UWM Union Theater
3pm – FREE!!
Listen Up! A Screening with the Center Advocates
A town hall meeting of sorts, showcasing true stories from elsewhere—and maybe from down the street—addressing issues that impact lives lead here in Wisconsin.
To screen: Freeheld (Cynthia Wade, USA, video, 38 min., 2007), a Sundance Festival award-winning documentary that chronicles the struggles of police lieutenant Laurel Hester who, as she loses her battle with cancer, fights to secure her pension benefits for Stacie, her life partner. Out Running: Stories from the Campaign Trail (Dave O'Brien, Samantha Reynolds, & Borga Dorter, USA, video, 22 min., 2007) profiles three openly LGBT candidates from Oklahoma, Iowa and Oregon as they run for office. One of the candidates profiled is Judge Virginia Linder, who is looking to become both the first lesbian and the first woman on the Oregon Supreme Court. Gender Skirmish: Milwaukee 's Struggle for Transgender Nondiscrimination (Dena Aronson & Patrick Flaherty, USA , video, 10 min., 2007) explores how local activists set out to add (successfully!) gender identity and expression to one Midwestern city's nondiscrimination ordinance.
5pm
Tick Tock Lullaby
(Lisa Gornick, UK, video, 73 min., 2006)
Co-Sponsor: Wolfe Releasing
Community Co-Presenter: Lesbian Alliance
Community Sex Toy Provider: Tool Shed
A way smart, sharply observed and very funny comedy about two women's pursuit of parenthood.
Sasha and Maya want a baby. Or so they think. Sasha, a Jules Feiffer-style cartoonist who drafts strips about human foibles, contextualizes all the baby/pillow talk by imagining some other characters: she conjures Gillian and Fiona, a pair of sisters, both straight. (Sasha thinks: straight women must have it easier, right? Like, wouldn't it save a lot of trouble if she just got Maya pregnant accidentally?) But the imagined sisters are no help: they are struggling to have babies of their own and are similarly and desperately trying to find cooperative male partners. Proving that there is nothing straightforward about conception, Tick Tock Lullaby is an angsty comedy about intimacy and its attendant strategizing. And writer/director/star Gornick—perhaps the British lesbian Woody Allen if Woody Allen is not the straight American male Lisa Gornick—sketches these travails of planned parenthood into a witty and wry comedy about adult entanglements.
7pm
Times Have Been Better
(La Ciel Sul la Tete, Régis Musset, France, in French with English subtitles, video, 90 min., 2006)
Co-Sponsor: Picture This! Entertainment
Campus Co-Sponsor: UWM Festival of Films in French
Community Co-Presenters: Milwaukee LGBT Community Center & PFLAG–Milwaukee
Winner - Best Foreign Narrative Feature - 2007 NewFest, New York Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
Winner - Audience Award - 2007 Festival du Film Gay et Lesbian (Brussels)
An irresistible French farce that redirects the coming out comedy into a winning and affectionate portrait of well-meaning parents trying to adjust to their gay son's news.
When Jeremy, a successful bank executive and apple of his parents' eye, bluntly announces that he's gay and moving in with his boyfriend Marc, his parents, the oh-so-devoted and proudly progressive Guy and Rosine, find themselves unmoored. How did they not know? How did this happen? And, more importantly, what does this say about each of them? Their doubts cause their own relationship to buckle. Their friends—a gay co-worker, well-meaning if cloddish tennis partners, a busybody gossip—are only so much help and their youngest son Robin doesn't see what the fuss is about. Jeremy and Marc discover that they can't remain at a remove from this familial fray: maybe coming out isn't just about them? The film is reminiscent of Cote D'Azur (LGBT Film Fest 2005) in its loving and comic portrait of a family in flux, in its pleasurably witty and self-involved talkiness and in the breezy opulence of the French bourgeoisie. Bring the folks! Bring the kids, gay and straight!
