The 50th San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival ended with a split decision: The San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle awarded its Outstanding First Feature Award to Adrian Chiarella. Leviticus McConnell Medal exam After voting ended in a statistical tie – the first of its kind for the festival’s jury awards.
Chiarella’s Australian debut uses horror to excavate internalized and externalized homophobia. McConnell exama gritty sports drama, received particular praise for the star-making performance from screenwriter Brock Urich, who played a closeted amateur bodybuilder.
And on the audience side, Jane Schönbrunn’s The Closing Night Teen sex and death in Miasma camp — a psychosexual horror film starring Hannah Einbender and Gillian Anderson — won best feature film, while Efrain Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s experimental rodeo documentary won. Jaribio It won best documentary.
Bridie O’Connor Barbara forevera portrait of pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, won Outstanding Documentary Feature and is scheduled to hit theaters through a Strand release this fall.
The short film award went to the Brazilian Morpheus and Charon (A wonderful short narrative) by Cecil Fountain-Jardim Doug + me (A wonderful short documentary), a formally innovative film about the director’s uncle, who died of AIDS before she was born.
The festival’s closing weekend, which coincided with San Francisco’s Pride celebrations — the massive citywide celebration of all things queer — brought two raucous, sold-out premieres to the Castro Theater, the legendary movie theater in the heart of the city’s gay district that recently reopened after a $41 million renovation.
On Thursday, John Early made his debut Material secretin honor of films such as Kate’s secret1985 television film starring Meredith Baxter, about a woman with an eating disorder. Introducing the film, he early thanked Fremline on stage and joked that the film was “designed backwards to be shown in the Castro” — rather than waiting a decade to re-evaluate the camp classic, he said, he wanted to go straight to the audience, the theater and the city for which it was built.
Documentary Saturday Honky Jesus — the history of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a long-standing charitable organization led by Sister Roma, “the most photographed nun in the world™” (real name Michael Williams) — attracted an equally enthusiastic audience in her hometown, where Sister Roma proved herself a natural movie star: Bea Arthur in kabuki make-up, with comedic timing to match.
Frameline50 attracted nearly 50,000 participants over 11 days, showcasing nearly 150 films from more than 30 countries.
