London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival Report

As the 26th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival closed last Sunday at the BFI Southbank, one could be grateful for a number of things, not least the unseasonably balmy weather and the enthusiasm with which the LGBT community embraced the programme, both of which cast a warm glow over the proceedings.
Flash back a year to the 25th anniversary festival, which should have been a joyous celebration of a quarter century of queer cinematic culture, but instead was a seven-day austerity festival with an uncertain future, the legs pulled out from under it by government funding cuts to the BFI, itself the custodian of Britain's cinematic heritage. What a drag that was, no pun intended.
Having lived to fight another year, the festival returned to a near full-strength 10 days, enough to allow multiple screenings and events, but not so much that supply would exceed demand. The sun shone, the Dyke March returned and the queer community had something to celebrate again. If the LLGFF is something of an anachronism in retaining the moniker ‘lesbian and gay’, it has certainly reached beyond that binary to embrace other aspects of the LGBT community, which has expanded markedly over the last 26 years.

A certain reflectiveness might be in order, such as that evinced in the documentary Vito, about film historian and activist Vito Russo, who noted that public attitudes to homosexuality were formed by mass media and especially films. His groundbreaking book The Celluloid Closet dissected anti-gay themes prevalent in the movies, as well as teasing out hidden queer characters. He could only have dreamt of a day when researching LGBT cinema would be as simple as doing a web search, or indeed visiting the BFI’s Mediatheque and new library on the Southbank.
Another champion of civil rights was celebrated in the world premiere work-in-progress screening of Pratibha Parmar's Alice Walker: Beauty In Truth, which gave the veteran director a chance to take the spotlight and discuss her decades-long history with the Pulitzer-winning writer, a close friend. Although the Q&A was cut short by a fire alarm that emptied the venue, a selection of seven clips was screened, which included interviews with and readings by Walker and comments by Jewelle Gomez, Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg. Parmar hopes to complete work on the film in the autumn.

he previous evening the same director hosted a programme comprising her 1991 doc A Place Of Rage, accompanied by two new shorts made for an upcoming DVD release. Though two decades old, the interviews with Walker, Angela Davis and the late June Jordan still hit home, as they explain the motivation behind their activist work and writings as African-American women. Not everything has changed for the better, as Parmar noted that, although the film was commissioned by Channel 4, nowadays it would definitely not be possible to get either the funding or the platform for such a work on British terrestrial television.
That her Walker film is being funded by a combination of US sources and crowd-funding is a sign of the times, and there was a paucity of UK features this year. The one exception was Campbell X's Stud Life, a comic drama grounded in black London butch and femme culture. As ‘stud’ JJ ponders her complicated relationships, she gives a running commentary to YouTube, a nod to modern social media.
In the future, directors may need to go online to create virtual worlds, a point made explicitly in Ben Walters and Gavin Butt’s This Is Not A Dream, which traces the breakthrough of queer voices into the realm of alternative television, from cable in the 1970s to today’s YouTube ‘stars’.
The perils of stardom are at the heart of Kieran Turner's profile Jobriath A.D., which got its first screening outside of the USA. While Jobriath's brand of 1970s pomp rock is not to everyone's taste, his story is a cautionary tale. Calling himself "the true fairy of rock and roll", Jobriath was openly gay at a time when many of his contemporaries were hinting at bisexuality to seem daring. But it backfired spectacularly, as low sales saw the musician dropped by his record label and Svengali manager Jerry Brandt. Re-emerging in the early 1980s as a piano bar singer called Cole Berlin, Jobriath finally seemed to have found his calling, before he fell ill and died of complications from AIDS in 1983. Appearing at the post-screening Q&A with Marc Almond, Turner was curious to get audience feedback on whether Jerry Brandt is the villain of the piece, and a show of hands indicated a pretty even split of opinion.

http://thequietus.com/articles/08457-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival-2012-report