse to witness times from her own life she bumps into the surviving mother. Spooky! Queer! Bonkers! 

BFI Flare: Messy Lives of the Creators

As all of the Flare viewing this year is online, I have been playing catch-up with all of the titles available. Today's post centres on the personal and creative lives of two twentieth century European icons: artist/writer Tove Jansson and auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Tove

I count myself as someone who has never read the Moomins series that made Jansson's name. Yet, her life fascinates me, having viewed a documentary many years ago formed from her home movies. So, I knew a bit about her later life living on a remote island but nothing of her earlier years. Tove, a biopic by Zaida Bergroth, picks up Jansson's story as WWII is coming to an end and she is suffocating living at home with her parents. Striking out on her own to set up her own live-work studio in Helsinki, she embarks on a life as a visual artist and bohemian. And how. Within the first twenty minutes of the film she has taken as her lovers not only an MP but the daughter of the mayor! Everybody appears to be married, but also playing around. Honestly, the Bloomsbury crowd had nothing on the Helsinki set. It is a beautifully crafted drama of a woman seeking creative and personal satisfaction and giving not a jot about convention. 

As its title makes clear, Oskar Roehler's Enfant Terrible offers a view of filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a drama queen creating chaos wherever he goes. Fassbinder's creativity was prodigious, fuelled by drink and drugs and his sexual appetite was equally active. During the film, which spans 1967-1982, he collects a crew of hangers-on and lovers who appear to be dedicated to him and his films, returning again and again. Why is not clear. He is rude, obnoxious, arrogant, insensitive and prone to throwing violent tantrums. Were his films that good? I don't buy the whole tortured genius as an excuse for wretched behaviour, but the film offers a vision of Fassbinder as performer on his own stage. In the title role Oliver Masucci is outstanding, conveying Fassbinder's aggression coupled with hints of vulnerability and fear. 

For those wanting to delve into Fassbinder's back catalogue the BFI Player is offering a selection of his work. Drama guaranteed. 

Five Films for Freedom 2021

 Today is the opening of BFI Flare, this year online, and as usual it coincides with the launch of Five Films for Freedom, the shorts selected to go online for all to see during the festival to promote LGBT+ lives around the world. 

Actually, all of the shorts are online this year, but these five are the ones the British Council will be spotlighting throughout the festival, so give them a look. I found the most affecting to be Pure, a sweet tale of budding romance allied with self confidence. 

More on BFI Flare in the coming days.... 

More Moxie

Watching the Netflix drama Moxie*, I was piqued by feelings of nostalgia and bang up to date anger. Women banding together to protest male violence? Zines? Protests? Vigils? All quite relevant to the situation unfolding in the UK after the murder of Sarah Everard, a woman snatched from the streets of London and found dead a week later. #shewasonlywalkinghome was trending while I watched and I viewed the awful footage on Twitter of police, one of whose number is the suspect, attacking vigil attendees that night. It was shocking. And yet not. 

Moxie

Women fearing for our safety on the streets is nothing new. And sadly other cases of women disappearing and being found dead attracted next to no attention even recently, among them Blessing Olusegun.

But, it was still refreshing to watch a drama about high school students in which the main relationship is between female protagonists, in which a mother is able to pass on her love of Riot Grrrl to her daughter and in which difficult issues of race, class and sexual violence are raised, albeit briefly in the case of the two former. I do wish there had been a bit more diversity of desire as well. One kiss between teenaged girls at a gig was not quite the representation it could have been. Kudos to Amy Poehler for picking up a YA book to develop in this way. We await real action on male violence, as well. 

*force of character, determination, or nerve

Historical Drama Fact and Fiction

Does it matter of an historical drama is factually incorrect? I thought about this after a recent viewing of the Netflix drama The Dig. I enjoyed the film, was swept up in the emotion and mood of the piece, especially the misty views of the Suffolk coast. Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes turned in bravura performances as landowner Edith Pretty and excavator Basil Brown as they uncovered an historically significant archaelogical find. Afterward, curious about what I'd seen, I went online and did some digging of a different sort to find out more about these figures and the others depicted in the film.

It's no secret Edith Pretty was 21 years older than Mulligan at the time she is depicted in the film. Equally, supporting characters' ages have also been changed and this has prompted some Twitter rage. The Dig is an adaptation of a novel based on actual events, so there is some leeway for depictions. We can all speculate why the producers could not find a 56-year old actress to portray Pretty, while having no trouble finding a 50-something to portray Brown. Indeed. I suppose for people like me who had no knowledge of the Sutton Hoo find the film more than justified the factual errors by bringing to light the personages of Pretty and Brown for us to appreciate. After all, Brown was lost to history, as the British Museum which took over the treasure erased his name from the record. The Dig at least restores some credit to both of them. 

Sound on Sound: Imogen Heap

On a similar tip to my last post, here is a fascinating chat between two electronic musicians, podcaster Caro C and her guest Imogen Heap. It takes in such topics as rats in a barn and wearable tech. I remember seeing Heap do a live soundtrack to a silent film, and I was impressed at her energy, dashing to and fro between instruments. Now she seems to have settled on "gestural gloves", which I didn't even know was a thing. This is a total geek-out. Enjoy. 

Directors on Directors: Olivia Wilde & Emerald Fennell

While on the hunt for some cultural podcasts to explore, I stumbled on this conversation posted to Variety earlier this month, in which directors Emerald Fennell (A Promising Young Woman) and Olivia Wilde (Booksmart) praise each other's work and compare notes on directing. I found it so fascinating to hear their experiences of being in the director's chair and doing it their way. 

While my own directing has been limited to shorts and no-budget work, I had a spark of recognition in hearing them say how unhelpful the paradigm of the tortured tyrant as director is. Why not be more egalitarian? Listen to suggestions? Keep the actors in the loop of the shoot? It all makes a lot of sense. They also have their own quirks and interest in details which is what makes work personal. As Wilde says at the end, "Be weird, be bold, make it yours." 

BFI Flare launch

As with everything else screen-related over the last year, Flare's annual launch went online. So, no programmes or cake presentation, but the usual montage of clips from the films was screened. I was a bit late getting to the correct Facebook page, as it was not well sign-posted, but did see some familiar faces presenting the clips. The key points are that the festival will screen this year on the BFI Player and all the shorts will be free. 

I have had a nose through the online programme and am quite excited about the long awaited world premiere of Rebel Dykes, a post-punk documentary which has been offering WIP screenings for some years now at conferences. Other docs focus on Billy Tipton and Gloria Allen. Biopics on Tove Jansson and Rainer Werner Fassbinder are also in the mix. And the late Cloris Leachman stars in Jump, Darling, which sounds intriguing. 

Here is the festival trailer.

The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree online

 One of the many casualties of the COVID crisis was this exhibit, scheduled to open last year at Camden Arts Centre in London. However, the gallery grasped the opportunity to move the exhibit online and indeed reflect on how its themes resonate in this peculiar time we are living through. 

Indeed, why wouldn't you reflect on how nature forms patterns, how it perseveres, how the living world operates through an interaction of plants and animals? There is much to unpack in these concepts. This introductory video introduces many of the concepts and there are also playlists and podcasts on the exhibit website. 

Pauline Boty's Nightmare

 While I have been in lockdown I have kept myself busy taking online courses, the most recent of which included Pop Art and Modern Sculpture. It was in the former that I made the acquaintance of the incredible talent that was Pauline Boty. A new name to me, she blazed brilliantly and briefly in the 1960s, creating striking Pop Art paintings that satirised sexual mores of the time, while also acting and broadcasting. Sadly, she died at 28 in 1966.

Like so many women artists Boty's star ebbed after her death and her paintings languished in family barns for many years awaiting rediscovery by discerning critics. 

This video is an excerpt from a documentary by Ken Russell and features music by Delia Derbyshire. 

Flare online: Our Dance of Revolution

Phillip Pike's documentary on Toronto's black LGBTQ community feels like a throwback to an era when community, coalition and activism were everyday words in the vocabulary. That Black Lives Matter now thrives on these terms is an interesting note thrown up by the film which covers an enormous amount of ground during its 102 minutes.

Our Dance of Revolution

Pike focuses on a handful of key events and groups such as the foundation of a group house, the AIDS crisis and current conflicts. If some of these feel rushed, there is much to discuss. Interspersed throughout the archive footage, interviews and current-day protests are performances of poetry that give another facet to the unfolding story. The use of the arts in this documentary was something I appreciated: dancing, singing and performing are all important ways for a community to express itself. It reminded me very much of the community I came out in in San Francisco in the early 1990s. As one interviewee says, it's hard to be angry all the time.

A few things I found odd: the drag queen Michelle Ross is shown and lauded but never interviewed; singer Faith Nolan appears repeatedly in a group interview, but is never named or interviewed; an activist called Sherona Hall is mourned, but her death is not explained. Perhaps there is a longer version that clears up these points, but the film celebrates a community forge in struggle but moving forward into its power with passion and determination.

Flare online: A Dog Barking at the Moon

A Dog Barking at the Moon is a film about family drama and is also made by family in that it is written and directed by Zi Xiang and the cinematography is by her partner, Jose Val Bal. They also co-produced it. One would think that this would lend it a cohesive feel, but that is not the case. A young woman and her husband fly into China to stay with her parents before her baby is born. The mother is angry, as her husband wants a divorce. The daughter advises her to get the divorce or stop complaining. So, the stage is set for family drama, but the film is a frustrating watch. 

A Dog Barking at the Moon

For one, the cinematography is almost static. Entire scenes play out as wide shots that drag on and on with no camera movement and little action. The story moves back and forth in time with very little explanation and then suddenly scenes are dropped in that make no sense, the actors interacting with no props or costumes on a stage. I wish that lent it an air of intrigue, but I was just bored most of the time.

The actress playing the daughter barely shows a flicker of emotion, massively underplaying, while her mother lashes out in furious rages, chewing the scenery. The other characters barely register and it is confusing to keep track of the different family members, especially as there are so many flashbacks. I had an inkling that two characters shown as young women might develop into something interesting, but this did not seem to be happening. 

And then in the last 15 minutes, wow--suddenly there is drama, character, emotion and a painfully played out reaction shot. I can't say it makes up for the previous 90 minutes but at least there was something to watch. A dance number, flashes of colour and life. And then it ends, oddly. 

Flare online: Rettet das Feuer

Continuing with the oh-so-topical self-isolation viewing, I watched the doc Rettet das Feuer, directed by Jasco Viefhues. I was keen to see this story of an artist living with HIV in 1990s Berlin, although not familiar with him or his work. Sadly, by the end of the film, I still felt I knew very little about him. Jürgen Baldiga, we learn, was a photographer and artist whose words and images fill the screen throughout the film, his diary entries read out by the filmmaker. 

Rettet das Feuer

 But the film spends most of the time in an unnamed archive (I guessed the Schwules Museum) with unnamed people poring over his donated works. I tried to work out who was who but failed. First names are thrown around but it is very hard to assign a name to a face or understand their relationship to this man who seemed to be very important to them.

Nor is any context given for Baldiga's life--where did he come from? What was Berlin like at that time? What was the drag scene that he photographed like? What was the situation for people with HIV? All of this information is withheld from the viewer and so we are left with black and white photos and chaps sitting in white rooms. I was completely nonplussed. It feels like an extended home movie where you have to already know who everybody is. Very frustrating.

Flare online: Good Grief

So, to the first post of this year's Flare, cancelled to all in person, but happening in various forms online. I do not have access to the BFI player where many films are screening, but I do have the limited screeners available to press online, from which I shall be selecting.

The first feature viewed was My Fiona, an impressive debut from writer-director Kelly Walker. Tackling the thorny subject of grief and surviving, My Fiona picks a delicate path through denial, bad object choices, staying put and moving on with great élan. Jane has to pick up the pieces when her business partner Fiona takes her own life. When she takes on caring responsibilities for Fiona's son Bailey to relieve the burden on Fiona's widow Gemma, it leads to drama and a lot of unresolved feelings coming to the surface. Oh, my.

If it loses a bit in the last 15 minutes, that only shows how well the preceding 85 has been presented. I had a giant "Oh, No!" moment about half-way through, which I will decline to reveal. But it's a big 'un. The leads, Jeanette Maus and Corbin Reid, are outstanding and the boy is super cute, displaying his own anguish and anger at the departure of his mother in an understandable way. I quite liked how Walker dropped in bits of dry humour throughout, without it coming off as glib.

I have also viewed several shorts, the outstanding find of which is Fawzia Mirza's I Know Her, a hilariously relatable 3 minutes of pillow talk which features another big reveal which I must keep scrum about. Awkward does not cover it. Mirza was the lead and writer in Signature Move three years ago at Flare, but I have not seen any of her previous directorial work.

Do catch Five Films for Freedom before it ends on the 29th. My favourite is the short doc, When Pride Came to Town, which pits a small-town Norwegian LGBT community against Christian conservatives who don't want Pride to come to town. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the filmmakers interviewed the committed Christian who admitted she once liked women and even looked like a boy (!) but then realised what she really needed was Jesus. Awks.

Self-isolation

So, things have taken an odd turn, eh? Two weeks ago I was planning to attend Flare, visit Bristol next month, start a new job, etc. And now I find myself at home most of the time, quite busy but quite  bemused.

Never mind. The last few days have brought a host of social connections, from FaceTime chats about writing, to drag aerobics to an enjoyable cabaret session, the latter two courtesy of Facebook Live.

I intend to cover Flare entirely from online viewing as the festival has been, like so many other social events, cancelled. It won't be the same, of course, but the show must go on.

Keep safe, stay in if you can and keep doing art.

Poly Styrene Weekender

Coming up is the Poly Styrene Weekender, which seems to only be one day, 1 June, but it's packed full of activity.

Disappointingly, I cannot attend but am very excited to hear there are an exhibit, a biography and documentary in existence celebrating the human dynamo that was Poly Styrene. A punk legend, she wrote for and fronted X-ray Spex before going solo and then vanishing from the public eye for many years. I attempted to make contact with her when I arrived in the UK in 1995 but never did and she was taken far too soon, in 2011.

But let's celebrate her wonderful achievements in music. This is one of my favourite songs ever, an excoriating 3-minute examination of identity.

This is a very odd profile of her which appeared on the BBC in 1979, hinting at some existential melancholia.

And this is her last release. Enjoy.