Newfest

Newfest is the New York LGBT Film Festival Sponsored by Marc Jacobs in which my group and I got the chance to see two films.

The first After the Storm was about a small film crew going out to New Orleans to help renovate the community center and put on a production with the sparse selection of teenagers left in the derelict city. The whole theme was moving, following the teenaged cast like in a reality show much like the set up of Drop Dead Gorgeous, showing the personal struggles of the teens living in a city with almost no community. This first film didn’t have any queer content behind it, as one audience member pointed out during question period, but it was an unmentioned theme behind some of the politics of filming, with a couple of young queer participants causing controversy merely by being themselves. This movie was inspiring and uplifting, giving success stories of all of the cast members after their role in resulting musical performance that was performed in New Orleans and New York shortly after.

The second film was the premiere of a bubbly independent film called Leading Ladies, a movie that mixed ballroom dancing with a lesbian love story, which could easily make waves in the heteronormative film market. Presented as typical (cheesy) chick flick, the main female character falls in love, but with a woman not a man. It presents alternative sexuality as a common occurrence rather than an anomaly in a true romantic story that young lesbians can gain role models from, rather than the often explicit content in other coming out and lesbian based love stories. I am not a chick flick kind of girl, I cannot seem to suspend my disbelief for long enough to follow the story, but this film managed to keep my attention using humour and the occasional song and dance. The queer content was tasteful and mainstream, realistic and balanced nicely with heteronormative life, rather than presenting the queer world as crawling with homosexuals as the L Word or Queer as Folk does.

While as in any chick flick, in this movie men are degraded in a joke or two, setting the balance towards the females that dominate the main roles of the film. The feminine viewpoint was refreshing, rather than the stagnant Hollywood female alongside the dynamic masculine hero of a lot of today’s movies, though it followed the norm of most chick flicks.

One issue with the gender presentation with this movie is that the two actresses playing the homosexual roles were typical Hollywood femmes. While homosexual romance is normalized, the tomboy was presented as a typical tomboy – jeans and a plaid collared shirt, pony tail and no make up, but following the typical feminine body type. So it spoke more to average tomboys rather than the queer youth, though I suppose a hairy armpit-ed or similarly alternative lead role would not have allowed the movie to fit into mainstream culture. Leading Ladies has continued on to other queer film festivals across America and I am sure it will be very successful in the future.