Outfest has been showcasing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) filmmaking since 1982. With several related events converging, this year promises to be a particularly spicy, exciting and poignant one for the longest running film festival in LA.
It's the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots--an important event in the LGBT community. In 1969, a series of spontaneous riots took place as a result of police raiding a gay hot spot in New York's Greenwich Village. Proposition 8, the California state bill banning gay marriage, was also upheld by the Supreme Court. And Outfest (as always) follows June's Gay Pride.
So, the gay rights battle wages on at Outfest--not in the streets, but on the screens. Jon Korn, a programmer at this year's event, talks about how politics is impacting the festival, and gives us a preview and some highlights of Outfest 2009 (July 9-19).
Q: What, in your opinion, are the most significant changes that the festival has undergone through the years?
Jon Korn: The most impressive thing about Outfest is its longevity. It’s the oldest continuously running film festival in Los Angeles. It’s so much fun to go back and look at the old catalogues. They’re photo copied, all hand-set. It’s been completely a labor of love. The biggest thing that’s changed more recently, as more and more film festivals appear, is that you have to do more to make sure your patrons have an experience that’s unique to your festival.
Q: What sorts of features are unique to Outfest? The Sing-Along?
JK: Yes, the cool thing about the Sing-Along is that this is the first year we gave five options and let people vote. I think voting creates a lot of excitement and allows people to be part of the programming process. The choices were Funny Girl, Hairspray (the more recent musical version), Spice World (which I thought might do well) and Hello Dolly. They ended up choosing Funny Girl. Last year it was 'South Park.' It did really well but I think people were thrilled to go back to the Barbra Streisand stuff.
Q: How does the Sing-Along work?
JK: They screen the film. Either we have a Sing-Along version with subtitles or we project the lyrics underneath. And everyone just sings along. The Sing-Along is one of the five films that we show at the Ford [Theatre]. That’s one of the most amazing experiences--the opportunity to bring a bottle of wine and a picnic basket and see a movie at one of LA’s most iconic venues.
Q: I read somewhere that Outfest is trying to target wider audiences this year. How is the festival doing this?
JK: Obviously, we have a really tremendous base audience who has supported the organization for as long as it’s been alive. As LGBT culture progresses, there are a lot of films being made that aren’t expressly 'coming out' stories. You can address a lot of topics while also being a "queer" movie. We have a film called Motherland, which is a Noir mystery about a woman whose mother is killed and she’s compelled to uncover the mystery. The fact that this character is a lesbian doesn’t impact the movie that much. You can have "queer" characters, and what’s interesting about them is not that they’re "queer."
We have gay interest films like a documentary called Sounds Like Teen Spirit. It’s a documentary about the Teen Eurovision Song Fest [in Europe]. There’s not really any gay content explicitly. But it's campy and over-the-top. That’s something we can show to anyone.
If a movie’s good, people want to see it. We’d rather show the best movies than films that are didactic about only exploring a gay subject. Digital filmmaking is also allowing more films to be made. With that comes all these different perspectives. This year we received close to 800 submissions and 300 to 400 gay features, which is kind of unbelievable and awesome.
Q: This year seems to be a heated one with the Proposition 8 battle waging. How political is Outfest?
JK: Our executive director Kirsten Schaffer said that last summer we were talking about the "summer of love." This year it’s not "the summer of love" anymore; it’s about people getting out on the streets and trying to make some change. It was a big day at the office when the decision came down from the Supreme Court. We wanted to make sure we had films that allowed people to explore and address a lot of the political topics and options that are out there right now. Also it’s the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots this year. We are showing Before Stonewall, about gay activism before the stonewall riots.
We knew that Prop 8 was going to be an issue this year again. We knew the 40th anniversary was coming as well so we wanted to focus on LGBT rights. Keeping that conversation going throughout the festival is something that was important to us.
Q: I guess the film Choosing Children addresses that?
JK: That is part of our Legacy Program, a preservation and restoration program for LGBT cinema in conjunction with the UCLA archive. It’s the only program in the world dedicated to saving and protecting LGBT films. We have the largest accessible to the public collection of LGBT images in the world, over 10,000 titles.
Choosing Children is having its 25th anniversary as well. It came out in 1984. It’s about gays and lesbians adopting children. The co-director, a woman named Kim Klausner and her co-director Debra Chasnoff are coming [to the festival]. We’re also showing Debra's newest film Straightlaced, a documentary about the changing notions of gender in high school age people right now.
