The world’s oldest LGBT film fest, San Francisco’s Frameline, celebrates its 40th anniversary beginning tomorrow, Thursday, June 16. Approximately 70 new and retrospective features will screen through the course of its eleven-night run before it wraps on Sunday, June 26. Highlights of the more than two dozen documentaries on offer follow:
Among this year’s Showcase Programs is THE TRANS LIST, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ latest permutation of his popular HBO projects like THE BLACK LIST and THE OUT LIST profiling a range of representatives of specific communities. Other programming focusing on trans subjects includes Shaleece Haas’ REAL BOY (pictured), which follows the coming out of a young trans man musician.
Documentaries on lesbian and queer women’s lives include: Jonah Markowitz and Tracy Wares’ POLITICAL ANIMALS, a portrait of pioneering Californian lesbian politicians; Liesa Kovacs and Nick Prokesch’s FEMME BRUTAL, about a queer burlesque troupe; and Sekiya Dorsett’s THE REVIVAL: WOMEN AND THE WORD (pictured), which follows a group of queer women of color poets on tour.
Gay male-geared nonfiction programming includes: LAST MEN STANDING (pictured), Erin Brethauer and Timothy Hussin’s portrait of long term San Francisco-based HIV/AIDS survivors; Tomer Heymann and Barak Heymann’s WHO’S GONNA LOVE ME NOW?, about an HIV+ gay Israeli man’s confrontation with his estranged family; and Robert L Camina’s UPSTAIRS INFERNO, a revisitation of an unsolved mass murder at a New Orleans gay bar in 1973.
Finally, among nonfiction work addressing the combined LGBT community are: Eddie Rosenstein’s THE FREEDOM TO MARRY (pictured), an exploration of the long path to marriage equality; and Mark Kenneth Woods and Michael Yerxa’s TWO SOFT THINGS, TWO HARD THINGS, which looks at the history of LGBT Inuit lives in the Canadian Arctic.
what (not) to doc 