2011-12

Lesbian Looks launches its 2011-12 season with an exclusive Tucson screening of Ghosted, the latest film by German director Monika Treut.

With Ghosted, Treut (Female Misbehaviour, Gendernauts) returns to narrative filmmaking after a decade in documentary work with a mysterious love story about a Hamburg artist, Sophie, who is trying to come to terms with her Taiwanese lover Ai-Ling’s murder. After a run-in with the seductive Mei-Li, a journalist investigating Ai-Ling’s death, Sophie flees back to Germany. But when Mei-Li turns up on her Hamburg doorstep, the mystery deepens.

This award winning documentary tells the little-known story of the first known act of collective, violent resistance to the social oppression of queer people in the United States — a 1966 riot in San Francisco’s impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood, three years before the famous gay riot at New York’s Stonewall Inn.

With Circumstance, writer-director Maryam Keshavarz offers a taboo-busting snapshot of contemporary Tehran — a provocative psychodrama that’s part Iranian “Girls Gone Wild,” set just before the 2009 elections.

Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) and Atefeh (Nikohl Boosheri) are beautiful teenage schoolmates attracted to each other — and to a host of things considered subversive in their repressive, male-dominated homeland; at night, the young women boldly doff their head scarves, slip into revealing dresses and then party away in an underground dance club.

Sonali Gulati’s lyrical and intensely personal documentary chronicles her journey as an Indian lesbian filmmaker who returns to Delhi after an eleven year absence, to re-open what was once her family home. There, she finally confronts the loss of her mother, to whom she never came out. As she meets and speaks to parents of other LGBT Indians, she pieces together the fabric of the true meaning of family, in a landscape where, until recently, her very identity was a criminal offense.

The film has been screened at dozens of festivals throughout the world, and won twelve awards for Best Documentary.

In Tomboy, French filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s (Water Lilies) second feature, a family with two daughters, 10-year-old Laure and 6-year-old Jeanne, moves to a new suburban neighborhood during the summer holidays. With her Jean Seberg haircut and tomboy ways, Laure is immediately mistaken for a boy by the local kids, and decides to pass herself off as “Mikael,” a boy different enough to catch the attention of leader of the pack Lisa, who becomes smitten. At home with her parents and girlie younger sister, she is Laure: hanging out with her new pals and girlfriend, she is Mikael. Finding resourceful ways to hide her true self, Laure takes advantage of her new identity. But as the end of her idyllic summer approaches, so too does the dilemma of revealing her potentially unsettling secret.

Feature-length documentary Wish Me Away is a personal and intimate look at Chely Wright, the first country music star to come out as gay. After a lifetime of hiding, she shatters cultural and religious stereotypes within Nashville, her conservative heartland family, and most importantly, herself.

Over a three-year period, award-winning filmmakers Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf followed Chely’s struggle – some of which was recorded on private video diaries – and her unfolding plan to come out publicly. Using interviews with Chely, her family, key players in Nashville and her management team, the film goes deep into Chely’s back story as an established country music star and then forward in verite scenes as she prepares to step into the media glare to reveal that she is gay. Finally, the film chronicles the aftermath of that decision in Nashville, her hometown and within the LGBT community.

»Tanya’s favorite 15 Web Series of 2011-12