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SAD Mag’s Nana Heed reviews Beira-Mar, Los Hongos and A Loucura Entre Nos, three stunning films from this year’s Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. Violence, humour, heartbreak, despair–this years festival lineup was not to be missed.

Beira-Mar (“Seashore”)

After debuting at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, directors Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon brought Beira-Mar (“Seashore”) to Vancouver screens for the 2015 Latin American Film Festival. Their first feature-length film, Beira-Mar, presents a sweet inspection of sexuality, youth, family, and liberation.

Following his grandfather’s passing, our young male protagonist, Martin, and his friend Tomaz venture to southern Brazil to collect a document from distant extended family. The trip prompts the two boys to explore their relationship, while also providing Martin an opportunity to heal old wounds with his estranged family. Finally, the protagonist learns to overcome his tumultuous relationship with the sea.

Unfortunately, the slow pace of the film prevented it from inspiring the audience completely. I found it hard to stay engaged, even when I could tell the scene was meant to be meaningful for Martin. One conversation with his grandmother, for instance, is exceptionally long and communicates very little–though this moment of reconnection is clearly an important one for their relationship.

Despite its shortcomings, the film has the right ingredients and intention to be an insightful foray into adolescence. The stripped down nature of the scenes enhances the remoteness and despair Martin feels during his trip. Meanwhile, the rough, bare bones cinematography uses the qualities of the landscape to enhance Martin’s feelings toward the less-than-promising meet-up with his family.

Los Hongos

Los Hongos is an engaging film about two young boys, Ras and Calvin, immersing themselves deeply into the subversive world of street art. The film is set in Cali, Colombia, and the colours of the city alone make the film vibrant to watch. The story follows both boys home to their respective neighbourhoods, and then brings them back together to unfold a shared passion for something forbidden by civic authority. By the film’s conclusion, audiences will have developed an affection for both protagonists, as well as for many of the supporting, equally likeable characters.

Throughout the film, Calvin cares for his grandmother, who is battling cancer. The old woman is stunning–she easily wins the audience’s love–and the relationship between wizened elder and caring grandson is inspiring.

Ras’ mother, meanwhile, worries about her son and tries unrelentingly to bring him into the fold of her church. She disapproves of his street art, something that is hard for Ras to deal with. But as the film progresses, we learn that Ras’ mother is as lost as her son and in need of a beacon of hope. For her, this is provided by the church, while for Ras, it’s painting that provides him with this gateway to feeling alive–an escape from life’s sinister moments.

There is a sense of urgency to the film that concentrates itself in certain scenes. At one point, police crack down on a painting session and become violent with the artists; at another, graphic footage from the Arab Spring protests inspire Ras and Calvin’s artwork. The two boys are later arrested while out painting. These moments of serious tension remind the audience of a collective struggle to survive and overcome oppressive systems; these scenes bring Los Hongos close to home.

A Loucura Entre Nós (“The Madness Among Us”)

The documentary by Fernanda Vareille takes place in Bahia, Brazil within a psychiatric hospital. Criamundo is the name of an NGO run inside the hospital that works to reintegrate previously committed patients back into society. We listen to various patients, with a focus on two women, and get a sense from them what life is like within the walls of the psychiatric wards, what it’s like working within the program, and what their lives entail beyond the walls of the hospital.

Vareille’s depiction of her interview subjects is sensitive to avoid exploiting a vulnerable minority. Elisangela is one of the two main interviewees with a powerful voice, a loving relationship to her daughter, and a strong desire to work hard and preserve her dignity in life. With Elisangela, we walk through the psych ward on a ‘normal day’ and see where she sleeps, who else shares the space, and other things that happen while Vareille’s camera is rolling. Seeing a combination of prepared interviews with various people who access Criamundo as well as what was caught on camera after Vareille seemed to have left it rolling in front of a gate, or walked through the halls holding it, builds a sense of trust towards her explorations of ‘normalcy’ and the struggle to be alive in each of us.

The film rolls along in such a way that you can be moved by each moment–there is a spectrum of humour, heartbreak, and critical commentary. Not once is the film overly fixated on a person’s mental illness as the main point of inspection. We become more invested in where the different interviewees wish to take us–be it the struggle to find work, or the internal struggle to identify as a person with a mental illness among other things. I was so moved by watching this documentary and would highly recommend trying to track it down!
For more information about the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, visit the festival website.

If you’d asked me last week whether I would like to spend my Friday night in a dark theatre watching homemade pornography with a bunch of strangers, my answer would have been a simple, resounding, “Never.”

But that was before I spoke to sex columnist Dan Savage about HUMP! Dirty Film Festival, an amateur porn festival that has been bringing surprise, love and laughter to audiences since 2005. Curated by Savage himself, HUMP! encourages everyday citizens to create their own homemade five-minute dirty videos for the chance to “become temporary, weekend porn stars” and win cash prizes. This year, Savage is taking the festival on a tour of the Pacific Northwest with 18 of the hottest HUMP! films in action. As always, the lineup for this year is diverse in style, content, and tone, and showcases a variety of sexual orientations, genders, and kinks. Highlights include Beethoven’s Stiff (2013), described on the HUMP! website as “precisely what would happen if your genitals dedicated themselves to classical music,” and Porn All The Time (2013), a rap video about excessive porn intake.

Needless to say, HUMP! got me curious. To find out more about the festival, I interviewed Savage for the scoop on the good, the bad, and the dirty of amateur pornography.

SAD Mag: Why do you think that people make amateur porn?

Dan Savage: People make a porn because they want to show off, they want to share their particular things, because whatever it is that they’re interested in–whatever it is [that] turns their crank–may be underrepresented, or not represented, in commercial porn or in mainstream porn.

The porn we get at HUMP! isn’t just exhibitionist, and it isn’t just from people with a social justice point agenda. We tell people that we’re going to do our best to make sure that they’re pornstars for this weekend in this movie theatre, not pornstars for eternity on the internet. So we get a lot of films from people who wouldn’t do this if there was an online component. A lot of it is really interesting, crazy, fun films [are] being made by people who might not make porn otherwise, but want to make a really good, funny film with a nod towards porn or erotica. What you’re seeing at HUMP! is really works of art that allow for fun sex, that allow for the representation of things, acts, activities, kinks that people wouldn’t necessarily think of as erotica.

SM: But why do people want to watch amateur porn? Why come to HUMP!?

The audiences at HUMP! don’t come to sit in the theatres and masturbate; there aren’t a lot of coats in laps rising and falling. People come to watch because it’s entertaining and interesting…they want to have a laugh, they want to be shocked. They come away from HUMP! with hopefully a little bit more than that.

We watch the audience to make sure that no one’s taking photographs or videos during the screening. This is what I see: for the first eight films, the gay guys are freaking out and thrown back in their chairs because they’re watching cunnilingus; the straight guys are like, “Wow!” because they’re watching hardcore gay buttfucking; vanilla people are like, “Holy crap!” because they’re watching hardcore kink porn. [Normally] when you sit and watch porn, you click on only what you want to see; you curate it for yourself. At HUMP!, we’re clicking for you; you don’t get to click.

And then this amazing thing happens: about a third of the way through the festival, everyone starts cheering for each film. People aren’t flinching or looking away; everyone’s loving each film. For the first handful of films, all anybody can see is what’s not their thing; all anybody can see are the differences. About a third of the way, or halfway, through, everyone’s seeing what’s the same. Lust is the same, passion is the same, humour is the same, attraction is the same. Those experiences are the same. All of [what’s] underneath the incidentals–[underneath] the kinks, the genders, the orientations–all of that is exactly the same, and all of that is more important.

About halfway through, you look out and you see that same gay dude who was very elaborately freaking out the first time he saw the cunnilingus. [By] the third time he watches it, he’s…cheering and laughing and clapping with everyone else. It’s beautiful.

SM: In an interview with Vice, you refer to the HUMP! experience as “the old-fashioned way” of watching porn. What does enjoying porn publicly bring to audiences? What sets it apart from more “conventional” enjoyment?

DS: It used to be that if you wanted to see a dirty movie, you had to go to a dirty movie theatre. You were kind of outing yourself as someone with an interest in erotica or dirty movies by walking through the door. You had to own it.

Then came VHS tapes and town got its little video rental store and a little corner of it would be erotica and dirty movies. Even then you had to out yourself by walking into the dirty movie section and choosing one and taking it to the counter. People tended to be mortified.

And then along came the internet–now we can do it in secret. Porn [became] something that we do all by ourselves, all alone. We lost that communal aspect of it, we lost that having to own it, having to walk through the door and say “This is something I’m interested in. This is what I want to see.”

HUMP! brings that back. You walk through the door and you’re saying, “I have a healthy and sex-positive attitude. I want to watch these dirty movies, and I’m not embarrassed or ashamed to be seen walking into this theatre to watch these dirty movies. We’re all in this together.”

SM: To my knowledge, at least, there is still no consensus within the scientific community whether porn and sexual violence are related. Can you speak to this controversy? How does HUMP! fit in here?

DS: There’s actually a really terrific article in Scientific American called “The Sunny Side of Smut” that I think demonstrates–and there’s a growing body of evidence that demonstrates–that access to access to hardcore pornography does not fuel sexual violence. In fact, I think the opposite. When you look at the stats for sex crimes and sexual violence, those rates have been falling for decades, just as rates for other violent crimes have been falling for decades. At the same time that those rates have been falling, access to hardcore pornography have skyrocketed. If viewing hardcore pornography and violent images lead people to commit sex crimes, then we would expect the opposite to have happened.

You can’t do a controlled experiment with this, you can’t lock people up all their lives and expose them to pornography and others not. But the evidence that we do have seems to indicate that what I remember people saying when I was in college in the ‘80’s–that porn is the theory, rape is the practice–just isn’t so.

I think the porn at HUMP! is often the antidote to porn that is negative, that makes people feel bad about their sexualities. The people who make films for HUMP! are making them for fun, they’re not being economically coerced, they’re not being forced. The films at HUMP! are people getting together with their friends and lovers [to] make a porno that they’re proud of and want to share with people. Not to feed their children, not to pay the rent, but to create joy.

One of the raps against porn is that it’s dehumanizing. Once a woman came up to me after watching a HUMP! screening and told me that she doesn’t really like porn. [Then she] said, “That was humanizing porn that I watched tonight, very deeply humanizing.”

SM: Do you have any advice for first time HUMP!-ers? How can they make the experience less awkward and more fun?

DS: Have a little pot, have a drink (but don’t get drunk, though!). We’ve had shows during the festival where people will go out and get drunk and then come to the show, and I don’t necessarily recommend that. We’ve had people throw up.

Just come with friends and don’t be afraid. In all those almost dozen years we’ve been doing HUMP!, we’ve only once had to ask someone to stop giving a blowjob during the screening; the genitals are going to be up on the screen.

One of the rules at HUMP! is no assholes in the seats, assholes on the screen. We have a very strictly enforced policy of no catcalling, no jokes made at the expense of the bodies, the genders, the sexual orientations, the gender expression, the kinks, the colours, the shapes, the size of the body modifications, the anythings of the people up on the screen. People will gasp and clap and react, but [there will be] no assholes in the theatre, [only] assholes on the screen.

HUMP! comes to Vancouver’s Rio Theatre on September 18 & 19. Tickets and showtimes available here.

In 2000, Bloomsbury Publishing released Sarah. The author of the novel was JT LeRoy, a teenager from West Virginia who had prostituted himself at truckstops, lived on the streets while addicted to drugs, and eventually became HIV positive. LeRoy credits his therapist, who urged him to write about his experiences, for the novel’s genesis. Two more books followed (Harold’s End, a novel, and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a short story collection), as did a slew of A-list celebrity encounters, photo shoots, magazine articles, and two feature film adaptations. The author himself cut an enigmatic figure; too shy to read his work at public appearances, his famous friends were obliged to read on his behalf. When LeRoy was seen, he was typically wearing a blonde wig and sunglasses, and rarely appeared without an entourage comprised of former outreach worker Emily (AKA “Speedie”) and her partner Astor. Eventually, LeRoy began identifying as transgender. In 2006, Stephen Beachy wrote an article in New York Magazine questioning LeRoy’s identity, and shortly after, a woman named Laura Albert revealed that she was the true author of LeRoy’s fiction. She gave phone interviews as “LeRoy” and orchestrated his public appearances. Too old to pass for a teenager herself, Albert had a younger woman named Savannah Knoop appear as LeRoy in public. Albert took on the persona of Speedie in order to accompany Knoop.

Filmmaker Marjorie Sturm documents LeRoy’s bizarre story from emergence to death in her new film The Cult of JT LeRoy. After watching it at this year’s Queer Film Festival in Vancouver, SAD Mag had a host of burning questions Sturm.

SAD Mag: Can you describe the process you went through to make The Cult of JT LeRoy? I’ve read that it was a long journey from initial concept to finished piece.

Marjorie Sturm: Yes, indeed, it has been a long (and strange) journey. I worked on the film for five years over a twelve year span. I began in 2002 with the understanding that “JT LeRoy” was a real person when in fact I was filming Savannah Knoop pretending to be a fictional character. At that time, I worked on the film for close to a year. I re-opened the film in 2006 when it became the clear that “JT LeRoy” was a massive, global, literary/entertainment deception. I gathered up the majority of the interviews that appear in the film at that time. Post-production is where the film took a nose dive; I waited many years to find funding that would allow me to control the direction of the film.

If I had been willing to allow others (men) to ‘co-direct’ my film or ‘merge’ it, I would have been able to get my film done faster. Apparently, this is not a unique situation in the documentary industry. Filmmakers who aren’t established ‘brands’ and have limited access to resources, who have stumbled on to some form of “documentary gold,” (as my early JT footage could be construed) are pushed and cajoled with the sword of Damocles. I can see why people would surrender as it is a terribly frustrating situation to find oneself. However, I thought it would be short-sighted to go forward making a film that didn’t represent the topic in a way that I would have control over. Eventually, I got extremely lucky and found funding and a team of supportive people that helped me create the film.

I imagine that there are many great films sitting on hard drives waiting for a break.

SM: I also understand that you have a background in mental health. Did you recognize Laura Albert as someone suffering from mental illness? Does that in any way mitigate her responsibility for her actions?

MS: Mitigating responsibility because of mental illness is an extremely tricky situation. First off, there are all types of mental illness, and like many things, there is a continuum. One could argue every pedophile, rapist, con-artist, murderer on some level has mental illness.

JT LeRoy’s therapist, who appears in the film via a trial deposition, agrees that JT/Laura Albert is not psychotic and out of touch with reality. If someone is psychotic (schizophrenic, severely bi-polar), it would be easy to understand why that could mitigate their responsibility. Laura did her damndest to present a case for her mental illness during the trial over a period of eight days, and the jury quickly concluded that they weren’t buying it. However, no one is arguing that Laura is not a disturbed individual. And if people choose to have compassion for her, that is their choice, but it doesn’t mitigate responsibility for her actions. I don’t believe our compassion for a victimizer should ever outweigh the compassion we have for those they victimized, as it fuels them and allows them to abuse again.

SM: As a filmmaker, you don’t insert your thoughts and opinions into the film much. Can you talk about that decision? Were you surprised when JT’s true identity was finally revealed or did you have suspicions earlier?

MS: How much to insert myself into the film was a question that I contemplated quite a bit from the beginning. I knew I needed to be a voice in the film in order to give my early footage some context. As well, there were gaps to fill in the narrative. At first, I used all text but it was just too much reading and was seriously nixed by almost everyone who saw the earlier cuts. With a lot of discussion and help from the editor Josh Melrod, I feel like I struck a balance that I am pleased with. I really didn’t want this documentary to be an overly personal one. I think there is a time and place for personal documentaries and I love many of them, but this particular topic was much larger than myself. I really wanted to create an active viewing experience that left the viewer thinking and analyzing. Even reading the views that I am expressing here in this interview could potentially distract from the experience of the film.

There was always something weird and cagey about the JT gang, but I absolutely believed that JT was a real person. Even after I read Stephen Beachy’s article in New York Magazine, I thought JT existed and Laura just ghost wrote the books for him because he was uneducated. It wasn’t until I had some back and forth discussion with Beachy, where he made so many lucid points, that I really came around to understanding that the whole thing was an utter fabrication.

SM: In an interview for The Paris Review in 2006, Laura Albert tells a story from when she was 16 and called a child therapist from a Village Voice ad. She recounts pretending to be a 14-year-old boy. When she later revealed the truth, the therapist told her never to call him again. Albert observes: “He responded angrily instead of asking himself, ‘Why did this kid invent this story? What would make a child do such a thing?'” Do you view this as deflection on Albert’s part or is it a valid question that you see your film responding to?

MS: I guess I view it as a bit of both. It is indeed a deflection on Albert’s part, a way of not taking responsibility for her actions and blaming others. The glaring problem with the deflection is that Laura Albert is a full grown woman and not a child. We judge a child’s behavior at a different standard than an adult’s, or at least we should. Laura Albert pretends to, or doesn’t seem to, grasp that.

And yes, in a sense, my film is responding to the question, “What would make a child (a person) do such a thing?”

SM: Posing as male in order to feel safe and be heard emerges as a strong theme throughout the version of Albert’s life presented in that interview. To what extent do you think a sexist society contributed to Albert’s decision to create a male persona?

MS: On one hand, I don’t think there is a woman alive who doesn’t feel, consciously or unconsciously, the implications of living in a highly sexist society.

When I was six and seven years old, I had a repetitive dreams that I was a boy in a wheelchair. Night after night after night. I have a brother who is two years older, and I saw the permission that his gender gave him. I resented it, and felt handicapped. Or at least that’s my armchair dream analysis.

My point is, using sexism and the need for a male persona is a compelling tale, one that is hard to refute, and many women can relate to.

But, JT wasn’t just a male. He was transgender, before people even knew what that term meant. Does a heterosexual woman really need to pose as someone transgender in order to feel “safe and heard in this world”?

What she did, and in a sense it was quite savvy, was a create a much more sensational persona than her own identity provided. Hustler on the run, being pimped out by his mother, strung out on heroin, yadda yadda. Or middle-aged woman from middle-class background with an eating disorder.

SM: One issue the film explores is that of who has the right to represent pain. In some ways the recent Rachel Dolezal story touches on this. In both instances the cultural outrage seems to stem from individuals laying claim to pain that doesn’t belong to them. I felt your film made clear that Albert crossed a line with the fabrication of JT, but how clear is that line? How mindful of this sort of appropriation do writers need to be when writing fiction?

MS: My personal opinion is that writers don’t need to be mindful of this sort of appropriation when writing fiction at all. Not one iota. Fiction is a work of the imagination. I think we can write from the point of view of anything–a duck, a chair, the sky, other races, genders, classes, and so on.

The line is crossed and problems begin when we market our fiction as non-fiction in order to manipulate and gain sympathy. When we start picking up the phone and pretending to be that fictional character in real time. When our marginalized ‘fictional’ character asks for resources of time, money, and gifts.

Laura Albert did countless interviews in the voice of a little boy and the work was marketed as “autobiographical fiction” with a bio to match. She had the cover-my-ass forethought to put only the word ‘fiction’ on the back cover, but everyone thought Savannah Knoop was indeed JT LeRoy, who grew up at trucks stops in West Virginia and was pimped out by his mother. Really, the level of disingenuousness, gall, and relentless spinning is appalling when not laughable.

As far as Dolezal, I was really struck by the fact that not only did she pretend to be black when she was in fact white, but she actively prevented other white academics from speaking about race on the campus where she taught. Um . . . no.

SM: I thought your film did a great job of showing the emotional impact the deception had on those in contact with LeRoy, while also examining to to what degree those individuals might have been complicit. Do you have any sense of Laura Albert or Savannah having any empathy for those they deceived?

MS: As far as Laura is concerned, I have seen absolutely no empathy towards those she has deceived. In fact, the subtext is more, “How could they all be so stupid and fall for it? Savannah looks like a girl.

Till now, she seems committed to “not apologizing” as if that would be somehow backing down. It’s actually kind of fascinating in a sense, and on a meta-level might lead one to having compassion for her because what a fractured and sad way to live.

Of course, at any given moment, she may change course and decide to mimic empathy/compassion for others, but to the best of my knowledge, I have only seen those emotions reserved for herself.

As for Savannah, my sense is that she is conflicted emotionally about the whole thing. When the deception was first revealed, she gleefully traipsed around with Laura to parties and receptions. The news picked up on “The Hoaxers are Out on the Town” and it seemed like public opinion was working in their favor. People enjoy[ed] seeing mud thrown in the faces of The Establishment. Celebrities. The New York Times, HBO, Cannes, Hollywood. Without the personal, it is kind of a hoot.

Laura and Savannah fell out when Savannah wrote her book about her experience around “being JT.” I think she got a good taste of Laura’s wrath at that point, and perhaps that increased Savannah’s empathy for those they deceived? But I have read her book, and it really was about her experience and I don’t recall empathy for others or much [of a] sense of shame or guilt. It was about “her growth” as JT. Laura uses that one, too. We’re supposed to be elated about their psychological, individualistic “growth.” This type of consciousness is extremely, profoundly American.

Found out more about The Cult of JT Leroy at the film’s official website. Stay tuned for next year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

I walked into Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party at last week’s Vancouver Queer Film Fest jaded by a history of over-indulging in cheesy, vaguely LGBT films. At best, I hoped the coming-of-age film about a 17-year-old white boy and his Christian family might be cute, maybe even entertaining. But instead I found Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party to be sweetly orchestrated, intricate and smart–a meaningful commentary on what it’s like to go up against an entire community.

The film centres around young, fresh-faced Henry Gamble on his 17th birthday. Our protagonist is a blossoming gay individual and is emotionally wrought over his equally fresh-faced, straight best friend. Over the course of one day and one big pool party, Henry ushers in a new year of living and, ultimately, learns how to be himself. The film alternates between adorably funny moments and disturbing ones. Audiences will remain engaged by what makes each character tick through each scene.

Cone takes the audience to some pretty dark places, examining the heavier sides to growing up gay (or even just different). This is especially true for one of Henry’s guests, Logan, whose troubles are concentrated by a lack of real understanding from his church community. Everyone tiptoes around him because of an incident that happened at church camp and now, when he is most in need of true connection and support, he is left to fend for himself.

Another strength of Henry Gamble lies in its ability to poke fun at the fact that it’s so clearly situated within the upper class, white, Christian perspective. When wine is smuggled into the party by a longstanding church member and referred to as ‘medicine,’ I couldn’t help but smile. In another scene, the pastor (Henry’s dad) and a fellow church member fumble frantically for the remote control when a movie suddenly gets “inappropriate.” They heave a sigh of relief after finally switching the channel to good old football, and I laughed out loud with the rest of the audience.

Both focussed and honest, Henry Gamble is the kind of movie about young people growing up I wish I’d had as a young person growing up. Even watching now, in my mid-twenties, I felt I could take a lesson from the struggles of some of Henry’s guests, slightly older but equally well-portrayed as the younger ones.

Find out more about VQFF here.

I leave the preview screening of I Am Chris Farley feeling strangely affected. I realize that I hadn’t considered how much of my adolescent psyche was shaped by the characters Chris Farley played on SNL and in the SNL franchise films of the mid-90’s. I didn’t realize that I am now just a year older than Farley was in 1997, when he died of an overdose of cocaine and morphine. Or that some of his most iconic characters seeped into my sense of what it means to be fat and funny (terms I occasionally self-identify by).

I was about 9 or 10 years old when I started staying up late at night to watch Saturday Night Live. I immediately understood the magic of the show and started to emulate the performances. I was too young to realize how much of a master Farley was, but I very much remember that Christina Applegate sketch where Farley’s famous Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker, was unleashed into the world.

There’s an uncanny overlap between this documentary and the character Matt Foley, whose motivating shtick was to caution teenagers against making the choices he’s made, as evidenced by the fact that he now lives “in a van down by the river.” In a way I’m not sure was intended, this documentary acts as a cautionary tale against the toxic nexus of fast fame, low self esteem, substance use and abuse, and, well, being fat. Except instead of ending up in a van by the river, Farley ended up in a cemetery in Wisconsin at the age of 33.

The doc flirts a little more than I had anticipated, but not enough to really satisfy me, with the connection between Farley’s weight-related self esteem issues and his comedy. A set piece in the film focuses on Farley’s breakout SNL sketch, a Chippendales audition, in which he takes his shirt off and dances next to the chiseled Patrick Swayze. His reluctance privately to play the “fat fool”, but ultimately unbridled commitment to the choice on stage, are both acknowledged by the film, but I’m left wishing someone would have spoken to the ways in which Farley was pigeon-holed on SNL. The film acknowledges how boundary-breaking that performance was in some ways, but I wonder if the magic lies more in the audacity and totality of his commitment rather than the cultural norm which underwrites that joke, that fat can never equals erotic.

I am Chris Farley, a project executive produced and heavily featuring Farley’s brother Kevin, does a coherent and at times quite cinematic job celebrating the singular comedic force of nature that Farley was, while also paying more than lip service to his more private struggles. Don’t expect anything too gritty or unflattering here—this is a loving tribute made to celebrate his life.

Those unfamiliar with Farley would do well to see it and discover his singularity. Those familiar will likely enjoy the reminder of how brightly he shone. I leave the film feeling vaguely implicated, somehow, in a culture that can’t quite decide how to embrace folks who are funny and fat.

I Am Chris Farley plays at the Rio Theatre from August 25, 28, and 29. Tickets and showtimes available here.

It all begins with a rainy car ride: a hauntingly beautiful scene framed from the backseat of a van; and after laughs, tears, and a standing ovation, it all ends with that same foggy drive. However, nothing else remains the same.

A Girl at My Door is South Korean filmmaker/screenwriter July Jung’s portrayal of a young female police officer and her new job in rural Korea. The film was borrowed for this year’s Queer Film Fest, but has the energy, talent, and aesthetic to reach any audience spanning from VIFF to the NY box office. To prove this, it’s already premiered at Cannes, and has been nominated for multiple screen awards. It is also worth mentioning that the film is complemented by the music of Jang Young-Gyu, a regular contributor to the musical landscape or Korean film.

During the film, a relationship is formed between a police officer (Bae Doona: Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending), and an abused girl (Kim Sae-Ron: Blue Dragon Film Award for Best New Actress). Jung creates characters, and lays out situations that are both profound like a drama, and elastic like any classic foreign animation film. Kim Sae-Ron’s performance is what really hits home in this film, as her character deals with some very raw, honest, and almost cringe-inducing scenes that offer a window into a broken world. Bae Doona’s character has her own struggles, dealing with a budding alcohol addiction, heart break, and homophobia – making her an easy protagonist to root for.

Although this is a two hour run-time film, it feels as if it’s a four hour movie. Some easy trimming would have made this film a little more captivating than it already is. Also, more time could’ve been spent on secondary characters to further enhance the storyline of the lead ones. As human as July makes these characters, they still seem a little stiff at times in the film. Nonetheless, July Jung’s feature film effort is nothing short of beautiful. Thought provoking, unhesitant, and human–A Girl at My Door is a masterpiece that will stir up your soul with both visuals and content.

Liz in September (Liz en Septiembre) is the story of life, illness, the fluidity of sexuality and the complexity of female relationships.

Eva and her husband are still trying to cope with the loss of their young son when they go on a trip. Eva leaves a day earlier but her car soon breaks down and she is sent to the one hotel in town that has room: Margot’s, a seaside paradise where the women who live there drink lots of wine, go swimming, and have the most Bechdel-worthy conversations of all time (where do I sign up, amirite?). Eva soon discovers that what she at first thought was a hotel is actually a haven of lesbians. Liz (Patricia Velasquez of The L Word), the commitment-phobic player of the group, gets a bet going that she can sleep with the new, straight girl within three days. But Liz, a stoic and tough gal, is also hiding a secret from the group: she has cancer and she is deteriorating.

The plot of Liz in September is predictable, with few original twists or surprising character arcs. Most of the characters don’t get explored very deeply, and few of the women’s relationships are really portrayed in depth. In fact, the one sex scene of the film is between Eva and her husband, which is an interesting choice for a movie about lesbians, especially considering there are only two male characters (both supporting).

Despite this, the movie does deal with a number of themes that aren’t usually seen in mainstream Hollywood films–or at least in a way in which they are not normally portrayed– which is always refreshing. It explores life and death, relationships, friendships, love– all with a full female cast.

All in all, Liz in September has a lot of topics it touched upon that could have been explored further. However, it has its moments, and manages to successfully maneuver the sensitivity of humour in dark places, which is not an easy feat. This, along with the breath-taking scenery, make the film worth checking out.

This is Gay Propaganda: LGBT Rights & the War in the Ukraine follows several Ukrainian LGBT activists in the aftermaths of Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, as they fight to survive in the face of gay propaganda laws in some parts of Ukraine. The laws, like those in Russia, label any sort of positive communication about LGBT rights and issues as “gay propaganda.” Spreading or engaging in “gay propaganda” is punishable by jail time.

The film ties together multiple themes. There is Toronto-based director Marusya Bociurkiw’s personal story, of her Ukrainian background and her identity as a lesbian. “Sometimes I felt like the only Ukrainian lesbian in the world,” she says in the film. She looks at how so many of us have our identities fragmented by circumstance.
The film focuses on the fight for LGBT rights but also heavily focuses on the intersection with the feminist movement in the Ukraine and on the violence that more masculine-presenting women experience at higher rates. After the movie, the director Skyped in from Poland for a Q&A. An audience member asked her why she focused on so many female LGBT activists, to which she chuckled and responded: “that’s sort of a hallmark of my work.”
There is the backdrop of a country at war. Ukraine in particular is a country very recently torn apart by revolution and the tug-of-war between the Western influences and the Russian ones and, as such, there are stark differences from place to place in the country, something that the film explains with such clarity.
There are the stories of the LGBT activists she interviewed: some are running away from families trying to kill them, some had to hide their whole lives and continue to do so, some got death threats from strangers, many were beaten and abused.
And then there are the scenes of hope: of a country that has organized and revolted, a people that are clearly capable of powerful change, of activist organizing of feminist film festivals and LGBT safe houses.
To watch this mere weeks after Vancouver’s city wide pride week, our richly sponsored parade with politicians, police, banks and thousands of people in attendance, is startling. Canada is not perfect. Not by a long shot. Discrimination based on gender identity is not protected by the Charter; queer POC and trans* communities are often left behind; and LGBT youth are still experiencing higher rates of bullying, substance abuse and homelessness, to name just a few issues. But watching This is Gay Propaganda is a chilling reminder of the kinds of state-sanctioned violence that activists around the world are up against. To watch it is humbling.

An Argentinian/Chilean production by director Mauricio López Fernández, La Visita centres around a young trans woman, Elena, who returns home to attend her father’s wake. The entire film takes place on the property of a doctor, home to his wife, their kids, an eccentric mother-in-law condemned to the upstairs, and a full staff, one of whom is Elena’s mother Coya.

Elena, played by incredible trans actress Daniela Vega, understands that talking matter-of-factly with the rest of the household will not be enough to resolve the ‘uncomfortable situation’ caused by her reappearance as a woman. Interestingly, while Elena’s struggle to find acceptance as a trans woman is the centre of the action, each character appeals the audience with their own ordeal.

Coya, for instance, is a deliciously blended character; it’s near impossible to shun her for shunning her trans daughter. As a servant to the doctor and his family, Coya struggles with class throughout the film while also coping with the loss of Elena’s father. More than missing her late husband, though, she is stricken by the loss of a strong male presence in her life. It’s endlessly entertaining to watch her as she attempts to satisfy her lust for young meat–a feat that, at her age, requires a lot of creativity.

Teresa, the doctor’s wife, is also struggling. She is left emotionally vulnerable by a husband who doesn’t come home nights. Though she is on the verge of erupting, Teresa continues to pretend that she is running the show. No one in La Visita is able to talk about what is going on with them, personally. Instead, Fernández uses facial tics to powerfully communicate characters’ true feelings.

The film wraps up with a sensuality expressed by Vega’s character in a few isolated moments, at night, or alone in front of her bedroom mirror. Viewers will fall for her almost immediately and stay on her side throughout, even while sympathizing with almost every character in the film. Because there is little dialogue and the action is confined to the house and surroundings, La Visita has a slow, dreamlike quality. Viewers will find themselves wondering about each character as the story unfolds, in this intense and intimite venture.

La Visita played at this year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival, which runs until Aug 23. For festival showtimes and information, visit the VQFF website.

The idea for Kiss & Tell (2015) hit filmmaker Jackie Hoffart like a whack over the head–an emotional, repeated, and unavoidable whack.

Hoffart had been going through a tough breakup at the time of the film’s inception. “There was a place where me and that person had a beautiful moment, directly at the exit of my garage,” she told SAD Mag over coffee last week.“Every time I left my house I would be whacked over the head with this memory. The memory was actually beautiful, but was in such contrast to how I was feeling–I’d have to close my eyes sometimes when I was pulling into my alley.”

What might have led to a dented bumper instead inspired Hoffart to create what she calls her first “somewhat professional” film, landing her a slot in the Vancouver Queer Film Festival’s short film showcase The Coast is Queer. Though VQFF is Hoffart’s official premiere as a filmmaker, she is a practiced storyteller. In the past, she worked as SAD Mag’s editor-in-chief and now produces, edits and co-hosts its official podcast, SADCAST. “Storytelling,” she explains, “is a kind of impulse–one that can be manifested in several modes.”

At just five minutes in length, Kiss & Tell is a compact but powerful expression of that impulse. Pairing striking shots of Vancouver street corners with poetic voice over, Hoffart crafts her own ode to the feeling she discovered in her parking garage, that feeling of “walk[ing] past a memory”. She revisits the locations of eight intimate moments, each of which she shared with a different someone. The result is a kind of cinematographic map of the city that feels both highly personal and surprisingly universal; it places viewers as witnesses–and by definition, outsiders–to Hoffart’s memories, but simultaneously invites them to revisit their own.

“What I tried to do was really whittle down what was important for me about memories that I’d had in certain, specific spaces and accept them as they were,” she says. But rather than reenacting the eight moments exactly as they occurred, Hoffart wanted to capture each intersection as it was at the time of the filming. “Those places aren’t anything like they were at the time, but those memories remain intact. You encounter them whether it’s sunny or rainy or the middle of the night–you just hit them.”

To capture the timeless nature of those places, Hoffart filmed most locations on at least two different occasions, in two different lights. Through the collaboration of her director of photography, Jon Thomas, she incorporated different frame rates at different times. “[We wanted to create] an effect of things slowing down and speeding up,” she explains. Like memories themsel, each scene is “out of place and out of time, but then also anchored to that specific place and that specific time.” Kiss & Tell stays as true to those locations as possible.

The true power of Kiss & Tell lies not in what Hoffart captures on screen, but in what it evokes off screen. Each moment she shares suggests a backstory that the audience will never hear; each memory hints at future ones that the viewer will never see. Like a first kiss, Kiss & Tell leaves you moved, curious, and hungry for more.

Kiss & Tell is not yet available for public viewing, but you can follow Jackie Hoffart on Twitter or tune in to SADCAST, now (at least) monthly at sadcast.ca, for updates on when and where it’s playing next.

The Vancouver Queer Film Fest runs until August 23. Visit the festival website for tickets and showtimes.

The Sad Mag Archives

VLAFF // Biera-Mar, Los Hongos, and A Loucura Entre Nós

Interview // Dan Savage’s Amateur Dirty Movie Festival

Q & A // Marjorie Sturm

VQFF // Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party

Review // I Am Chris Farley

VQFF // A Girl at My Door

VQFF // Liz in September (Liz en Septiembre)

VQFF // This is Gay Propaganda: LGBT Rights & the War in the Ukraine

VQFF Review // La Visita

Interview // Jackie Hoffart on Kiss & Tell