Three Dollar Bill Season
Oct. 14th, 2007 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
The Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival kicked off this weekend, and yesterday I went to see two films, one documentary, one drama.
The first film was Dos Patrias: Cuba Y La Noche, a documentary about gay life in Cuba. The title is taken from the work of the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who fled to the US after serving a prison sentence. The film interviews a series of people, covering a range of gay and trans lifestyles and experiences on the island.
There are some common threads running through the interviews, particularly the distress caused by the simple lack of any place for gays to go. With gay bars banned, the young people hold illegal parties, or meet at night along recognised stretches of waterfront that are under permanent police watch. This is no help to Tomas, an older man and a friend of Arenas - too old for the parties, after the breakdown of one relationship, he now looks ahead to a life alone, taking comfort in the gay-friendly African-based Santeria religion.
A photographer of male nudes talks of having his work censored and exhibitions closed early, and also of the roles men are pushed into by societal expectations and the penalties for defying them. An HIV positive drag performer moves around from site to site as clubs are raided and closed, and talks of the dichotomy of a country in which HIV drugs are provided for free, but no attempt is made to educate gays to stop its transmission. One young man who refuses to live closeted, and is consequently jobless, lives entirely by the support of his parents and brothers, avoiding the prostitution many of his openly gay friends are forced into.
There's a lot of interesting information in this film, some of it new to me - things have improved a little since Arenas' time, with gay people no longer automatically banned from university, but the only way to earn a living afterwards is to be self-employed, like the photographer. But the film ultimately fails by trying to do too much - in attempting to cover the full range of Cuban gay experiences, the depth is lost. Less than ten minutes with each interview subject isn't enough to give a real feel for their lives and problems. Some of these people have deeply interesting outlooks, and don't really have the chance to get them across. The only one who of them who manages to fully come across as a person, to really make you live her life in the time available, is the trans woman, unemployable and forced to live entirely alone within a condescending and judgemental family.
The film needed to be either twice as long or halve the number of interviews, IMO, and I scored it 3/5.
The second film was Shelter, one I went to see on the basis of all the good reviews at imdb. Zach is a wanna-be artist and passionate surfer, whose relationship with his old high school girlfriend feels more like good friends than real romance. But he's never considered he might be gay, until the night his best friend's brother kisses him.
This film is a simple and sweet story really well told. The actors have genuine chemistry, everyone's well-cast and plays their roles with conviction, and (almost) none of the characters are demonised, mostly just being people with all their flaws. There's some great cinematography and almost no cheese, the latter a remarkable feat considering some of the subject matter, and all the more so given this is the first full length film for the writer/director. A good, solid 4/5, and well worth seeing.
In other news, I'm not receiving emails again. It started with missing LJ comments, but now it's no mail at all since yesterday, so contact by phone for urgent stuff please! And we've finally got a non-Comcast broadband provider out here, so I think it's time to ditch their useless arses.
The first film was Dos Patrias: Cuba Y La Noche, a documentary about gay life in Cuba. The title is taken from the work of the gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who fled to the US after serving a prison sentence. The film interviews a series of people, covering a range of gay and trans lifestyles and experiences on the island.
There are some common threads running through the interviews, particularly the distress caused by the simple lack of any place for gays to go. With gay bars banned, the young people hold illegal parties, or meet at night along recognised stretches of waterfront that are under permanent police watch. This is no help to Tomas, an older man and a friend of Arenas - too old for the parties, after the breakdown of one relationship, he now looks ahead to a life alone, taking comfort in the gay-friendly African-based Santeria religion.
A photographer of male nudes talks of having his work censored and exhibitions closed early, and also of the roles men are pushed into by societal expectations and the penalties for defying them. An HIV positive drag performer moves around from site to site as clubs are raided and closed, and talks of the dichotomy of a country in which HIV drugs are provided for free, but no attempt is made to educate gays to stop its transmission. One young man who refuses to live closeted, and is consequently jobless, lives entirely by the support of his parents and brothers, avoiding the prostitution many of his openly gay friends are forced into.
There's a lot of interesting information in this film, some of it new to me - things have improved a little since Arenas' time, with gay people no longer automatically banned from university, but the only way to earn a living afterwards is to be self-employed, like the photographer. But the film ultimately fails by trying to do too much - in attempting to cover the full range of Cuban gay experiences, the depth is lost. Less than ten minutes with each interview subject isn't enough to give a real feel for their lives and problems. Some of these people have deeply interesting outlooks, and don't really have the chance to get them across. The only one who of them who manages to fully come across as a person, to really make you live her life in the time available, is the trans woman, unemployable and forced to live entirely alone within a condescending and judgemental family.
The film needed to be either twice as long or halve the number of interviews, IMO, and I scored it 3/5.
The second film was Shelter, one I went to see on the basis of all the good reviews at imdb. Zach is a wanna-be artist and passionate surfer, whose relationship with his old high school girlfriend feels more like good friends than real romance. But he's never considered he might be gay, until the night his best friend's brother kisses him.
This film is a simple and sweet story really well told. The actors have genuine chemistry, everyone's well-cast and plays their roles with conviction, and (almost) none of the characters are demonised, mostly just being people with all their flaws. There's some great cinematography and almost no cheese, the latter a remarkable feat considering some of the subject matter, and all the more so given this is the first full length film for the writer/director. A good, solid 4/5, and well worth seeing.
In other news, I'm not receiving emails again. It started with missing LJ comments, but now it's no mail at all since yesterday, so contact by phone for urgent stuff please! And we've finally got a non-Comcast broadband provider out here, so I think it's time to ditch their useless arses.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 08:43 pm (UTC)Gmail has been great though. I've never had a problem with missing any emails since I switched over. The added plus is that I don't have to worry about shifting anything when it comes time to get rid of Comcast once and for all ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-14 09:25 pm (UTC)The added plus is that I don't have to worry about shifting anything when it comes time to get rid of Comcast once and for all ;)
Well, that's why we got the different domain name with dynalias - the problem is, Comcast keep blocking the domain as spammers so our mail doesn't get forwarded to our comcast addy. Pointing out that the spam's coming from users, not the company really doesn't seem to work with comcast's auto-blocking bots.