Strong films, rich variety mark Outflix Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
The clean, affluent suburbs of progressive Sweden and the "Dirty South" of impoverished, suspicious rural Alabama: Both settings provide challenges for the heroes of movies featured in this year's 12th Outflix International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which begins tonight and continues through Thursday at Malco's Ridgeway Four.
Several years ago, when films in the fledgling Outflix festival were screened at the University of Memphis and in the basement theater at First Congregational Church, organizers felt lucky to attract 300 to 400 people.
Carrie Preston portrays the mother of a Catholic school boy, Lurie Poston, who wants to be a cheerleader in "Ready? OK!"
"Patrik 1.5" is about a married male couple in Sweden who want to adopt an infant but are sent a homophobic 15-year-old.
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But if attendance figures from the past two years hold up, Outflix -- which moved to the Ridgeway in 2008, after the Peabody Place multiplex shut down -- should attract about 1,700 moviegoers, said festival co-chairman Mickey Maxwell.
The event is not just a fundraiser for the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center but the center's most recognized program, Maxwell said. Its scope may be narrower than that of the city's two main film festivals, but its mix of foreign-language and quality independent films, thought-provoking documentaries and crowd-pleasing romantic comedies otherwise complements the lineups found at the Indie Memphis and On Location fests.
"It's become a brand name," said Maxwell, an International Paper business analyst whose Outflix co-chairman is Susana Rodas. "It's a way to get a lot of films to Memphis that otherwise wouldn't come here."
This year's festival includes 15 feature films and three shorts. Highlights include "Rivers Wash Over Me," a superb drama about a bookish African-American youth from Brooklyn who becomes the victim of abuse after his mother dies and he has to move to an aunt's trailer home in a small town in Alabama, where his classmates include coke-snorting thugs and the promiscuous blonds who love them; "Mississippi Queen," a compassionate documentary by Paige Williams, a lesbian whose Southern Baptist parents run the only "ex-gay" recovery ministry in the Magnolia State (the film includes a visit to the Love in Action center in Bartlett); and director Ella Lemhagen's "Patrik 1.5," about a married male couple in Sweden who want to adopt an infant but, due to a bureaucratic snafu, are sent a homophobic 15-year-old instead.
Directors who will attend the screenings of their films include John G. Young ("Rivers Wash Over Me") and Tim Daniels, whose documentary "Standing-N-Truth: Breaking the Silence" is an autobiographical look at gay black men who have been diagnosed HIV-positive.
The 12th Outflix International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
Today through Sept. 17, Malco's Ridgeway Four, 5853 Ridgeway Center Pkwy. Tickets: $9 per screening, or $70 for a festival pass. Opening night cocktail party (cash bar): 6:30 p.m., Ridgeway Four. For more information and the links to the movies' Web sites, visit outflix.org.
The schedule:
Tonight: "The Big Gay Musical" (8 p.m.), in which an actor is flummoxed to learn his parents plan to attend the opening night performance of his "rated flaming" off-Broadway play, titled "Adam and Steve -- Just the Way God Made 'Em." (The film also opens tonight in New York, in a regular theatrical run.)
Saturday: "Mississippi Queen" (3:30 p.m.); "At Home (A Domicilio)," a short, with "And Then Came Lola," a San Francisco-set lesbian romantic comedy inspired by "Run Lola Run" (6:30 p.m.); and director Rob Williams' fourth film at Outflix in as many years, "Make the Yuletide Gay" (8:30 p.m.), a comedy about a college student trying to stay in the closet at home even after his gay lover shows up for the holidays.
Sunday: The short "Transproofed" with "The Lovers & Fighters Convention," a documentary about London's "Transfabulous" transgender arts festival (2 p.m.); "Hannah Free" (4 p.m.), a sort of female "Brokeback Mountain" (if both cowboys had lived into old age) starring Sharon Gless ("Cagney & Lacey") as a dying woman reflecting on a lifelong and forbidden Midwestern love affair; and "Ready? OK!" (7 p.m.), about a Catholic schoolboy who longs to be a cheerleader, to the distress of some nuns and his mother (Carrie Preston, of HBO's "True Blood").
Monday: "Drool" (6:30 p.m.), a black comedy starring Laura Harring ("Mulholland Drive"), Jill Marie Jones (UPN's "Girlfriends"), Oded Fehr (the warrior Ardeth Bey in the "Mummy" movies) and Ruthie Austin of Memphis; and "Shank" (8:30 p.m.), a British coming-of-age story set in a gritty underworld of gang violence.
Tuesday: "Standing-N-Truth: Breaking the Silence" (6:30 p.m.); and "Patrik 1.5" (8:30 p.m.).
Wednesday: "Burn the Bridges" (6:30 p.m.), a Spanish-language drama from Mexico about a bedridden former pop singer and her odd brood of children; and the Irish short, "James," with "Clapham Junction" (8:30 p.m.), an ensemble comedy/drama that chronicles the interwoven lives of several gay men over 36 hours in South London.
Thursday: "I Can't Think Straight," a romantic comedy about a London-based Christian Jordanian of Palestinian origin whose impending marriage is interrupted when she falls for a Muslim British-Indian woman (whew!); and "Rivers Wash Over Me" (8:30 p.m.)
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