Alice Fleerackers

“All I want to do now is run and be in love” is the first thing my movie date says after seeing Mischa Kamp’s Jongens (“Boys”) at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. She certainly has a point: no matter what your gender, age, or sexual orientation, this queer coming-of-age story will transport you back to being fifteen, in love for the first time, and hopelessly confused about it.

Jongens is the story of Steiger (Gijs Blom), a reserved teenager who falls for his teammate Marc (Ko Zandvliet) while training for the national relay racing championships. It quickly becomes clear that the attraction is mutual, and Marc and Steiger grow steadily closer. Not everything is rosy for the young lovers, however, their budding romance complicated by an unruly older brother, an unwanted girlfriend, and Steiger’s uncertainty about his sexual orientation. A couple of extremely ill-timed encounters between the two boys throw everything into question, the romantic tension hitting some all time highs.

Women are largely absent from the film, Steiger’s mother having died in a motorcycle accident a few years prior. Instead, Kamp focuses on a theme of male-to-male love that is rarely explored in cinema. Through his relationship with Marc, Steiger not only learns to understand love romantically, but also from the perspective of a friend, teammate, brother, and son. These platonic subplots add emotional complexity to the film, and are in some ways more moving than the main action.

Excellently cast and featuring stellar performances by Blom en Zandvliet alike, the film is sweet, lighthearted and engaging. With sun-drenched cinematography, Jongens promises to keep viewers “awing” and “oh no-ing” for the full 78 minutes of hormone-laden emotion.

If you haven’t had a chance to check-out the Queer Film Festival yet, tonight is your last chance! Head to the Vancouver Playhouse for the screening of Girl Trash: All Night Long at 7:00pm, then follow the lantern-lit procession to the Junction for the official Closing Gala party featuring performances by Isolde N Barron and Thanks Jem!

Imagine that every day of your life is a bad hair day. You’re a nine-year-old dreamer, living in the hostile city of Caracas with your recently widowed mother and baby brother. You’re poor, rejected, and decidedly “different” from the other kids. Add a possible identity crisis into the mix, and you’re beginning to understand what it means to be Junior, the star of Mariana Rondón’s award-winning Pelo Malo (“Bad Hair”), now playing at Vancouver’s Queer Film Festival.

The plot is simple: a new school year is around the corner and Junior must decide how he wants to take his class head shot. Will he don the socially respectable button-down and trousers, or the flashy, straight-haired singers’ getup he dearly longs for? Making things harder, Junior’s singer fantasy is complicated by his impossibly curly mop of “pelo malo” that won’t lie flat no matter what he does, his family’s inability to pay for the photo shoot, and most importantly, his mother’s insistence that Junior start acting more like one of the other boys.

Torn between winning his mother’s love and honouring his own sense of self, our young hero’s choice becomes the audience’s own. Forced to examine our own lives under the lens, we wonder what our head shots say about us. What costumes have we put on? What roles are we playing? And what have we given up to become who we are? Prompting questions of identity and gender, love and suffering, survival and responsibility, one little boy’s snapshot thus becomes a tool for seeing the bigger picture.

Missed the showing? Pelo Malo will be playing again at The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival on August 29 (7 pm) and September 7 (3 pm) at The Cinemateque.

Click here to check out the other films playing at this year’s Queer Film Festival.

Performing in tonight's QSong, the insatiable Leroy Wan (Love-bots not pictured). Photo by http://czarinnabravotabobo.com — Performing in tonight’s QSong, the insatiable Leroy Wan. Photo by http://czarinnabravotabobo.com

Haircuts, seeds, and electricity: three topics I hadn’t expected to cover during last night’s interview about Queer Songwriters of a New Generation (QSONG), the song writing workshop debuting at this year’s Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver. Sarah Wheeler, one of two artists leading the project, tells me I should have seen it coming. I’m interviewing with a group of aspiring song-writers, after all; a few rogue metaphors are only to be expected.

Over the past 16-weeks, Wheeler and her co-mentor Melissa Endean have been leading free weekly drop-in sessions where queer, trans, and allied youth learned to write, record, and perform music professionally. As part of the workshop, students worked intensively with top professionals in their industry to develop their technical skills, creativity, and artistic confidence. By building lasting relationships with established queer songwriters like Wheeler and Endean, QSONG offered students a non-prejudicial space to grow as artists. For queer youth, student Vi Levitt explains, this is hugely important. “That kind of space,” Levitt feels, “doesn’t really exist for queer artists outside of situations like this.” Student Jude Bartlett agrees. “It’s a very open, supportive community,” she says, “everybody here stands on a common ground.”

Wrapping up the workshop, students will be headlining at tonight’s QAF closing party, Loud and Queer. When I ask what to expect from the show, Wheeler, Levitt, and Bartlett are unanimous: “It’s going to be amazing,” says Wheeler. “But, that’s performing,” she explains, “what makes you bullied in life makes you awesome on stage.”

See QSong performances at Loud & Queer, The Queer Arts Festival Closing Gala

Date: Saturday August 9, 2014
Time: 7:30 pm – 11:00 pm
Venue: Yaletown Roundhouse
Cost: $5 – $10 suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds

Author Archives: Alice Fleerackers

Vancouver Queer Film Festival Review / Jongens

Vancouver Queer Film Festival Review / Bad Hair

QSong, the magic behind the Queer Arts Festival Closing Gala–TONIGHT!