Category: Q-Fest

Come get your Q on! The 12th Annual QFest St. Louis, presented by Cinema St. Louis,runs April 28-May 2, 2019, at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar) .The St. Louis-based LGBTQ film festival, QFest will present an eclectic slate of 28 films (14 shorts, seven narrative features, and seven documentary features). The participating filmmakers represent a wide variety of voices in contemporary queer world cinema. The mission of the film festival is to use the art of contemporary gay cinema to spotlight the lives of LGBTQ people and to celebrate queer culture. The full schedule can be found HERE

The 12th Annual QFest St. Louis continues Tuesday April 30th. Here’s Tuesday’s schedule:

5:00pm April 30th: THE GOSPEL OF EUREKA – This is a FREE screening
(though tickets are required from box office)

Eureka Springs, Ark., is a one-of-a-kind oasis in the Ozarks where Christian piety rubs shoulders with a thriving and open queer community. Known for its natural springs, the town serves as home to both the 1,500-foot concrete sculpture known as Christ of the Ozarks and a surprising number of gay resorts, B&Bs, bars, and businesses. Narrated with homespun humor by Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, “The Gospel of Eureka” spotlights the space where the town’s seemingly contradictory factions intersect: Lee and Walter, the out and proud married owners of a local gay bar that they describe as a “hillbilly Studio 54,” talk about their deep-seated faith; a Christian T-shirt designer confesses his love for his gay father; and everything comes together in a show-stopping mashup of a spectacular Passion Play and raucous drag show. Variety enthuses: “Here in this rhinestone on the Bible Belt, the filmmakers find that most residents just want to get along, despite loudmouths on the news rattling their sabers. This cheerful small-town portrait makes for an idealistic crowd-pleaser (after all, Eureka Springs is the rumored home of healing waters), but this beautiful, and beautifully shot, documentary is a cure for the angry headline blues.” 

Shown with: 

Grandmother and Me (Kat Cole, U.S., 2018, 7 min.): In this intimate documentary, the director creates a visual letter to her fiancé’s 100-year-old  grandmother, exhuming long-kept secrets to capture the complexities of familial love and the subtle effects of transphobia in the home.

7:00pm April 30th: MAKING MONTGOMERY CLIFT – Ticket information can be found HERE

Montgomery “Monty” Clift was one of the most influential actors in the history of cinema, starring in such iconic films as “Red River,” “The Misfits,” “From Here to Eternity,” “A Place in the Sun,” “Judgment at Nuremberg,” “Suddenly, Last Summer,” “I Confess,” “The Heiress,” and “Raintree County.” Clift bucked traditions on and off screen, but countless biographies have reduced him to labels like “tragically self-destructive” and “tormented,” describing him as a self-loathing, closeted alcoholic whose repressed sexuality led him to “the slowest suicide in Hollywood history.” In “Making Montgomery Clift,” nephew Robert Anderson Clift and Hillary Demmon rigorously examine the flawed narratives that have come to define Monty’s legacy. Drawing on interviews with family members and loved ones and a rich collection of unreleased archival materials from Monty and his brother, Brooks Clift, this fresh portrait of the actor’s passions, contributions, and commitment to living and working in his own way gives one of Hollywood’s underappreciated legends his due. Seattle’s The Stranger writes: “The documentary manages to be not only a strikingly honest take on Clift but also a moving exploration of a lost relative and a meta-analysis of the ways media creates a biography.”

9:00pm April 30th: KNIFE+HEART – Ticket information can be found HERE

Set in the gay underworld of 1979 Paris, Yann Gonzalez’s sexy and murderous “Knife+Heart” follows Anne (Vanessa Paradis), a porn producer coping with heartbreak who is thrust into a lurid mystery after her actors, one by one, begin to fall victim to a leather-clad masked killer. With her relationship to her lover and colleague (Kate Moran) on the rocks and the police unwilling to mount a proper investigation, Anne finds herself alone as she pursues a small lead through dark forests and seedy film sets, encountering along the way a slate of outlandish characters, from a deformed ornithologist to a phantasmal, grief-stricken mother. With a pulsing, sensuous score by French band M83 (of which director Gonzalez is a former member), the film is both a celebration of ecstatic, unrestrained hedonism and a macabre descent into the psychosexual realm of transgression and the violent reactions it so often provokes. This stylish thriller premiered at 2018 Cannes Film Festival and has been nominated for nearly two dozen international awards. Lead actress Paradis (“The Girl on the Bridge’) turns in a soulful, dark performance as her world is literally cut to pieces. Selecting the film as a New York Times Critic’s Pick, writer Glenn Kenny says that “Knife+Heart” “packs in plenty of cinema acrobatics and spectacle without ever feeling out of control” and calls the film “an apt, and not at all unserious, example of queer cinema at its most playful.”

Come get your Q on! The 12th Annual QFest St. Louis, presented by Cinema St. Louis,runs April 28-May 2, 2019, at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar) .The St. Louis-based LGBTQ film festival, QFest will present an eclectic slate of 28 films (14 shorts, seven narrative features, and seven documentary features). The participating filmmakers represent a wide variety of voices in contemporary queer world cinema. The mission of the film festival is to use the art of contemporary gay cinema to spotlight the lives of LGBTQ people and to celebrate queer culture. The full schedule can be found HERE

The 12th Annual QFest St. Louis begins this Sunday, April 28th. Here’s Sunday’s schedule:

1:00pm April 28th: TRANSGEEK – This is a FREE screening
(though tickets are required from box office)

“TransGeek” brings together the stories of transgender people working in the tech industry and participating in geek and gamer cultures. The film documents people who, in pursuit of their passions, risked their careers and lives to be their authentic selves; who persevered in an industry that undervalues women, LGBTQ folk, and people of color; who found themselves in the pages of science fiction and fantasy or, when they didn’t see themselves represented, wrote their own stories; and who turned to the Internet to build communities that transcend geography and bigotry only to find themselves again the target of hatred and harassment. “TransGeek” allows transgender people to tell their own stories in their own voices, using in-depth interviews conducted over a period of several years to explore the lives, hobbies, politics, careers, and thoughts of transgender geeks. The film features an original score composed by Zoë Blade, a British electronic musician and transgender woman.

Shown with:

Listen (Jake Graf, U.K., 2018, 4 min.): Featuring young trans actors, this short frankly depicts some of the myriad struggles experienced daily by trans children and teenagers.

3:30pm April 28th: DEAR FREDY – Ticket information can be found HERE

Fredy Hirsch, a proud Jew and openly gay man, was born in Germany in 1916. When the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935, Hirsch fled from Germany to the Czech Republic, where he worked as a much admired sports teacher in a Jewish youth club. With the deportation of the Jews to Terezin — a combination of ghetto and concentration camp — Hirsch was appointed head of the Youth Services Department and helped care for more than 4,000 children and teens. Later, when he was sent to Auschwitz, Hirsch managed to persuade Josef Mengele to set up a daycare center, providing some 600 children their final moments of happiness. Ironically, it was in Auschwitz that Hirsch escaped homophobia for the first time in his life: He was out and had a lover, but people embraced Hirsch for his good work. Combining rare photographs, archival footage, witness testimony, and animation, “Dear Fredy” tells Hirsch’s amazing story, which includes planning a never-realized revolt with members of the underground in Auschwitz. 

5:30pm April 28th: VITA AND VIRGINIA – Ticket information can be found HERE

When aristocratic socialite and writer Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) first espies Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki) in Bloomsbury, London, she immediately vows to pursue the famous novelist — thus starting one of the most notorious and convention-shattering love affairs in literary history. This sensuous and highly literate love story — which would eventually result in Woolf’s landmark novel “Orlando,” whose androgynous, gender-bending title character was based on Vita — draws heavily on the letters the two married women exchanged. With its lavish costumes and seductive settings, “Vita & Virginia” transports viewers into a past that seems a century ahead of its time. Lauding Debicki’s “astonishing performance,” Variety writes: “With her as the lodestar, this is a stranger and more intriguing film than it really has a right to be, one that becomes less about a clandestine courtship between famous women, and more about Woolf’s relationship with her writing, and with the workings of her own beautiful, restless mind.” Isabella Rossellini co-stars as Vida’s stern mother-in-law, Lady Sackville. 

8:00pm April 28th: SORRY ANGEL – Ticket information can be found HERE

From acclaimed writer/director Christophe Honoré (“Love Songs,” “Dans Paris”), “Sorry Angel” — which premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival — is a heartbreaking film that offers a mature and deeply emotional reflection on love and loss, youth and aging. In 1993, Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps), a writer and single father in his 30s, is trying to maintain his sense of romance and humor in spite of health issues and the turmoil in his life and the world. While on a work trip to Brittany, he meets Arthur (Vincent Lacoste), an aspiring filmmaker in his early 20s. Experiencing a sexual awakening and eager to escape his parochial life, Arthur becomes instantly smitten with the older man. A final side to the triangle is added in Mathieu (Denis Podalydès), Jacques’ fortysomething Paris neighbor. An inter-generational snapshot of cruising, courtship, and casual sex amid the rising worldwide AIDS crisis, “Sorry Angel” balances hope for the future with agony over the past, providing an unforgettable drama about finding the courage to love in the moment. The LA Times writes: “Among other things, ‘Sorry Angel’ is a lovingly detailed affirmation of gay male identity, albeit one that never feels as diagrammed or predetermined as that description.”

Check back here at We Are Movie Geeks for more coverage of this years ‘QFest St. Louis’