A scene from James Franco’s and Travis Mathews’s Interior. Leather Bar. to be featured at this year’s QFilms.
This year’s QFilm Festival, the annual celluloid buffet of everything LGBTQ film that attracted over 1,200 people last year alone, has announced its features lineup as it prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary.
Opening on the Friday evening of the festival will be two features, Reaching for the Moon and Jawbreaker director Darren Stein’s newest comedy, G.B.F.
Moon is Brazilian director Bruno Barreto’s newest film, exploring the famously private American poet Elizabeth Bishop and her 15-year lesbian relationship with architect Lota de Macaedo Soares. It most recently appeared at the Tribeca Film Festival to positive reviews, particularly for the performances of Miranda Otto and Gloria Pires.
With Stein announcing his indie project last October, the George Northy-penned G.B.F. has an impressive cast: Michael J. Willett, Natasha Lyonne, Megan Mullally, Horatio Sanz, Jonathan Silverman, Paul Iacono, and Sasha Pieterse. Satirizing the ongoing trend of girls taking on gay boys as accessories, Stein describes the film as something which “uses the gay closet as a metaphor for all the closets high school kids are in, any insecurity or perceived weakness that they think they have.”
Saturday and Sunday will bring forth multiple documentary and narrative features, highlighted by documentary I Am Divine and James Franco’s and Travis Mathews’s Interior. Leather Bar.
Divine is the critically acclaimed and popular documentary that has been shown at multiple festivals, examining the life of the famed drag queen that became a cult icon by headlining legendary filmmaker John Waters’s Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, amongst others.
Interior. Leather Bar.–billed a “docufiction” feature–has garnered its fair share of controversy after premiering this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Directors Franco and Mathews–who also star in the film–use the idea of recreating the deleted footage of the 1980 controversial film Cruising as a plot to explore the idea of creative freedom versus censorship as well as the actual process of making a film itself.
Other features will include the satirical romance Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf? and the documentary Getting Go: the go doc project, which will also include an advance sneak preview of Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption, the documentary that explores the controversial play by Terrence McNally.
The festival, put forth by The Center Long Beach, is set to take place over the course of three days, September 6, 7, and 8. All films will show at either the Art Theatre or The Center. Passes and tickets will be available for purchase beginning in August through the QFilm Festival page at www.qfilmslongbeach.com.
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