September 6-16
UWM Union Theater
1pm
Blueprint (Kirk Shannon-Butts, USA, video, 75 min., 2007)
Community Co-Presenters: Charles “D” Productions & Project Q
A film about a tentative courtship between two African American college students that is resourceful and risky, lean and leisurely, daring to take and find its own time.
Keith is a beatnik, excessively confident—even about his unhappiness—and proud of his precision. Nathan is laid back, amusingly garrulous and probably high. On their first date, Keith and Nathan hit the road on a motorcycle with only a hint of an itinerary: they smoke pot and take a dip in a stream. The two are on the cusp of something—adulthood, a relationship, a plan?—and the movie enjoys their hesitancy, the charmed time before an agenda looms, when possibilities are part of the atmosphere. Blueprint has the conventionally comedic friction of opposites attracting, but first time filmmaker Shannon-Butts designs a winning debut out of the less schematic and far richer pleasures and promises of irresolution.
shown with:
Float (Kareem Mortimer, Bahamas, video, 35 min., 2006)
Set in the acutely homophobic Bahamas , two men risk falling in love.
3pm
FtF: Female To Femme (Kami Chisholm & Elizabeth Stark, USA, video, 48 min., 2006)
Campus Co-Sponsor: Women's Resource Center
Community Co-Presenters: Milwaukee Femme Mafia , FORGE & Lesbian Alliance
Sexy, smart and funny, FtF: Female to Femme explores femme dyke identities as radical gender practices.
A film that envisions more than it documents, FtF pushes for an understanding of femininity as multiple rather than singular, constructed rather than natural. FtF features a host of fabulous femmes, including actress Guinevere Turner, novelist Jewelle Gomez, rock stars Leslie Mah and Bitch, along with professors, activists, artists and dancers. FtF makes use of parody and costuming much the way femme does: to create a saucy, indelible impression of a people and a politics central to the gender revolution. To be screened with a series of shorts assembled with Milwaukee Femme Mafia.
5pm
Tuli (Auraeus Solito, Philippines, in Tagalog with English subtitles, video, 107 min., 2006)
Winner - Outstanding International Narrative Feature - Outfest 2007
A beguiling film of feminist defiance and lesbian courtship in rural Philippines.
In this new film from the director of last year's delight, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Solito's subject is another willful young queer challenging the law of the father. Headstrong Daisy, daughter of a preeminent patriarch, assists her father in performing the male circumcision ritual (tuli). Daisy resists the life—and the marriage—chosen for her and instead devotes herself to her childhood girlfriend Botchok in a relationship that stirs the wrath of the superstitious village. Ethnographically rich, Solito's film offers a complex portrait of a rural life caught between Christian and local shamanistic rituals. Daisy's defiance and the changes it prompts suggest the politics and feel of an Alice Walker novel, wherein outsiders find power in confederacy and feminist utopias can be realized through personal declarations however challenging, however disobedient.
7pm
The Bubble (Habuah, Eytan Fox, Israel, in Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles, 35mm, 117 min., 2006)
Community Co-Sponsor: Milwaukee GAMMA
Community Co-Presenter: Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival
Winner - Audience Award & Best Narrative Feature - Outfest 2007
A love story between an Israeli and a Palestinian in today's fractious Middle East.
Yali works as a waiter but aspires to something more romantic, say consummating his desire for his roommate Noam. An oblivious Noam works as a record store clerk when he is not enduring his military service at a border checkpoint. Lulu bristles at accepted opinion—and piggish men—and hazards a career in fashion when not organizing a rave for peace. And Ashraf, fleeing political strife and family pressures, sneaks across the border into this “bubble” of Tel Aviv twenty-somethings, perhaps to find the soldier he spied at the border. Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox (Yossi and Jagger , Walk on Water) crafts a valentine to the in-spite-of-it-all exuberance of the young people of Tel Aviv and a heart-rending mapping of the conflict in today's Israel through the antics and loves and stabs at responsibility of these not-quite adults. At the epicenter of the tragedy is the charged romance between Noam and Ashraf, whose devotion across fraught territories can only ultimately manifest itself in desperate measures. A powerful gay narrative, “The Bubble” broadens its concerns to acknowledge the impossible aches of a wider world.
The Bubble will also screen at the 5th Annual Milwaukee International Film Festival which runs September 20 – 30. See http://www.milwaukeefilmfest.org for show times.
9pm
iLESBIAN: An Evening of Women's Shorts
Campus Co-Sponsor: Women's Resource Center
Community Co-Presenters: Lesbian Alliance & Project Q
Scroll! Touch! Join us for the an evening of the finest and newest in short films and videos about courtship, first dates, innovative uses of cell phone technology and communities resourcefully invented in locker rooms. The standout may be “Pariah” (Dee Rees, video, 28 min., 2006), the powerhouse—and multiple award-winning—short that tells the tale of one young African American girl's struggle to bust out of the closet, of the confines of her family's ideas. Also to screen: “A Passing Rain” (Kim Myoung-Hwa, South Korea, video, 8 min., 2006); “Flowers at the Park (or First Kisses)” (Mariel Macia, Spain, video, 10 min., 2006); “Filled With Water” (Elka Kerkhofs, Australia, video, 5 min., 2006); “Eddie” (Quentin Kruger, USA, video, 10 min., 2007); “Vibracall” (Esmir Filho, Brazil, video, 5 min., 2006); “Spinning” (Heide Arnesen, Norway, video, 8 min., 2006); & more!
11pm – FREE!!
Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, USA, 16mm, 80 min., 1983)
Community Co-Presenters: Broad Vocabulary & Queer Zine Archive Project
A rare big screen presentation of this radical, still - provocative feminist classic of the struggle of alternative politics and the control of the media – the inspiration for this year's Itty Bitty Titty Committee. In Borden's troubled imagined future, the government celebrates the tenth anniversary of the US's own Social Democratic War of Liberation. But the citizenry of New York City are increasingly agitated. In this alternate America, government oppression and violence against women is rampant, and the feminist response is increasingly powerful. Born in Flames chronicles the activities of the Women's Army, a formidable if loosely organized faction of female vigilantes and counterrevolutionaries, and two pirate radio programs trying to rally the sisterhood and shake up the system. When the outspoken leader of the Women's Army dies in police custody, a united front emerges to take direct action and potentially dangerous measures. “Born in Flames” uncorks a bracing mode of independent film no longer evident, however much its concerns with the plight of women and people of color, the government policing of its citizenry, and media control remain most relevant.
