Wayne Bund's photo series 'The Bathers' opens Saturday at East End
Check back for our preview of Siren Nation festival, which will encompass the entirety of the weekend. As if you didn’t have enough to work with below.
Thursday
Thursday may not see a whole bunch of new nights but there’s always the stellar, incredibly danceable and Smiths-loving Dirtbag! at the Know (with special guest DJ Ill Camino) and the mellower Bobby Jo Valentinejust down Alberta street making his Portland debut and the popular St Johns Thursday night gay hangout Sweet Teawhere you can drink in southern style for only 4 bucks.
Friday
Deep Cuts– Only in its second iteration, DP has already become a music conisseurs good time. Good music without pretentiousness this party is hip and fun without being the kind of hip and fun that makes you uncomfortable, nervous and…no fun. I think that’s proved well enough by this week’s DJ of the Week, which profiles Cuts’ special guest DJ L-Train.
Narratives about those crossing the gender spectrum, in whatever capacity, are just beginning to enter mainstream culture. I often find myself wanting to see more well-rounded, and dare I say happy portrayals of non-gender conforming people on screen. Tomboy, a French film by Director Céline Sciamma, does not paint a wholly a rosy picture, but it does portray the young child protagonist with compassion and sincerity.
Ten year old Laure is mistaken for a boy when she moves to a new town over summer break. She embraces it fully, going by the name Michael, taking her shirt off, and even fashioning a makeshift packy out of Play-Doh. The film delves into the parentless world of children on summer vacation very well. The kids are fully fleshed out characters that are quite adorable and smart, even as they are still juvenile and innocent.
One of Thursday night’s screenings for the PLGFF was Gun Hill Road by writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green. The film opens with Enrique, a husband and father, returning home to the Bronx after three years in prison. During his absence he finds that the family he used to know has changed. Not only has his wife, Angela, had an affair with another man but his teenage son, Michael, has started to experiment with his gender identity. Michael dresses up as a woman and wants to have surgery to become fully transitioned.
Although Michael never confronts Enrique about the transformation he wants to make, Enrique has suspicions and discovers it anyway. This challenges Enrique’s ideals about what it means to be a man and what it means for him personally to have raised a son that wants to be a woman. He deals with these challenges from his family and with the challenge of getting out of prison by becoming involved in the same kinds of skirmishes that probably put him in jail. Meanwhile, Angela struggles with breaking off her affair. Though she is supportive and protective of Michael, she seems somewhat oblivious to the transition Michael wants to make.
Dirty Girl: Let Them Talk, is a movie opening today (Friday) with limited release. Set in 1987 Oklahoma, centers around Danielle, (Juno Temple) the dirty girl of Norman High. She becomes furious when her mother (Milla Jovovitch) announces she is marrying a Mormon, and begins to make friends with an adorable gay boy, Clarke (Jeremy Dozier). Clarke’s homophobic father is threatening to send him off to military school (to meet boys?), and Danielle decides they need to run away to find her biological father. Off they go to Fresno, California, in pursuit of a person Danielle has never met.
I’m always excited, for many reasons, to see Milla Jovovitch in anything, especially this whole Mormon-loving mom bit. Juno Temple as Danielle should be interesting. She had a role in Notes on a Scandal, and will be in the new upcoming Three Muskateers remake, as well as The Dark Knight Rises. We also get to see William H. Macy play a Mormon!
The Future, the newest film from Portlander now in Los Angeles, Miranda July, has been out for a few weeks now. If you too were also a fan of Me and You and Everyone We Know, then you were excited for the release of her next project. Most of the world got their first introduction to July from her first major release, but she’s been writing, and creating rad video and performance art for years. She was the first feminist film and performance geek that I met, and It’s been awesome watching her gain acceptance from the rest of the art scene.
Sixteen year old Icelandic boy Gabriel returns from a trip to Manchester having had a sexual encounter with another boy. His friends and family all think he’s changed and he struggles to find his identity and ease back into his life as a young man.
Lyska Mondor (L) and Alley Hector love each other, and you, enough to do a podcast together. Photo by Ally Picard.
I’ve had it in my head for awhile now that I want to start a podcast. I want you to take qPDX with you wherever you go, on your iPod on the bus, whatever.
Maybe I just like the sound of my own voice (metaphorically) but […]
When I arrived in the rainy late afternoon to see PLGFF’s premiere of the German film, and first from Director Sabine Bernardi Romeos, to be released later this year it was not to a packed house. Organizer Gabriel Mendoza didn’t consider it one of the fest’s blockbusters, though he loved the film. Indeed, compared to the line around the block when I left for 7pm’s Weekend, it wasn’t. But it was a triumph. Small it may seem, but every review I’ve read thus far of the film following a young trans man struggling with life and attractions through his transition, has been celebratory, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Another common sentiment I share about the film is that the well-written story is carried off flawlessly by lead actor Rick Okon. Okon plays the 20-year-old Lukas who is “accidentally” put into the female form during his year of German service. He wants desperately to get out and just be one of the guys, even though it is here that he has a Ine (Liv Lisa Fries) an old best friend (former lover?), who is also an out lesbian. In her sexually fluid, but not necessarily trans-inclusive, group of friends, Lukas falls for alpha hottie Fabio (Maximilian Befort).
Coming home from a stint in prison Enrique comes home to a very different life with his wife and son. The son is gay and Enrique grapples with accepting him for who he is or risk losing him. Sundance jury nominee.
