Cinema Q: Wrapping Up This Weekend’s Queer Film Festival
The 15th Annual Cinema Q Film Festival at Sie Film Center took place this past weekend with the best of the best in queer cinema being shown right here in downtown Denver. Cinema Q went from Thursday night through to Sunday night and featured many films as well as panels and a marketplace for local vendors. In addition, several of the movies had Q&A sessions with the filmmakers. There was even an opening night reception on Thursday, catered by The Easy Vegan. Unfortunately, I failed to take a close enough look at the food to realize that it was vegan and that I could, therefore, eat it, and I missed out on my chance to comment on the food, but I heard great things about it from others. It made for a really fun event with plenty of things to do and a ton of positive queer energy.
I went on the opening night to see Bottoms, which was phenomenal, and you can read my review of it that went up yesterday. Here’s a look at some of the other films I caught at Cinema Q this weekend.
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture
Rating: 85/100
Did you know that the word “homosexual” didn’t appear in the Bible until 1946? Apparently, the word “homosexual” was a translation of two words from the original Greek, “arsenokoitai” and “malakoi,” which referred to a very specific relationship in the culture of the time in which a rich, powerful older man carried on a sexual relationship with an underage boy. Director Sharon “Rocky” Roggio follows researchers Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford as they trace the history of the so-called “clobber passages” that are used by conservative Christians to justify homophobia and how none of them were ever meant to refer to the modern conception of loving, consensual homosexual relationships.
I’m not particularly religious, but I was raised Catholic and know quite a bit about the Bible, so this was fascinating to me. What was hard to watch, though, were the scenes where Roggio, who is openly gay, interviewed her homophobic pastor father who refused to accept that these passages were mistranslations. The relationship with Roggio and her father mirrored many of the difficult relationships that queer people have with their parents, with the exception being that few queer people would keep someone as hostile as Roggio’s father in their lives. That being said, as difficult as those scenes were to watch, it was a harsh reminder of how these clobber passages are weaponized against queer people, and they served the movie quite well.
Rating: 80/100
Filmmaker Sav Rodgers says that Kevin Smith’s 1997 film Chasing Amy saved his life, so he sets off to investigate the history of the movie and how it’s received by the LGBTQ community, and to explore its relationship to him first discovering his queerness and then coming to terms with his identity as a transgender man.
Chasing Amy is somewhat of a polarizing film to the LGBTQ community, being a film that prominently features queer characters but is written and directed by a cishet man who told the story from his own point of view. Personally, I’ve been a huge fan of Kevin Smith’s films since my teen years, and Chasing Amy helped me deal with some jealousy issues in a relationship I was involved in as a teenager. I’ve always had a positive view of the film, and I don’t really see it as a movie about how a straight man “turns” a lesbian straight, but a story about how a woman who thought she was a lesbian discovering she is bisexual, or pansexual, before that term was commonly used. The scene where Holden and Alyssa are lying in bed in each other’s arms, bathed in blue light, and Alyssa explains that she came to Holden on her own terms, explains that beautifully. Furthermore, Kevin Smith is such a likable person (as the movie shows) that it’s hard to be mad at him for a movie that was clearly well-intentioned. But I appreciated Rodgers looking at all the different takes on this controversial film.
The most eye-opening interview of the movie comes from Chasing Amy star Joey Lauren Adams who reveals a lot of negative feelings about the film and her relationship with Smith that inspired the film, as well as the fact that making the movie brought her in the orbit of known sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. That was a difficult interview to watch, but really necessary for any fans of the original film. (According to the Q&A session afterwards, Kevin Smith was really good about taking responsibility for his role in Adams’ discomfort with the movie after having watched Chasing Chasing Amy, and called her interview one of his favorite parts of the documentary.) Really, whether you love or hate Chasing Amy, this is a movie for you, as it takes on every side of the film and its controversy. You’ll also absolutely fall in love with Rodgers’ wife, who features prominently in the film, and who demonstrates the power of queer love.
Rating: 92/100
Keith Garcia, artistic director of both the Sie Film Center and Cinema Q, talked a few times during the festival about wanting to both start and end the festival with comedies, namely Bottoms and Problemista, because the queer community’s strength is in its ability to laugh off the tough stuff. Thus, Problemista closed out the festival on a hilarious note. In the movie, Alejandro (Julio Torres, who also wrote and directed the film), is a young immigrant from El Salvador who comes to the United States to pursue his dream of designing toys. However, he finds the process of getting a visa sponsorship in the United States to be so Kafkaesque that it’s nearly impossible. He finds a job as a personal assistant to an absolute Karen of an art critic named Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) whose constant verbal abuse Alejandro has to suffer if he wants to stay in the country. The movie is brilliantly funny and smart and makes you genuinely frustrated for Alejandro as he struggles to achieve his impossible dream. This is made even more poignant by the use of surreal, metaphorical imagery used to depict Alejandro’s plight.
However, as much as I loved this movie, I was actually a little confused and even insulted at its inclusion in a queer film festival. Torres himself is queer, and the movie has a very brief appearance from transgender actress Shakina Nayfack (in which the character is not acknowledged as trans), but the story itself had almost no queer content. There’s one very brief scene that could be described as a queer sexual encounter, but even that encounter is one where one party is forced into it by a financial situation. That made the scene somewhat uncomfortable and of questionable consent. In addition to that, this one queer scene could have easily been cut from the movie and taken nothing away from the plot. Still, despite it not being a particularly queer film, it is an excellent movie. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing strike in Hollywood, the movie’s wide theatrical release has been pushed to 2024, so you’ll have to wait to see it. But the wait will be worth it.
Make sure to catch Cinema Q again when it comes back around next year!
Image courtesy of A24 Films
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