Inside Out Film and Video Festival: The Past is Present
By Liam Lacey
This year’s Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Festival, running May 24 through June 1, opens in Toronto this Friday with Canadian actor-turned-director Megan Park’s Sundance hit, My Old Ass.
My Old Ass
The coming-of-age comedy is about a college-bound lesbian teen, Elliott (Maisy Stella). While tripping on mushrooms, she is visited by her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza). The two women begin a conversation which carries through the film and, in a sense, sets the tone for a festival of films that involve many kinds of inter-generational conversations.
The most obvious division is the Boomer generation, and those who have come of age after the millennium. The first out gay generation faced prison and police raids, legal discrimination, and the devastation of the AIDs epidemic, and formed institutions like Inside Out in 1991.
The millennials and GenZers who followed included a wider spectrum of sexual identities, along with intersectional generational issues including the wealth gap, race, climate change and the conservative rabid scapegoating of drag queens and trans people.
Those generational differences are a big part of the discussion in Brian J. Smith’s A House Is Not a Disco, a year-long documentary about Fire Island Pines, the beach town and historic gay mecca not far from New York City.
Another documentary about the debt the present owes to the past is Join the Club, directed by Kip Andersen and Chris O'Connell. It traces how the relatively recent legalization of marijuana in many jurisdictions was indebted to the work of San Francisco activist Dennis Peron, a Vietnam war vet and gay man who championed the use of medical marijuana for AIDS patients, leading to California to become the first state to legalize the drug on compassionate grounds.
Of course, civil rights have not progressed at the same rate around the world. Ray Yeung’s Hong Kong-set nuanced drama All Shall Be Well — a winner at the Berlin Film Festival for Best Feature Film championing LGBTQ stories — follows a lesbian couple in their sixties.
Angie (Patra Au Ga-man) and Pat (Maggie Li Lin-Lin) are settling into contented retirement, lovingly accepted by Pat’s extended family. But when Pat dies suddenly, Angie, who has no legal partner status, finds herself at odds with her young in-laws, who see the inheritance of property as a life-changing opportunity. The issue for Angie isn’t just about a home, but the dismissal of her relationship.
In several of the Gen Z-focused films, parental figures may be toxic, supportive, or somewhere in between, but not conventionally homophobic. In the Philippines-set coming-of-age sports drama Rookie, gawky transfer student Ace lands at a girl’s Catholic school and finds herself a misfit on the volleyball team, picked on by the team’s mean but hot captain and preyed upon by the male physiotherapist.
In an unexpected scene, Ace’s single mom, who knows more than she lets on, encourages her daughter to wear her late father’s white tuxedo to the school prom.
nanekawâsis
In the documentary Dalton’s Dream, by celebrated British documentarian Kim Longinotto and co-director Franky Murray Brown, we follow the career of Dalton Harris, a young Jamaican man with a beautiful voice who won England’s 2018 X Factor television show.
He subsequently faced an angry backlash at home when an Instagram post showed him sitting on another man’s knee. The film follows his struggles with mental health, his eventual coming out as pansexual, and reconciliation with his estranged mother as part of his recovery.
If you’re looking for a young filmmaker to watch, I recommend Canadian director Susie Yankou’s jauntily assured debut film Sisters, making its world premiere at the festival. It follows besties Lou (Yankou) and Esther (Sarah Khasrovi) who find their friendship challenged when Lou discovers that her recently deceased father, George, had another daughter, and abruptly seems ready to throw over her old pal for the chic new half-sibling.
The parents in the film are silly, insensitive, judgemental, over-concerned about financial stability and, in the case of George, a certifiably “bad dad”. But no one in this contemporary dramedy seems unduly fussed about anyone’s sexual orientation.
Looking to our ancestors to guide to the future is a message in nanekawâsis, Conor McNally’s documentary about Cree artist George Littlefield, who was part of the Sixties Scoop, and whose art addresses issues of social justice.
In a film that includes several decades of archival footage, Littlefield expresses a calm and consistent point of view. Though his vivid artwork does not adhere to traditional art styles, Littlefield explains how everything he does is indebted to Indigenous spiritualism, and how he found self-acceptance about his sexuality from learning about the place that gay people traditionally had in Indigenous culture.
Possibly no film explores the queer generational theme more thoroughly than the world premiere of the homegrown documentary Uncommonly Normal (Our Gay Family), in which director Colette Johnson-Vosberg follows three generations of gay women in her family.
Pieced together with TikTok posts, home video, and decades-old 16mm film, Uncommonly Normal also employs some helpful flowcharts to explain how four grannies, a daughter and her partner, and another daughter are connected, along with home video and revelations that are both funny and painful.
Not surprisingly, the “Canada’s gayest family” concept was previously shopped as a reality television series, though the documentary format feels both more honest and respectful to the older women talking for the first time about their difficult histories.
Finally, on May 27, in another nod of respect to the old-timers — and in conjunction with the Cinema Studies Institute and McGill-Queen's University Press — Inside Out is presenting a free screening of what is widely considered the first gay Canadian film: a 60th anniversary screening of Winter Kept Us Warm, also the first Canadian film ever to screen at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film will be shown at Innis College, on the University of Toronto campus where it was filmed. Director David Secter will be in attendance, along with Chris Dupuis, the author of a new monograph on the film.
The 34th annual Inside Out 2SLGTBQ+ Festival runs from May 24 to June 1 at TIFF Lightbox.
For complete information and tickets, including digital screening options, click here.