Reeling 2002, the 21st Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival, continues Friday through Thursday, August 2 through 8. Screenings are at the Three Penny and Landmark’s Century Centre. Advance tickets can be purchased from 10 to 6 weekdays, noon to 5 Saturday, at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark; same-day tickets are available only at the venue box office. Tickets are $8, $6 for screenings until 5. Discount passes are available; for more information call 773-293-1447 or the festival hot line at 312-458-9117. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
The Man I Love
In Pretty Ladies: A Super-8 Explosion!, four lesbians awaken in separate beds and begin to search for mates. Director Catherine Crouch uses the style of silent movies, including intertitles and music, as she mixes eroticism and humor in her exaggeration of gestures such as cigarettes touching; she also uses stark, high-contrast imagery to intensify the focus on bodies. Self-parody adds an amusing edge, as when ludicrous humping on a tractor–and a kinky cut to nearby cows–follows sensuous lovemaking. The humor is even sillier in several shorter media parodies that still manage to entertain: Mark Kenneth Woods’s Pimp and Ho: Adventures in Queersploitation (2001) focuses on the heroes’ attempts to keep drug dealers sent by “hetero scumbags” out of their “gayborhood” using a gun that turns victims gay with beamed fruit. Margaret Broucek parodies Jewish parody in Your Better Butch Fashion (2001), in which a Jewish mom dispenses wisdom such as “If you’re going to walk with your mother and be a butch, wear Tommy Hilfiger” and seeks an alternative mate for a daughter who plans to shack up with a “living rack of earrings.” Also on the program: work by Nina Xoomsai, Vanessa Stalling, and Sam Stalling; Kristin J. Mohr and Kelly Hayes; George Lyter; and Nanci Gaglio. 95 min. (FC) (Three Penny, 8:45)
SATURDAY, AUGUST 3
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Brian Tilley’s moving 2001 documentary profiles Zackie Achmat, the South African AIDS activist whose Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) is committed to making antiretroviral drugs available to anyone in South Africa who is HIV positive, especially pregnant women. The video follows Achmat’s arduous court battles in Johannesburg, which initially forged an uneasy alliance between the government and multinational pharmaceuticals to deliver affordable drugs to the general population. He reached an impasse when President Thabo Mbeki called into question the connection between HIV and AIDS and selectively cited American warnings about the toxicity of some antiretroviral drugs. Both HIV positive and gay, Achmat is in a moral and political bind: he declines to treat himself with drugs he could easily afford but most of his countrymen cannot. Tilley juxtaposes Achmat’s complete absorption in preparing for demonstrations and court appearances with his private battle to ward off a host of HIV-related maladies, and his frequent visits to his doctor reinforce his personal stake in hammering out a national policy that will prescribe medicine to millions who have HIV. 72 min. (Joshua Katzman) (Landmark’s Century Centre, 1:00)
The Heart’s Root
Writer-director Sherman Alexie offers a richly detailed version of the identity contradictions Native Americans wrestle with in this tale of a gay Indian poet who’s left the reservation for success in the white world: he writes about life on the reservation but rarely returns, and he’s had many white lovers but no Native Americans. Alexie mixes up time and juxtaposes scenes to create meaning as he tries to explain the poet’s rejection of life with his tribe. A triumphant Indian football victory is followed by a scene of kids forced to wait in the car while their parents get plastered; a boyhood friend challenges the poet for rejecting the rez, yet the poet meets the man who would become his longtime lover at a dance in Seattle; and some cuts-both-ways humor illuminates the justifiable bitterness Indians have, as when the poet explains to his white lover, “I just pretend you’re Custer.” Also on the program, Jasc’s short Thorn Grass, a somewhat sappy meditation on the brutal murder of a gay, or possibly transgendered, boy. 111 min. (FC) (Three Penny, 4:15)
