It's June, it's pride month, then it's time
for Frameline, the
world's oldest and largest LGBTQ+ film festival. Its 48th
edition will take place from Wednesday, June 19 through
Saturday, June 29, 2024, in theaters in San Francisco and
Oakland, including the Roxie Theater, the
Palace of Fine
Arts Theatre, the Herbst
Theatre, the
Vogue Theatre,
and the New Parkway
Theater, with a nationwide streaming encore June
24-30, 2024.
While most of the film festivals in San Francisco have
been downsizing to a minimum, Frameline48
programs more films than last year, and officially
becomes the largest film festival in the City. It will
showcase 42 narrative features, 25 documentary features,
and 66 shorts. These films represent 34 countries and
regions around the world. And 8 shorts programs and 19
feature films will be available for streaming
online from anywhere in the United States June 24-30,
2024.
This year's festival also introduces something entirely
new in its 48 years history. Instead of the tradition of
showing an opening night film at the
under-renovation Castro Theatre,
the festival will open with a free outdoor block party on
the Juneteenth holiday in the Castro neighborhood. The
party will include drag performances from San Francisco's
all black Reparations,
and a screening of a concert
documentary "Lil Nas X:
Long Live Montero" (USA 2023 | 95 min.) about
the black queer rapper Lil Nas X,
directed by Carlos
López Estrada and Zac
Manuel.
Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero
The following are a few samplers in this year's
selection. (You may click on each still image or poster
for the corresponding screening or event's show time and
ticket information.)
Having just completed its San Francisco premiere
at CAAMFest
last month, the goofy
comedy "Extremely
Unique Dynamic" returns to the City
at
Frameline48. It
tells a story of two best friends trying to make a
movie about two guys making a movie, and that movie
is about two guys making a movie. That loop might
have gone deeper if there were more people on the
writer-director team. It's written and directed
by Katherine
Dudas, Ivan
Leung, and Harrison
Xu, with Ivan
Leung and Harrison
Xu also as the lead actors. This light-hearted
film makes an earnest effort to entertain its
audience, with a minimum storyline despite its plot
appearing to be super complicated in a meta
structure.
Ryan (Harrison
Xu) and Danny (Ivan
Leung) are childhood best friends who grew up
surrounded by cameras. As Ryan prepares to leave
for Canada to be with his finance, they decide to
make a movie over the last weekend together to
create a lasting memory for themselves.
These are two hyper energetic and pretty loud
guys from Generation Z, so it's understandable
that their supposedly memorable movie won't be a
montage from their childhood home video clips,
which they have plenty of. Instead, they are
making a no-budget indie gay fiction about two
guys, named Gregg and Tim, making a movie. The
movie which Gregg and Tim are making is about two
guys, named Jasper and Jake, making a movie. In
the quarreling process of making the movie
(doesn't matter which one), Danny comes out to
Ryan as gay, which echoes the sexual identity of
the characters in the movie they are making.
As if to follow the rationale that Ryan sketches
out in the movie, Danny's gay identity is
artificially put on him in order for marketing
success. In a sense, it worked because it's
selected by Frameline! The characters are thin
and the script directly follows a classroom
writing playbook. However, the acting (except the
fake anger) is charming to watch and there are a
few humorous moments.
No one will be able to track at which layer of a
Russian doll these two actors-directors are
playing, nor to understand how this film is
serving as their lasting memory of their
friendship. But Ryan's marketing strategy works
out perfectly for the directors.
At the beginning of the director Ray
Yeung's quiet, sensitive, and heart-wrenching
drama "All
Shall Be Well"
(從今以後 | China 2023 | in
Cantonese | 93 min.), a lesbian couple, Angie
(Patra
Au) and Pat (Lin-Lin
Li), start their morning routine without a single
word. Angie adds tea to a tea pot, when she turns
around, Pat adds boiling water to the tea pot. That's
one of the often wordless yet heartwarming harmonious
moments in their daily lives together in their small
apartment in Hong Kong, where a train passes by the
window every few minutes.
During a mid-autumn festival gathering, Pat and
Angie cook a feast and we are introduced to Pat's
delightful extended family. Pat's brother Shing
(Tai-Bo)
works night-shifts at a parking lot and his wife
Mei (So-ying
Hui) works at a hotel cleaning rooms. They have
two grown children. Their daughter Fanny
(Fish
Liew) raises two young children in a rat
infested cramped apartment and their son Victor
(Chung-Hang
Leung) is desperately looking for a place he
can afford to start his own family. They all love
Auntie Pat and Auntie Angie as their own family
members, and the two often offer generous help to
the working class family.
But Angie and Pat's happiness is abruptly ended
when Pat unexpectedly dies in her sleep at the age
of 70 without a will. Based on Hong Kong's law,
because Angie's name is not on the deed, Pat and
Angie's apartment now goes to Pat's brother Shing.
Not only Angie has to deal with the tremendous
grief of losing a lifelong partner, but she also
faces the reality that she might lose the home she
has shared with Pat for over 30 years.
After telling a story of two elderly gay men in his
previous film "Twilight's
Kiss" (叔叔 2019), the
writer-director Ray
Yeung now turns his lens to an elderly lesbian
couple. While he reveals the cruel reality under
current law in Hong Kong which doesn't provide
protection to same-sex couples, he avoids
simplifying the issue and instead portrays a few
characters that evokes our sympathy and
understanding. None of these characters are bad
people, but everyone seems to run into a corner and
there is no alternative. You can't help but
wonder what you would do if you were in the shoes
of each character. The mesmerizing performance by
the terrific ensemble cast also makes the story
even more devastating to watch.
The film won the well-deserved Best Feature Film of
the Teddy
Award at this year's Berlin
International Film. It also serves as an urgent
public announcement: get a living will if you have
not done so. The film is not to be missed if you
didn't see it during its Bay Area premiere last
month at the CAAMFest.
Out
(Netherlands 2024 | in Dutch | 91 min. | World Premiere)
(L-R) Jefferson Yaw Frempong-Manson and Bas
Keizer in Out.
Gorgeously shot in black and white, the
director Dennis
Alink's all-queer-crew
production "Out"
tells a captivating story about queer youth from a
small village coming to a big city trying to figure
out where they belong in the new world. It features
terrific performances by the two lead actors,
portraying the young characters who face the exciting
and confusing new gay scenes. The film will resonate
with the audience, regardless of which country you
live in and what language you speak, because quite
possibly, you had similar self-discovery experiences
as the protagonists have.
Tom (Bas
Keizer) and Ajani (Jefferson
Yaw Frempong-Manson) are boyfriends living in a
small rural village in the Netherlands. They both
dream about attending the hard-to-get-in film school
in Amsterdam and living the exciting new gay lives.
Their dreams come true when they are accepted and
move to Amsterdam. The excitement and temptations are
overwhelming for both of them, even though Ajani
seems more quickly adapted to the new city while Tom is
more reserved and trying to maintain his composure
and sanity.
But soon enough, Tom realizes that the days when he
and Ajani make short movies together, by themselves,
are long gone. They begin to grow apart, and start
their own journeys to build their identities in the
intoxicating big city life.
The director Dennis
Alink artfully tells the coming out story of his
characters, not just for their sexuality, but also
for their places in the gay culture and gay
communities. Despite the setting of the film, the
story is universal. "Out"
is one of the films you will remember from this
year's festival.
Perfect
Endings (13 Sentimentos | Brazil 2024
| in Portuguese | 100 min. | World Premiere)
Ten years ago, the Brazilian writer-director
Daniel
Ribeiro brought his splendid
"The
Way He Looks" (Hoje Eu Quero Voltar
Sozinho | 2014) to Frameline38.
That film beautifully captured adolescents'
subtle feelings and took a spot in my
top
ten films of 2014. Ten years later, as if the
teenagers have grown up, the writer-director
returns to this year's festival with a
comedy "Perfect
Endings" whose central character
João is in his 30s dealing with a recent
break-up. Even though the film's original
Portuguese title "13 Sentimentos" means "13
feelings," this grown-up character João
appears to show fewer feelings than those
teenagers in the director's previous film.
In "Perfect
Endings," the handsome 32-year-old
filmmaker João (Artur
Volpi) returns to the dating scene after he
has just ended his 10-year-long relationship with
Hugo. His filmmaking career is stalling, and his
dates disappoint him, especially when he cannot
stop comparing them to Hugo. But he seems to be
good at being a cameraman and an editor for the
porn movies he makes for other people's OnlyFans
contents.
As if he is constantly re-writing his scripts,
the charming João encounters various guys
and explores different scenarios of his dating
life. In the end, he is able to come out of the
fictional world of his movie script, and live,
happily, with reality.
"Perfect
Endings" is more like an episode of a
sitcom than a dramedy. It's aiming to please the
audience more than anything else, including
having an overt more than 3-minutes long sex scene
as the perfect ending. All the characters in the
film are kind, pleasant, understanding,
considerate, and some of them get help from
shrinks regularly. Surrounded by people like
those, how is it possible for João to fail
in finding a perfect ending?
This film can be viewed as an amusing dessert of
a dinner the director crafted, but if you want to
be reminded by the memorable main course, check
out the director's previous
film "The
Way He Looks" from your local library.
Demons
at Dawn (Los demonios del amanecer |
Mexico 2024 | in Spanish | 136 min. | International Premiere)
Impeccably shot almost in every frame, the Mexican
director Julián
Hernández's
arresting "Demons
at Dawn" captures the physical beauty
and mental turbulence of two young men in Mexico
City.
Twenty-year-old professional dancer Orlando
(Luis
Vegas) also dances at the nightclub as a go-go
boy. One day on the street, when he spots the
adorable Marco (Axel
Shuarma), an aspiring nursing student, they
madly fall in love at the first sight. But the love
affair begins to fall apart when the young minds
begin to grow and evolve. The hearts are inevitably
broken.
The director beautifully tells a genuine and
captivating story, with the outstanding performances
from the lead actors, and a masterful cinematography
(Alejandro
Cantú). This is one of the films you
definitely don't want to miss at this year's
festival.
