Bringing the inside outside

Dodie and Kevin from Justine Pimlott’s Fag Hags

Toronto, with its endless yearly film festivals, can easily be described as a moviegoer’s paradise. What a perfect location for the Inside Out Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival, which started in T.O., to strut its stuff. And the festival has every right to strut loud and proud, because it’s celebrating its 15th year of bringing queer culture’s worldwide rainbow to the screen.

Queer culture continues to evolve and challenge, but is also suppressed and reviled by many cultures and people, even in the city of Toronto where PRIDE celebrations draw nearly a million revellers to Church St. and the downtown core every year.

A common misconception people have is they won’t find anything to watch at a queer film festival. That is far from the truth: you can watch raw, fuck-heavy flicks, comedies, animation, as well as wonderful documentaries that, in the case of Fag Hags, wash over you with their honest compassion and in the case of The Troublemakers with disturbing accuracy.

Justine Pimlott, director of Fag Hags, sat in front of her computer for a quick email interview with S&H.ca about her film, which despite the somewhat abrasive title is soft, sympathetic and far removed from the negative connotations associated with the two words in the title.

“Like most people, I had a relatively narrow view of the ‘fag hag’ friendship, but the couples I interviewed for the film showed me that the relationships go far beyond the clichés and stereotypes we are all familiar with,” said Pimlott. “Ultimately, these relationships are about the joys and complexities of love, and the challenges these ‘couples’ met with were the typical challenges of many relationships.

“One of the surprises that I discovered in my research is that there is still a lot of shame around this relationship. There were some people I talked to who wouldn't be interviewed for the film, either because the man wasn't completely out in his life, or because the woman was afraid of being judged.”

The notion of platonic love is at the root of the film, something shared between many friends but without the stigma. What is so shocking about a straight woman being close friends with, in the case of Kevin and Dodie married to, a gay man?

Pimlott agreed: “On a general note, platonic love isn't shocking today, especially in the queer community where friends become chosen family, but I think profound friendship between women and men is still contested territory in some way. There's a lot of baggage in male/female relationships - especially straight women and straight men - which makes it difficult to be friends. With gay men, the relationship, because there's usually no sexual expectation, can be free from that baggage, though at times the boundaries can get confusing.”

Next into the VCR was GB Jones’ The Troublemakers, a punk-inspired film about self-expression, understanding, and the reality of living in the '80s.

“We were all really poor so I decided to make a film about what our lives were like, to really honestly portray how we were getting by,” Jones typed in an email interview. “So, on one level it’s a document of how people living on the margins of society manage to exist. But on another level, I wanted the film to capture the dichotomy between how society views people like us and how we choose to be portrayed on film.

“The world views us through their two way mirrors and cameras and articles in the paper when we get arrested and all the apparatus of the surveillance society we live in. But also there's a view of ourselves, the one the actors let me capture on film; that despite this poverty we live with a sense of style. That's why I describe The Troublemakers as being about the 'Aesthetics of Poverty'.”

With a style all its own – raw, dirty, honest – GB Jones, who has been making films for at least 20 years, tells a very different tale in The Troublemakers. The film is not about the obvious, it’s about the honesty that lurks behind the scenes, in people’s minds.

If you’ve never been to Inside Out, this is could be your year to go. The films, of which there are more than 275, paint a different colour of the rainbow.

Inside Out runs from May 19 – 29; Fag Hags screens at Cumberland 2, Sun. May 22, 7:15 pm; The Troublemakers is part of The Power and the Glory: a survey of drawings, 1985-2005 at Paul Petro Contemporary Art – www.paulpetro.com- from May 7 – June 4. For info visit - www.insideout.on.ca, call (416) 967-1528 or in-person at the Manulife Centre, main floor (55 Bloor St. W.)

Courtesy images