Chicago’s 22nd annual lesbian and gay film festival runs Friday through Thursday, November 7 through 13. Unless otherwise noted, screenings are $9 at Landmark’s Century Centre, $7 at Chicago Filmmakers, and $6 for matinees at either venue (until 5 PM). Advance tickets can be purchased from 10 to 6 weekdays and noon to 5 Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, or anytime at www.chicagofilmmakers.org; same day tickets are available only at the venue box office 30 minutes prior to the first screening of the day. Discount passes are available; for more information call 773-293-1447 or the festival hotline at 312-458-9117. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
A World of Love
Originally broadcast on French TV, director Fabrice Cazeneuve’s study of a popular high school student’s first tentative steps out of the closet is also a painfully honest examination of the limits of loyalty among friends and family. Vincent is the proverbial kid with a bright future: a great student, star of the swim team, and boyfriend to a smart, attractive female classmate. His seemingly idyllic life is the envy of his classmates until he’s outed by a boy he tried to kiss. While Cazeneuve’s story is about gay love, it also charts universal truths about adolescent romance and high school politics with great aplomb. In French with subtitles. 90 min. (Joshua Katzman) (Landmark’s Century Centre, 9:15)
This video documentary has been trimmed from 70 to 55 minutes since it screened this summer as part of “The 72 Hour Feature Project.” Reviewing the longer cut, Reader critic Bill Stamets wrote, “Ronit Bezalel (Voices of Cabrini: Remaking Chicago’s Public Housing), Laurie Little, and Sree Nallamothu [follow] the Chicago Force, part of the Independent Women’s Football League, as it does battle at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s De La Salle Field. Yet the team’s 55-zip rout of the San Diego Seacatz, caught by a nine-camera crew, is less important than the hearty portraits of the Chicago players. The team spirit is contagious, and the squad’s improvisatory style is matched by the video’s rough edges.” (Chicago Filmmakers, 11:00 am)
School’s Out: The Life of a Gay High School in Texas
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The Walt Whitman Community School in Dallas, not yet accredited and struggling with low enrollment, was founded in 1997 as a haven for gay kids fleeing harassment at their previous schools. One of a few institutions of its kind, the school accepts boarders, who are placed with host families. Although weak on context and a bit too much like raw data, Jeremy Simmon’s documentary succeeds when the students speak for themselves: their life circumstances have made them precociously self-aware, though that doesn’t stop one HIV-positive boy from having unprotected sex in the restroom, provoking a crisis. Also showing: Jan Padgett’s Sticks and Stones (2002), an effective antibigotry video for kids. 99 min. (FC) (Chicago Filmmakers, 2:00)
Rory Kennedy’s HBO documentary does a slick job of reporting on AIDS in five different cultures where varying modes of transmission prevail–heterosexual sex in Uganda, prostitution in Thailand and India, dirty needles in Russia, and gay sex in Brazil. Much is familiar here: some families reject their infected members out of shame while others are supportive; some national health systems can’t cope with the rising toll of infection (Russia) while others have greatly reduced death rates (Brazil). The film’s inappropriately upbeat tone, which extends from pretty tourist images of major cities to Danny Glover’s calm narration to a weirdly chipper ending, fails to convey the awfulness of the disease itself beyond a few quick shots of emaciated patients. 113 min. (FC) (Chicago Filmmakers, 4:00)
