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Get Pariah to Sundance in style!*

By on January 6, 2011 in APB, Moving pictures

Pariah still
Director Dee Rees on the job, one of the most beautiful images I’ve seen in a very long time. [Source: Pariah: The Movie blog.]

*[Update: They did it! And now that they're fundraising in excess of their $10k goal, they're donating half of remaining money to the Ali Forney Center, a New York City homeless shelter for LGBT youth. Dictionary definition of walking the talk.]

Pariah! This film has to get to Sundance in the best possible shape, and its whole bodacious film-making crew has to be there along with it!  I found out about it this morning from my handy-dandy Frameline e-newsletter (thanks, folks), and am all inspired to do my wee part in boosting its support.

Here’s what Frameline had to say:

Dee Rees and Nekisa Cooper‘s feature adaptation of their Frameline Audience Award winning short will be finished just in time to world premiere at Sundance. The film is about a Bronx teenager forced to choose between losing her best friend or destroying her family while she juggles conflicting identities and endures heartbreak in a desperate search for sexual expression. If you would like to help Dee and Nekissa finish their film and make it to Sundance for their world premiere please check out their Kickstarter page.

Writer/director Rees’s bio on the Kickstarter page notes the following:

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20 of 31

By on December 21, 2010 in A month o' photos, Moving pictures

You. Must. Watch. This.




“Family Time,” COLAGE’s new documentary about its first twenty years, tells the story of this generation of LGBTQ family history along the way. I can’t even find hyperbole enough to describe how moving it is.

About COLAGE’s founding, Hope Berry recalled saying to others, following a support group for kids who had an LGBT parent who’d died of AIDS:

Wait! We want to talk to each other. Parents: help us. Support us. Give us a place where we can meet and follow this through.

And Hope Berry again, from a Canadian talk show appearance where she and another COLAGE co-founder were bum-rushed by a professional homophobe guest:

[The problem] is not about our parents! It’s about this attitude!

Beth Teper (current COLAGE Exec. Dirctor), on what COLAGE did for her young self:

That’s what COLAGE has given me: pride in my self, my family, and my community.

And finally here’s Felicia Park-Rogers, in response to an off-camera question by some media person, presumably along the lines of “What would you say to others?”:

I would say to parents: be courageous and proud of who they are, and your children will follow. And they will be courageous and proud of who they are.

Needless to say, the 14 minute documentary includes lots more wonderful stuff along these lines. Useful for LGBT parents to watch, period, regardless of your interest in COLAGE’s founding decades or the evolving issues facing kids of LGBT parents.

After you’re done watching, those of you who feel you have something to spare and/or those who annually actually seek tax deductible donation opportunities because you want to reduce your tax burden (you know who you are! the both of youse!), please consider supporting COLAGE and/or your local LGBTQ family org. Don’t know your local org? See if you can find it at Family Equality Council’s national parents’ groups page here.

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10 of 31

By on December 10, 2010 in A month o' photos, Moving pictures

filibernie

My desktop, 3:15pm PST.
[Ed note: re-edited to read in forward chronological sequence. I'm not so used to incessantly updating a post with breaking news stuff; sorry.]
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Senator Bernie Sanders gives representative democracy a swift kick in the pants by mounting an EIGHT INTO NINE HOUR, AS OF THIS WRITING (3:15pm, PST), ol’ school — yes, he’s talkin’ it the whole way — filibuster in protest of Obama’s planned give-away to the Republicans and the richest 2% of Americans.

[Ed note: finally clocked in at 8 hrs 37 minutes when he finally took his seat.]

Live C-SPAN coverage can be found on Senator Sanders’ web page. You can follow the spirited engagement and support on Twitter (the hashtag: #filibernie) here. But that’s just via #filibernie. #Bernie Sanders and #filibuster are also trending. I hope engagement in the democratic process and spirited resistance to a political system skewed to the richest 2% are also trending.

I love this guy. More for every minute he stays standing — eight into nine hours and counting, people, eight into nine hours and counting: he is 69 years old and I defy most of us to stay on our feet for eight nine hours doing ANYTHING. Receiving a friggin’ neck and shoulder massage the whole time, man. I love this guy.

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4 of 31

By on December 4, 2010 in A month o' photos, Moving pictures

“Christmas Lullaby,” by Jason Robert Brown, eavesdropped after dinner last night. [Ed note: Once you start the video, double-clicking the image expands it to full screen, a decidedly mixed blessing since then you get more jostled by my improv'ed lo-tech iPhone cinematography.]

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Night Fliers a-flyin’

By on July 22, 2010 in APB, Moving pictures

Night Fliers, the debut feature film by Bay Area screenwriter, producer, and director Sara St. Martin Lynne, is out and about making waves on the festival circuit.  It’s a “poignant film about a gender nonconforming teen and her friends finding their way in a small CA rural town,” and I can’t wait to see it.

Tonight at 7pm it’s being screened at Berkeley’s Elmwood Theater in a fund-raiser for Our Family Coalition, the Bay Area’s can-do, kick-arse LGBT family organization.  Event info here at its Facebook page and via Our Family Coalition.

I am trying to find a way to be there, but may not be able to manage it (haaaaaarrrrrrgh!). Locals, get childcare (if you need to) and get thee hither! You get to meet and talk with the director and actors afterwards, and support OFC in the process. When it’s all abuzz at Sundance and optioned for major nationwide distribution, you can say, “I saw it first!”

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Carousel ride

By on July 13, 2010 in Moving pictures, On marriage and commitment, Re: the lil' peanut

And by carousel ride, I’m not referring lyrically to the online comment stream debates elsewhere (I’m thinking of those at Autostraddle and AfterEllen) between women who have seen the lesbian family film The Kids Are All Right, which opened in limited release this past weekend and is opening in wider release this Friday (theaters here), and those who haven’t.  And won’t.

Though I am thinking of them.

An impressive and spirited number of those who haven’t seen the film are cocksure (d’oh!) they know precisely what it’s about and what cultural impact it will have, and are therefore both avoiding it like the plague and denouncing its writer-director. (“No cash for this trash!” one commenter declared; “Lisa Cholodenko is an idiot!” concluded another.)

To which I can only sigh and moan: My people, my people. That, and periodically jump on one of the up-and-down ostriches and try to talk sense into the cantankerous menagerie.

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