Rita Baghdadi's feature documentary Sirens, which world premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, is a nuanced, intimate, and upbeat portrait of Lebanon's only all-female thrash metal band, Slave to Sirens. Although it opens with footage of protests on the streets of Beirut with chants of "revolution" and shots of graffiti with phrases like, "homophobia... Continue Reading →
With a screenplay by Lauren Pomerantz (SNL, The Ellen DeGeneres Show), wife and wife co-directors Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne refashion the romcom by placing a platonic female friendship at its centre. Now both in their early thirties, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) and Jane (Sonoya Mizuno) have been best friends since high school. It's become comfortable... Continue Reading →
Chase Joynt's follow up to his exceptional No Ordinary Man (co-directed with Aisling Chin-Yee) about the life of jazz musician Billy Tipton, is the equally thrillingly and similarly genre-defying feature Framing Ages—expanding upon his own 2019 short—which just had its world premiere in the NEXT lineup at Sundance. It's a fitting section of the festival... Continue Reading →
Writer-director Gabriel Martins' sophomore feature, Mars One (Marte Um), which world premiered on the opening night of Sundance 2022 and is part of the festival's World Cinema Competition, focuses on a Black working-class family in Contagem, Brazil, the Martins, as the far-right extremist Bolsonaro prepares to take office. One of the many pleasures of the... Continue Reading →
When we met with writer-director Sam Max in 2020 to discuss their haunting play Coop, they described the inspiration for the work as coming from "a profound sense of isolation, particularly as a queer person”. Their impressive debut short film, the delicate and gripping two-hander Chaperone, which world premieres at Sundance 2022 feels like it... Continue Reading →
Lizzie, an early 00s power punk-pop musical about Lizzie Borden—the turn-of-the-century axe murderer—has been ripped apart and put back together for the Sydney Festival. Dial down the history, turn up the lesbian rage. “Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, She gave her father... Continue Reading →
Ahead of Sundance 2022, taking place on the festival's online platform at Festival.Sundance.org January 20-30th (and in person at seven Satellite Screens venues around the US during the festival’s second weekend), the nonprofit Sundance Institute has announced the members of the six prize-awarding juries and the Beyond Film lineup. Among the jurors are Weekend filmmaker... Continue Reading →
Toto, I have a feeling we're in Kansas...Manhattan, Kansas to be precise. It's the conservative hometown of Sam (Bridget Everett, who hails from the town herself), a middle-aged woman who returned there to care for her terminally ill sister, Holly, and where she still finds herself living six month's after her sister's passing. Sleeping on... Continue Reading →
When the last season of the Emmy-winning Queer Eye landed on our screens in June 2020 I called it "just the queer tonic for the soul we all need in our lives right now". I hadn't anticipated that all these months on we'd still be in such need of that same tonic, but thankfully the... Continue Reading →
One of the most memorable and beloved television characters of all-time, queer or otherwise, has to be Sex and the City's fast-talking, wise-cracking, insatiably horny, and adorably handsome Italian-American Anthony Marentino, who made his debut as Charlotte York's wedding planner in the third season of the Emmy-winning series. The role was written for New York... Continue Reading →
