My Gay Film Festival in Seattle

My Gay Film Festival

Read Jetsetters Magazine at www.jetsettersmagazine.com
To read this entire feature FREE with photos cut and paste this link:
http://jetsettersmagazine.com/archive/jetezine/film/seattle/gay/gayfest/gayfilm.html

Hollywood may not know what to do with a gay character and the community may moan about lack of role models on the silver screen, but foreign films and documentaries tell a different story. At the 27th Seattle International Film Festival 2001, so many "films of interest to gays and lesbians" played that I could only see 14 of them before I had to take a break. "Iron Ladies from Thailand," and, "The Closet," should be coming to theaters soon. "Scout's Honor" played on P.O.V. to protests from the Christian Right, and "Out of the Closet" should be showing up on cable sometime in the near future. Watch for the rest of these movies, either to come out eventually (no pun intended) or as rentals.

This isn't exactly a gay film, but it is an extremely funny film about being gay in the workplace. At the director's Q&A after the film, Francis Veber (directed "The Dinner Game," and wrote the screenplay for "La Cage Aux Folles") talked about wanting to make a film about political correctness. The setup is that Daniel Auteuil plays a schlub accountant who is going to be fired from his job. He decides to pretend to be gay so that diversity laws will save his job. Gerard Depardieu plays the homophobic, racist, H.R. director. One of my favorite scenes has Depardieu buying a pink cardigan for Auteuil and having to explain it to his wife when she finds the receipt. What's great about the film. besides the laughs, is that it actually takes a look at workplace issues. As the web of lies starts to unravel, The Closet spins faster and faster into an outright farce. My only complaint was that it ended too soon. The film exposes homophobia with out resorting to it.

The premise of this movie sounds highly unlikely: a volleyball team composed of drag queens, a pre-op transsexual, and one straight man makes its way to the national championships in homophobic Thailand. What makes it interesting is that it's based on a true story. The Iron Ladies took the national title a couple of years back, and are in the running for the Thai Olympic Volleyball team. The characters go through the usual fish out of water routines, similar to "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," but the story is told with enough heart that it overcomes the clich