Inside Out Festival 2021: Virtually exploring intimacy in a time of separation
By Liam Lacey
The opening night film of this year’s Inside Out Film Festival (available across Ontario from May 27-June 6) is a tender charmer, Language Lessons.
For a 2SLGBTQ+ film festival, it’s a somewhat surprising love story (albeit platonic) between a man and a woman. But as the proverb says, adversity makes strange bedfellows.
The directorial debut of actress Natalie Morales (Abby’s, Parks and Recreation), Language Lessons was created within the restrictions of the COVID pandemic. Co-written by its stars, Morales and Mark Duplass, it’s a drama about loneliness that consists almost entirely of video chats.
Two spirit Indigenous youth activist Sherenté Harris in Being Thunder.
Adam (Duplass) is a recent widower living in his late husband’s Oakland home. He is taking Spanish language lessons with his Costa Rican-based teacher, Cariño (Morales). As Adam works through his grief, he and his teacher form a connection through the narrow rectangle of their laptop screens.
While it’s unusual to find any film that focuses on friendship, Language Lessons, touches on themes common in several of this year’s films: A struggle for intimacy and caring that is beyond what we usually think of as sexuality.
CLICK HERE to view Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Language Lessons director Natalie Morales.
But then, “What is sex?” That’s the question Alex Liu asks in his playful, first-person documentary, A Sexplanation, in which he tries to come to terms with growing up in a Roman Catholic Asian-American family and with his own near-suicidal shame about being gay.
Liu puts the question to several experts who offer advice on the subject. But they all stumble to some degree, when trying to find a way of defining the all-pervasive implications of those loaded three letters, S-E-X, which embraces love, touch, lust, self-expression, and all the urges and bonds that keeps the human herd together.
Liu, a San Francisco-based health reporter, does his legwork, including interviews with a sex-positive Catholic priest, right-to-lifers, porn merchants and anti-porn crusaders. The intrepid reporter even masturbates while inside an MRI machine for the benefit of some New Jersey neuro-scientists studying the brain on sex (Well, they claim they’re neuroscientists).
Prodigal transgender daughter Dawn (Maya Henry) rebuilds a tractor and a relationship
Here’s a sampling of some of this year’s other films about people working to create connections, before they were constrained by masks and Zoom calls. Also, please check out our earlier Original-cin.ca reviews of two more Inside Out films, the Hot Docs audience-award winning rockumentary about the influential all-female rock band, Fanny: The Right to Rock and the recent LGBT-themed Canadian horror film, Bloodthirsty.
Two (Drama)
Two Israeli women, Omer (Mor Polanuer) and Bar (Agam Schuster), go through the frustrations of artificial insemination in Omer’s effort to conceive a baby. Much of this is a conventional pregnancy drama about the relationship strains of trying to conceive, though backstory involves a traumatic event in Bar’s life that serves as a critique of Israel’s (now altered) laws on same sex adoption.
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Mama Gloria (Documentary)
When Gloria Allen, a transgender African American woman with a strict sense of style and decorum, saw young trans women at a Chicago community centre behaving in an undignified manner, she decided to set up a charm school for them. That led to a newspaper article, and then a play, which played in cities throughout the United States. Now in her late seventies, Mama Gloria has had a harrowingly difficult life, but she remains a resilient joyful presence. And her account of trans history, dating back pre-Stonewall, is an illuminating one.
Ma Belle, My Beauty (Drama)
This Sundance audience award winner is set in a villa in the south of France, where a married couple, French musician Fred (Lucien Guignard), and African American singer Bertie (Idella Johnson), are reunited with their old mutual American lover, Lane (Hannah Pepper). Bertie is disillusioned with her life in Europe and Fred hopes to reignite her musical enthusiasm by bringing Lane back into their lives. In a somewhat self-conscious study of the ups and downs of polyamory, the film is full of flowing music, wine-fuelled outdoor lunches, sunbathing, tears, and mingled sweat. A suggested alternate title might be Poly Me By Your Name.
Being Thunder (Documentary)
French director Stéphanie Lamorré’s documentary hops and skips through moments in the life of Sherenté Harris, a two-spirit teenager and competitive pow-wow dancer who broke through traditional boundaries, winning competitions in both male and female categories. And it has a lot of say about racism, history, and Indigenous pride.
More conventional journalistic context would be welcome (you can get some background by watching Harris’s TED Talk). But in essence, we meet one of those inspiring young activists, who - like environmentalist, Greta Thunberg, girls’ education advocate Malala Yousafzai, or Parkland anti-gun survivor, X González - wields a persuasive voice and wisdom beyond his/her years.
Summertime (Drama/performance hybrid)
Director Carlos López Estrada developed this exuberant drama/comedy from the work of Los Angelean high-school poets into a sort of contemporary version of Fame. Over the course of one hot day, two dozen youth perform their poetry in dramatized scenes around the city, on buses, in burger joints, and roller skating through the street. They address issues of sexual orientation, race, stupid jobs and how parents just don’t understand. The only non-woke element here is the focus on the great American teen tradition of consuming ground-up animal parts between burger buns.
My First Summer (Drama)
An outré, if sincere mash-up of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures and a same-sex version of the adolescent idyll of Blue Lagoon. This Australian gothic-erotic fantasy traces the summer love affair between two 16-year-old girls. One, Grace (Maiah Stewardson), dresses in candy-coloured outfits and loves sugary treats. The other, Claudia (Markella Kavenagh), is a frightened introvert hiding out in her house after her novelist mother committed suicide, a la Virginia Woolf, by filling her pockets with rocks and drowning. Meanwhile, two lackadaisical detectives (Steve Mouzakis and Harvey Zielinski) take all summer to figure out that the famous writer had a daughter, and to close in on the lovers.
A Distant Place (Drama)
This handsomely crafted, melancholic South Korean pastoral drama by Park Kunyoung takes place on a sheep farm, where hired hand Jin-Woo, lives with his young niece, Seol, while his employers — a farmer, his aged mother, and his adult daughter — treat them as part of their extended family. Complications arise when Jin-Woo is joined by his lover, a poetry teacher, and later, visited by Jin-Woo’s twin sister, looking to reclaim Seol and take the girl back to the city. The title refers to the struggle between freedom and loneliness for each of the characters in this entangled family.
Dawn, Her Dad and the Tractor (Drama)
This Canadian agricultural dramedy blends a sad/inspirational soundtrack, earnest message, and quasi sitcom premise. When a family reunites on the Ontario family farm for their mother’s funeral, prodigal son, Don, returns after a five-year absence as prickly transgender daughter, Dawn (Maya Henry). Dawn looks “exactly like” her late mother, arousing the sibling resentment of her repressed sister (Amy Groening). Dawn, meanwhile, must negotiate the variously friendly/curious and bigoted small-town reaction, and rebuild her relationship with her taciturn father (Robb Wells) through the reconstruction of the third-billed antique Ford Jubilee tractor.
Individual tickets for the Inside Out festival are $12, or $50 for a pack of five. For complete information about this year’s film schedule and buying tickets for online streaming, go to insideout.ca.