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Press Releases:
Asian Films
Awards
Conference
Distribution
Latino Films
Music Films
Overview of Festival
François Ozon
Spirituality Films
Sponsors
Youth Films
Wrap
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PRESS
Frameline30: the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival Celebrates
Thirty Years of Revolutionary Film
San Francisco, CA—Frameline the world’s premier showcase for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender cinema, proudly announces Frameline30, the 30th anniversary of its annual San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. This year’s Festival runs June 15-25 at the historic Castro Theatre, CinéArts @ Empire, Roxie Film Center and the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco, as well as at Oakland’s Parkway Theater. Frameline’s renowned Film Festival offers 11 days of the newest and best in LGBT film for audiences of approximately 70,000 from the Bay Area and beyond.
This year, the Film Festival will feature more than 260 feature and short films—from narratives and documentaries to experimental and animated—representing the most artistically innovative, thematically rich and socially relevant LGBT images and ideas from around the world.
Opening Night at the Castro Theatre is Puccini for Beginners, written and directed by Maria Maggenti (The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love). In this delightful screwball comedy, a New York writer finds herself in two surprising and complicated love affairs while on the rebound from her latest lesbian relationship.
Frameline’s popular Opening Night Gala, the unofficial launch of San Francisco’s annual LGBT Pride celebration, will take place at the San Francisco Design Center Galleria following the screening. Maggenti will attend Opening Night festivities.
Closing Night at the Castro Theatre wraps up Frameline30’s stellar 11-day run with Manuel Gómez Pereira’s Queens, a dramatic feature that centers on Spain’s first mass same-sex wedding. Bringing together the grand dames of Spanish cinema including Verónica Forqué, Carmen Maura and Marisa Paredes, Queens is the story of five headstrong mothers coping with the drama and comedy that surrounds the wedding of their gay sons.
Following the screening, the Closing Night Party will be held on Pride Sunday, June 25, at the San Francisco Design Center Galleria. Both the Opening Night Gala and Closing Night Party offer a variety of delectable food, thirst-quenching elixirs and scrumptious desserts, and will provide attendees a memorable evening of rubbing shoulders with filmmakers from around the globe.
Frameline30’s Centerpiece film is Time To Leave, directed by acclaimed French filmmaker François Ozon and starring Melvil Poupaud and screen legend Jeanne Moreau. Over the past decade, the Film Festival has screened seven of Ozon’s films. He last attended the Festival in 2000 with Criminal Lovers and Water Drops on Burning Rocks. Each year Frameline honors a selected filmmaker whose outstanding accomplishments and contributions to LBGT cinema deserve recognition. On June 20 at the screening of Time to Leave, Frameline will proudly bestow director Ozon with the distinguished 2006 Frameline Award.
In addition to the Frameline Award, the Festival proudly presents two juried awards: the Michael J. Berg Documentary Award for excellence in documentary filmmaking, and the Dockers® First Feature Award for first narrative features premiering at Frameline30. The awards offer unparalleled cash prizes in the LGBT film festival circuit and serve as testament to Frameline’s champion support of LGBT filmmakers. Winners will be announced at the Closing Night Party, as will the winners of the Festival’s Audience Awards for Best Feature Film, Best Documentary and Best Short Film. For the first time, Frameline will be offering cash awards to all three films selected by Festival audiences as the Best of the Festival.
Eight Showcase screenings will highlight current trends in international LGBT cinema. 20 Centimeters, by Spanish filmmaker Ramon Salazar, is a campy musical comedy featuring the music of Madonna, Queen and Ani DiFranco. Todd Stephens’ Another Gay Movie is a raunchy teen comedy with gay teens taking a bite out of American Pie. In Looking for Cheyenne, by French filmmaker Valerie Mineto, two women struggle with the issues of love and commitment. Paul Dinello’s Strangers With Candy is based on the cult television hit of the same title; with Amy Sedaris as the inimitable Jerri Blank. Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, by Academy Award-winner Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision), covers three years of Kushner’s life from 9/11 to the 2004 presidential elections. The three additional showcase films are Pick Up the Mic; Follow My Voice: With the Music of Hedwig; and Boy Culture, all described below.
The Festival is honored to be presenting 11 world-premiere films which include: Flirting With Anthony by Christian Calson, investigates the borders of what we call “queer cinema”; The Kinsey Sicks: I Wanna Be a Republican is Ken Bielenberf’s hilarious satire of all things Republican; Colton Lawrence’s the sex movie weaves its way through issues of sexual preference, gender identity and body image; David Sector’s documentary Take the Flame! Gay Games: Grace, Grit & Glory covers one of the world’s largest sporting events; and in Trantasia director Jeremy Stanford goes to Las Vegas to chronicle the first World’s Most Beautiful Transsexual Pageant.
Of the world-premiere films at Frameline30, more than half are by local filmmakers. Two documentaries, Todd Holland’s The Believers and Lawrence Dillon’s Why We Sing!, focus on gospel choirs; Marc Huestis’ (Sex Is…, Whatever Happened to Susan Jane?) Lulu Gets a Facelift focuses on drag icon Lulu; Jeremy Solterbeck’s feature ¡El Presidente! is about a local wrestling hero’s bid for presidency; FtF: Female to Femme, directed by Frameline veterans Kami Chisholm and Elizabeth Stark (A Conversation with Elizabeth’s Father), looks at femme identity; and Howard Scott Warshaw’s Vice & Consent attempts to accurately present BDSM and its intricacies.
Frameline30 will represent international perspectives with a wide array of queer features from 32 countries. From India comes the Frameline release Shabnam Mousi, an action-packed Bollywood musical about a hijra (eunuch) who rises to political power. Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues (O Fantasma) returns with his latest, equally dark Two Drifters. From Mexico, the Film Festival will present Broken Sky, a lush and languid romance by Julián Hernández (A Thousand Clouds of Peace).
Asian cinema continues to explode with exciting queer films, and Frameline30 will highlight several new gay features from Asia, including Brillante Mendoza’s The Masseur and Ellen Ongekeko-Marfil’s Stray Cats from the Phillipines. Also screening is Nanang Istiabudi’s debut film, Last Second, from Indonesia and Simon Chung’s Innocent from Hong Kong. In addition, Ned Farr’s The Gymnast stars South Korean actress and dancer Addie Yungmee as Serena.
On the domestic front, following his award-winning debut Eating Out (Frameline28 audience award winner), Q. Allan Brocka is back with his new feature Boy Culture, based on Matthew Rettenmund’s novel about a young gay man’s dreams of love and lust. The divine thespian Charles Busch returns to Frameline with his directorial debut, A Very Serious Person, which stars Busch as well as television and screen veteran Polly Bergen. Frameline presents another feature debut with Santa Cruz filmmaker Cam Archer’s touching and ethereal masterpiece, Wild Tigers I Have Known. Katherine Brooks’ film, Loving Annabelle, is the controversial story of a Catholic School teacher who has an affair with her 17-year-old student, and Erin Greenwell returns with her hilarious road-trip film, Mom.
Documentaries have been a major part of the Film Festival for three decades, and this year’s lineup will showcase another selection of moving and important works. Malcolm Ingram’s small town gay bar takes a look at queer communities in rural Mississippi. Follow My Voice: With the Music of Hedwig tells the stories of four LGBT teens from the Harvey Milk School, echoing their struggles and aspirations with songs from John Cameron Mitchell’s celebrated transgender musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Frameline25). Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Hammer (History Lessons, Nitrate Kisses, Dyketactics) returns with her newest film, Lover Other, the story of 1920’s Surrealist artists and Nazi resisters Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Pick Up the Mic is a landmark new film from Alex Hinton chronicling the MCs and producers in the burgeoning queer hip-hop movement whose genesis began in the Bay Area.
Frameline is equally supportive of the short film genre, as evidenced by the nearly 157 scheduled domestic and international short films. The Festival has a history of showcasing up-and-coming talented filmmakers, and this year is no exception. The wildly popular Fun In Boys’ Shorts, a playful collection of testosterone tales, and Fun In Girls’ Shorts, filled with bold, sexy lesbian imagery, are back. For audiophiles, Killing Rock Stars is a program of music-driven films and videos featuring videos from Sleater-Kinney, Scream Club, Deerhoof, Elliott Smith, Hey Willpower, The Gossip and many more. In Tough Girls, tomboys, rockers and other girls take center stage; Dyke Delights is the extremely hot, fun dyke shorts program; Don’t F**K With me is for bad-ass women and those who fear and adore them; Small Town Girls is about being queer and finding a way out of small towns; and Inciting Hope—Queer Women of Color Shorts is a collection of films by and about queer women of color. Worldly Affairs is a global mélange of same-sex short films; Emerging Voices is from and about people of color; Momma’s Boy features stories in which both gay men and their mothers are championed; Family Ties films also have family in common; Boys School plays out on tough places for the budding homosexual; and Performative Queers is an homage to living and dead legendary drag kings and queens. Youth honors youth in Do It Yourself—New Youth Films.
For kids of LGBT families and straight families and for the kid-at-heart in all of us, Frameline30 is delighted to offer our Third Family Film Screening, The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh, by directors John Lounsbery and Wolfgang Reitherman.
For four days (June 19-22) during the Film Festival, Frameline will present Persistent Vision 2006, an international queer media conference that will bring together industry professionals for an in-depth look at the past, present and future of LGBT media arts. Some 300 guests and attendees will take part in keynote speeches, instructive seminars, provocative panels and hands-on tutorials. Keynote speakers include: film critic and cultural theorist B. Ruby Rich; writer and TV host Keith Boykin; and writer, director and actor John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). The conference—a follow-up to Frameline's first Persistent Vision conference in 2001—promises to be a landmark assessment of the queer media field as it undergoes radical transformations in the key areas of exhibition, distribution, filmmaker support and worldwide moving-image proliferation.
Frameline30: the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, screens June 15–25 at the Castro Theatre (429 Castro Street), CinéArts@Empire (85 West Portal Avenue), Roxie Film Center (3117 16th Street), Victoria Theatre (2961 16th Street) in San Francisco and the Parkway Theater (1834 Park Blvd.) in Oakland.
Advance tickets will be available at the Festival Ticket Outlet located at 474 Castro Street in San Francisco. The Ticket Outlet will be open for Frameline Members only from May 26th through June 1st. General public ticket sales begin on June 2nd. Tickets may also be purchased by phone (925.866.9559), fax (925.866.9597), or mail (Frameline30, P.O. Box 2229, Danville, CA 94526-7229). For more information on the Festival and how to purchase tickets call the 24-hour hotline at 925.866.9559 or visit http://www.frameline.org/festival.
The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival is presented by Frameline, a nonprofit LGBT organization whose mission is to strengthen the diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and further its visibility by supporting and promoting a broad array of cultural representations and artistic expression in film, video and other media arts.
Media contact:
Seema Arora
seema@frameline.org
415.703.8650 x323 |
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