Arts & Entertainment
March on Washington Film Festival boasts stellar queer content
Hybrid format features films, panel discussions, theater, and VR lab
Kevin Kodama, a 26-year-old, queer, Asian-American filmmaker, was saddened and angered by the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. Then, he was a student studying film at San Francisco State University. “One of my professors encouraged me to channel my feelings {about the hate crimes} into a short film,” Kodama told the Blade.
Kodama took his professor’s advice. He wrote and directed “Shikata Ga Nai,” a poignant, compelling fantasy romance, set in a Japanese concentration camp where a lesbian couple attempts to reconcile their relationship as ghosts.
Kodama is one of the many filmmakers, theater legends and civil rights heros whose work will be showcased and honored at the March on Washington Film Festival (MOWFF) 2022 from Sept. 28 to Oct. 2.
MOWFF, in a hybrid in person and streaming format, will feature films, panel discussions, theatrical performances and the first-ever VR {virtual reality} Equity Lab in the Nation’s Capital.
From its honorees to its emerging filmmakers, the Festival has a strong queer quotient.
In its 10th year, the Festival celebrates African-American legends of theater and film who have advanced civil rights. Its theme this year is “STORY, STAGE & SCREEN.” To purchase tickets to the Festival, click here.
MOWFF was founded in 2013 on the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. Now in its 10th year, the Festival uses the power of film, music, scholarship to tell untold stories of the unsung heroes of the American Civil Rights movement. The Festival shares these narratives to connect the past to the present and the future. For information about the Festival go to: marchonwashingtonfilmfestival.org.
MOWFF is committed to highlighting stories at the intersection of racial and LGBTQIA+ justice, David Andrusia, executive director of the Festival, told the Blade.
“We want to correct stories that have been mistold,” Andrusia, who is gay, said, “Too many are silenced and kept from telling their stories.”
This year, the Festival will bestow the John Lewis Lifetime Legacy Award to Rep. Barbara Lee, a founding member and a Vice Chair of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus and the Chair of the Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus.
MOWFF2022’s other honorees are George C. Wolfe, Tony-winning director of “Angels in America” whose upcoming film “Bayard Rustin” celebrates the gay rights legend, and pioneering lesbian publicist and producer Irene Gandy, a two-time Tony Award-winner.
Lewis, Wolfe and Gandy will be honored on the Festival’s opening night.
Gandy, 78, is glad that MOWFF is being held now. “So that young people can learn about and remember Black community activists and artists who’ve fought for civil rights,” she told the Blade.
It’s important that people not forget that Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson and other artists were part of the 1963 March on Washington, Gandy said. “We have to honor the legacy and continue the activism of these artists,” she added.
Gandy doesn’t go into meetings thinking “I’m Black” or “I’m gay.” “That deafeats everything for everybody. It crowds all the good things out.”
There’s a long way to go, but things are changing, Gandy, who for over 50 years has been the only Black female press agent member of the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers (ATPAM).
“There are more Black shows now – with Black actors and produces,” she said, “with more Black managers making decisions.”
In addition to being a groundbreaking press agent and producer, Gandy is a fashionista. In 2008, she became the first female press agent to be immortalized with a Sardi’s caricature. Known for her furs, in 2015, Gandy launched
a signature collection featured in “Vogue” and her Lady Irene Fur line debuted earlier this year.
On a recent evening as she walked out of a theater on to Broadway, Gandy had an awesome encounter with a father and his five-year-old child. “The child was trans,” she said, “the child was biologically a boy. But when the Dad called him by a boy’s name, the child said ‘I’m a girl.’”
“This little, trans person didn’t know who I was – that I had won the Tonys,” Gandy said, “but she said to me ‘I love your style!’”
If they know who they are, everyone has a story to tell, she added.
The stories to be highlighted at the Festival include “Maurice Hines: Bring Them Back,” an intimate portrait of the trailblazing Black entertainer; “Mankiller,” a documentary about Wilma Mankiller, who became the Cherokee Nation’s first Principal Chief in 1985; and “The Defenders,” about lawyers who fought for civil rights in Mississippi in the early years of the civil rights movement.
After his meeting with his professor, Kodama had the idea of doing a story set in the concentration camps where Japanese Americans were interred during World War II.
“It’s a way of bridging the history of anti-Asian policies of that time with the anti-Asian racism and hate crimes of today,” he said.
Queer people who were interred during the War had to be closeted. “For most of the decades after the War, queer people were left out of stories told about the camps,” Kodama said.
“Because of homophobia – discomfort with queerness,” he added, “people didn’t talk about it. Same-sex couples had to pass as friends.”
“Shikata Ga Nai” was filmed on the site of one of the camps – Manzanar in Inyo County, California (a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service). “One of the nice things about my film is it will get people to talk about it {queer people in the camps} who haven’t talked about it.” (The film will be shown at MOWFF as part of the Student and Emerging Filmmaker Competitions.)
Derrick L. Middleton, a talented, 35-year-old, Black, gay filmmaker, uses his art to tell stories.
Middleton, born in Harlem in New York City, knew as a little boy that he was different. “I wasn’t yet labeled as ‘gay,’ but I felt like I didn’t fit in,” he told the Blade.
“It felt unnatural to try to be masculine in the way I was expected to be,” he added.
He, like other Black queer men, ran up against hyper-masculinity, when he went to a barbershop.
“Barbershops are critically important to the Black community,” Middleton said, “I want to honor them.”
When Black people were enslaved, one of the few things they could learn was how to cut hair, Middleton said. “When they were freed, owning a barbershop was one of the few businesses they could run,” he added.
But, heteronormity rules in many Black barbershops. Subtle or overt anti-queer slur often make you feel unsafe if you’re queer and Black in a Black barbershop.
“I had already come out to my family and friends,” Middleton said, “but I felt, to be safe, I had to go back into the closet when I went to a the barbershop.”
One day, he became angry and scared when he went to a Black barbershop. “The barber told me that he didn’t cut hair for sissies,” Middleton said.
He was so frightened that he couldn’t think of anything to say and ran out of the barbershop.
Out of this experience, Middleton made “Shape Up: Gay in the Black Barbershop,” an eye-opening, engrossing, moving documentary short about the stories of himself and other queer Black men in Black barbershops. The film premiered in 2016 at the White House and was awarded the Grand Prize for Emerging Documentary by the March on Washington Film Festival.
“I never thought that I, a boy who grew up in Harlem, would get an award at a White House ceremony when the country had a Black president,” Middleton said, “It was a dream come true.”
This year, Middleton has been selected for a VR Equity Lab and Fellowship. His work will be showcased in the Festival’s VR Equity Lab. Middleton’s VR Equity Lab project “Shape Up: Gay in the Black Barbershop” (The Series). The series is a spinoff that takes viewers on a journey to barbershops from different countries in the African Diaspora, using 360-degree video and animated interactive scenes to give viewers an immersive experience from the perspective of LGBTQ people.
“I hope that the Series will be mainstreamed on a platform like Hulu or Netflix,” Middleton said, “so that people who aren’t able to access it through VR will be able to see it.”
Movies
‘Leviticus’ demonizes homophobia for gripping queer horror yarn
A genuinely engaging and terrifying supernatural drama
There’s something about horror films that makes them particularly apt as a vehicle for allegory. Vampires, zombies, ghosts, or seemingly death-proof serial killers can all easily be seen as metaphors for some lurking threat from the “dark side” of our own collective psyche, and stories about them are almost always cautionary tales that remind us that it’s the “dark side” of our own nature that we must confront in order for the danger to be eliminated.
This subtext has always been present in the genre, of course; but with the so-called “renaissance” of horror cinema that has taken place across the past decade or so, modern filmmakers in the genre have made increasingly bold choices with regard to how “sub” it is. “Get Out” or “Sinners” need no explanation to get across their allegorical points about racism, nor does “The Substance” require an expert to recognize its satirical observations about the toxic cultural obsession with youth and beauty. These are movies that wear their proverbial hearts on their sleeves, instead of masking them behind layers of cliched and “coded” plot tropes.
The same can definitely be said of “Leviticus,” the debut feature from Australian writer/director Adrian Chiarella, which not only hinges on a conceit that has obvious associations with its not-so-hidden themes but tips off the whole thing by its very choice of title – a reference to the Old Testament book frequently cited by fundamentalist bigots as so-called proof of God’s condemnation of homosexuality, which sets up exactly what we are in for before the opening credits even begin to roll.
Set in a conservative rural town (in the Australian state of Victoria, though it will feel distinctly familiar to anyone who grew up in similar communities anywhere else in the world), it centers on Naim (Joe Bird), a teen boy newly transplanted by his mother (Mia Wasikowska) – who has ties to a fundamentalist Christian enclave there – after the death of his father. Their new life – like seemingly everything else in the community – is tied directly to the church, which makes it doubly inconvenient when Ryan (Stacy Clausen), son of the town’s presiding preacher, invites him for an after-school “hangout” which leads to a furtive make-out session in the town’s deserted mill.
Though the boys promise each other to keep it secret, they are both soon “outed” to their parents and subjected to a ritual performed by a mysterious “deliverance healer” (Nicholas Hope), intended to “protect” them from their “sinful” impulses. Soon after, a series of mysterious and violent encounters lead them to investigate local rumors around incidents involving other local teens – and the revelation that the ritual has summoned a malevolent entity, which appears to them as the person they are most attracted to (in this case, each other) and unleashes its murderous wrath when they give in to temptation. Their only chance of staying safe is to stay apart – unless they can find a way to defeat the supernatural force that has been turned loose against them.
Yes, it’s all very obvious. There is no attempt to mask what Chiarella’s movie is really about, though the word itself – like the biblical book with which it shares a title – is never spoken aloud in the film. It’s hardly a spoiler, though, to confirm that “Leviticus” is a story about homophobia. From its obvious evocation of real-life “conversion therapy” to its more subtle exploration of the secrecy and social shaming that surrounds same-sex love for so many teens growing up in an environment of fundamentalist religious tradition, every nuance of the film’s ingenious premise announces the clear intent of its messaging: homophobia is the true evil at work here, and its deadly power lies in its ability to make queer people afraid of being who they are.
While some might argue that presenting such an “on the nose” allegory in what is ostensibly “just” a horror film is a heavy-handed choice, we suggest – in this case, at least – that it’s exactly what makes the movie work so effectively.
From the very first scenes (after a prologue that ominously hints at the arcane evil that will soon come into play), we are invested in Naim and Ryan, whose tentative-but-joyous afternoon tryst is bound to trigger our own individual memories of adolescent sexual awakening, and whom we hope will be able to navigate their way through to the other side – even before the introduction of supernatural hate demons being summoned to kill them by using their own feelings for each other as a trap. They’re almost a definitive queer “coming of age” archetype, echoing generations of treasured “first time” memories and “what if“ fantasies about what might have been; we want them to be together, to overcome the otherworldly forces deployed to keep them apart – and when their romance is distorted, inverting their natural attraction into fear and mistrust, it’s their own inability to resist the pull they feel toward each other that continues to put them in danger.
That emotional stake is the anchor of “Leviticus,” which lends an imperative to what might otherwise be a campy B-movie thriller and turns it into a genuinely engaging – and therefore terrifying – supernatural drama that is all the more powerful for playing to our hearts. Much of this effect hinges on the chemistry between its two young stars (which hits just the right pitch between irresistible hormonal urge and inseparable soul connection), but it’s also underscored by the irony of their being immersed within a culture that would rather destroy them than allow them to exist outside its traditional norms.
Nevertheless, while “Leviticus” succeeds by making us identify with its cult-crossed teenage lovers, it pays off by delivering not just a genuinely unsettling, profoundly disturbing, and unflinchingly brutal personification of religious bigotry at its most cruelly hateful, but by providing a tense and terrifying horror scenario that works on a pure “genre” level. Simply put, even setting aside any wider subtext about the deadly consequences of homophobia, it’s a creepy, nerve-wracking ride.
A critical hit as part of the Sundance Festival’s “Midnight” section earlier this year, “Leviticus” went into theatrical release on June 19, the latest in a continuing trend of fresh and inventive films that has elevated the horror movie to new levels of critical appreciation. For us, it’s worth singling out as a boldly original expression of queer experience, elegantly constructed from the reinterpreted formulas of a genre that has always had particular draw for those in our community who knew how to read between the lines.
The difference is, this time we don’t have to – the message is spelled out loud and clear, and that in itself is enough to make it feel a little bit like empowerment, at a time when we could all use as much of it as we can get.
Friday, June 26
Trans Discussion Group will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This event is intended to provide an emotionally and physically safe space for trans people and those who may be questioning their gender identity/expression to join together in community and learn from one another. For more details, email [email protected].
DC Bird Alliance will host “Second Annual Ride for Pride” at 9 a.m. at the Yards Marina. This event is for celebrating community, belonging, and our shared connection to nature. Together, we’ll enjoy a guided one-hour boat ride departing from The Yards Marina, exploring the river’s wildlife, history, and ongoing restoration. Along the way, participants may spot Ospreys, herons, egrets, cormorants, Bald Eagles, turtles, and other species that call the Anacostia home. For more details, visit Eventbrite.
Saturday, June 27
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
“Sunshine: A Sapphic Pride Day Party” will be at 1 p.m. at Spark Social. This is a patio party for queer women & sapphics 35+. For more details, visit Eventbrite.
Sunday, June 28
Trap Laughsss Pride Comedy Night will be at 7 p.m. at Sid’s Gold Request Room. This in-person event is where comedy meets Pride, bringing you hilarious performances that’ll have you rolling in the aisles. Whether you’re here to celebrate or just enjoy some fantastic jokes, this night is all about fun, community, and laughs. Don’t miss out on the best comedy bash around! More details are on Eventbrite.
Monday, June 29
“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
Tuesday, June 30
The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community will host a screening of “Swann Queen” at 7 p.m. This is a short film by Lcedeño Miller inspired by the true story of William Dorsey Swann – considered one of the world’s first drag queens. Billy Swann and their brother Dan are preparing to host their third masquerade ball. When the police raid the party, Billy must decide whether to run or resist. Swann Queen is a story about community, survival, and the legacy of LGBTQ+ resistance in Washington, D.C. Screening followed by conversation. For more details, visit the Center’s website.
Wednesday, July 1
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit www.thedccenter.org/careers.
Thursday, July 2
The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the Center. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community’s website.
The Baltimore Orioles will take on the Washington Nationals on Friday, June 26 at 7 p.m. for Pride Night at Oriole Park.
The first 15,000 fans will receive an exclusive Pride Night Orioles jersey. The Washington Blade is a media sponsor of this event.
To purchase tickets, visit Orioles.com/Tickets.
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