Diving Into Outfest! Plus: Christian Petzold and Cheryl Dunye
A guide to summertime escapes and revivals that will take you places without leaving home.
Hello!
One of the most exciting parts of starting this newsletter is discovering how geographically diverse our readership is — and also one of the most frustrating when we know we’ve been talking up films and events that are primarily happening in New York and Los Angeles. Inevitably, that’s going to happen here when we’re based in L.A. and New York remains the biggest American market for arthouse films, but when we spotlight films from all around the world, we hope nobody’s left out from seeing them either and we’ll try the best we can to broaden our coverage without losing our focus — and we welcome any feedback on how we can do better.
However, this is why we’re so excited to talk about our festival itinerary in the weeks ahead since everyone can join in the fun for two of our favorite community-based film festivals, Outfest LA and Blackstar in Philadelphia. While many festivals made the jump online during the pandemic to keep up the habit amongst their usual attendees, few did virtual editions with as much care as these two, cultivating a true feeling of sharing something with an audience even when we were all living in isolation and celebrating artists at a time when they may not have been able to feel the love coming back in their direction. It’s no surprise then that both have maintained those platforms even after the pandemic has largely subsided and while their physical events are going full steam ahead and well worth the trip, for those who can’t travel out, there are some real highlights to enjoy in your own home.
At Outfest, we’re already looking forward to catching up with SXSW standout “Down Low,” but we’d highly recommend anyone feeling a little FOMO about the event that runs through July 24th to check out the tender relationship dramas “Mutt” and “Fancy Dance” from perspectives that have rarely been seen before on screen. We were also thrilled this week to catch up with Carolina Costa, a longtime favorite of ours as a cinematographer on such films as “Hala” and, as it happens, “Fancy Dance,” who is bringing her directorial debut “Ecstasy” to the shorts program (in theater on 7/16 and streaming during the festival) that features her sensational eye as well as captivating turns from Mabel Cadena as a nun who can no longer suppress desire on the occasion of an unusual celestial event and “Huesera” star Natalia Solian as the elusive object of her longing.
Blackstar isn’t happening until the first week of August, which still leaves time to book a room in Philly for the best time you could have this summer. But short of that, the festival has already made tickets available for a remarkable amount of its typically exquisite lineup virtually including Bishal Dutta’s horror film “It Lives Inside” nearly a month-and-a-half before Neon releases it in theaters, as well as a number of heartrending films you might want to watch from home if you worry about shedding tears in public, whether it’s Chloe Abrahams’ deeply moving doc “The Taste of Mango” (review) detailing the strength and secrets that have been kept by the women in her family, Zia Mohajerjasbi’s “Know Your Place” (interview), a beautiful portrait of the Eritrean-American community in a gentrifying Seattle, or British director Adura Onashile’s coming-of-age drama “Girl” (review). These are just the highlights we know of right now, but we’re seriously stoked to see premieres from “Cocaine Prison” director Violeta Ayala (“La Lucha”) and the legendary Stanley Nelson (“Sound of the Police,” co-directed with Valerie Scoon) as well and we look forward to covering the festival as it unfolds.
One last suggestion you won’t have to leave your couch for - two recent nonfiction favorites of ours are making their way to POV on PBS. Already, you can check out So Yun Um’s endearing and provocative “Liquor Store Dreams,” reflecting on her responsibilities as a child of Korean immigrants who devoted themselves to running a convenience store that could set her up for an easier life than they had (our interview with the director), and as of next Monday, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s Oscar-nominated “A House Made of Splinters” will start streaming and gives an unparalleled view of the current peril in Ukraine through the eyes of some of the most vulnerable, set in an orphanage where the effects of war are shaping generations. (Our interview with Wilmont about the jawdropping doc is here.)
A Matter of Time
It was entirely coincidental that a theme of The Moveable Fest this week ended up being filmmakers who found fresh ways to revisit history in order to preserve it, but we were excited to find those common threads as we got a chance to connect with Cheryl Dunye about her landmark 1996 comedy “The Watermelon Woman,” which recently became part of the Criterion Collection, and composer Kathryn Bostic, who has penned new scores for the silent films “The Flying Ace” and “Something Good - Negro Kiss” that will play for the first time at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles on Saturday.
Setting aside both filmmakers’ boundless creativity, they are equally enviable custodians of important work that would fall through the cracks when few can be counted on to step up and advocate for it. As Dunye told us, “Artists should care about their work — living artists in particular — and I think the care of me wanting to make sure that the project gets to the world [led to getting it] to Criterion.” That persistence has only made “The Watermelon Woman” more poignant over time when Dunye memorably starred as a comic variation of who she was in real life as a Black, queer filmmaker who seeks to restore the legacy of an iconic actress from the silent era who has largely disappeared from the public record as a result of those very same identifiers, and just as Dunye didn’t wait for permission to tell such a story, Bostic took it upon herself to volunteer her services to the Academy after seeing its “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971” exhibit to activate two silent era classics for modern audiences.
This week also sees the release of “Lakota Nation Versus the United States,” a bold recounting of Native American history that we feared might get swept under the rug when it wasn’t immediately snapped up after playing Tribeca last summer. A reteaming of “MLK/FBI” producer Benjamin Hedin and editor Laura Tomaselli, who co-directed the film with Jesse Short Bull, deliver an equally stunning consideration of how the way history has been written has doubled down on injustices towards marginalized communities and we’re glad to see IFC Films starting a rollout that begins at the IFC Center this week and will have a special screening in L.A. at Vidiots on July 19th with the filmmakers in attendance. Our own interview with them is here.
The Last Word
“As a Protestant, when something doesn't cost me sweat and effort, then I disbelieve it because work has to be hard and painful. But this movie was not hard and painful, so I never trusted it really until the 20th day of shooting,” Christian Petzold told us of his latest “Afire,” which couldn’t be coming out at a more perfect time when the director envisioned it as a summertime getaway.
One of contemporary cinema’s great dramatists has made his lightest and most playful films to date with the charming drama about an author (Thomas Schubert) who refuses to leave work on his second novel after settling in at a summer retreat in spite of many tantalizing distractions that would likely serve him better than sitting around his laptop. Quite literally, we caught up with Petzold as he was leaving the Criterion Closet, en route to a weekend of Q & As on both coasts as it is gearing up to hit theaters across the country, and he graciously answered a few questions about his largely unpredetermined process that allows both himself and his cast and crew to find the film during the time that they’re making it.