Funding the Out-in-Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, now in its seventh year of existence, has always been a problem. When director Nodi Murphy goes looking for corporate sponsorship, she frequently gets told that they’d love to invest, but she has to take the “gay and lesbian” part out of the festival’s title. Which, as she says, is rather like being asked to go back into the closet.
Sponsors such as J&B and Bell’s whisky have given support in the past, but every year the search has to be renewed, and the corporates aren’t exactly rushing to associate themselves with a gay and lesbian event.
“The way forward,” says the festival, “is self-reliance.” This means asking members of the community served by the festival to put up some money. “We are attempting to secure a minimum of R1-million, which may be raised through the annual donation of R120 by 8Â 333 people. This amounts to the cost of one cappuccino or a box of cigarettes per month – think about it.”
Participants will get certificates and will be entered in a holiday competition. A further fundraising dinner is planned, at which more substantial investors will be sought from the ranks of what some refer to as “the A-gays”.
Let’s hope that the festival gets enough to carry on with, because it is a unique event, with a dedicated following, and an important history of activism – think of the political heavyweights, from Carl Niehaus to Cheryl Carolus, who have been invited to speak at festival openings, and have accepted. This is a public sign of state support for gay rights and visibility as part of a new democracy.
And then there are the movies. The Out-in-Africa festival has done what festivals are supposed to do – show us movies we wouldn’t otherwise get to see. Where else are you going to get a Bruce LaBruce retrospective? Where else will you see anything at all by Rosa von Praunheim, one of this year’s guests?
This year’s festival covers the usual spectrum. There are no trends to be discerned – the mainstreaming of homosexuality in the cinema has been parallelled by its de-mainstreaming. For every reasonably budgeted movie, likely to reappear a while after the festival at a Cinema Nouveau near you, there is a risky little experiment on the outer edges of sexuality.
This year, the range stretches from mainstreamy commercial pictures such as But I Am a Cheerleader (about a lesbian whose parents try to have her reprogrammed)and The Broken Hearts Club (described as a gay version of Diner, and starring TV Superman Dean Cain)to the quite mad and possibly unintelligible Japanese road movie The Story of Pupu.
Certainly, one gets a sense of world gay cinema, from the Indian traditions explored in Chutney Popcorn to the Peruvian film Don’t Tell Anyone, which tells of the psychological torture to which homosexuals in Latin America are subjected by the awful confluence of machismo and Catholicism – as one character says, “Here you can be a cokehead, a thief, a womaniser, whatever, but you can’t be a faggot.”
French filmmaker François Ozon is represented by three films. His Criminal Lovers is a dark thriller; Sitcom is a delirious social comedy in the Bu-uel mode, while Like Water Drops on Burning Rocks is a rather datedly angsty filming of a 1970s play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Fassbinder is also dealt with in Von Praunheim’s documentary about him and the women in his life – one of whom was editor Ila von Hasperg, who worked on another movie showing at the festival this year, the delightful and touching Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel.
The festival often provides an opportunity to look back into gay film history. This year, you can catch up with the 1931 classic Mädchen in Uniform, celebrating its 70th birthday, as well as Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George (1968).
The feature films have the glamour, but there are some very strong documentaries on this year’s festival. The Eyes of Tammy Faye looks at the heavily mascara’d televangelist’s life through gay eyes, and it is both hilarious and heart-warming.
Homophobia: That Painful Problem is a rapid-fire exposé of how much hatred is still directed at homosexual people in the supposedly civilised world. Two Brides and a Scalpel is the absorbing story of Canada’s first legally married lesbians – okay, one of them was still technically a man when the knot was tied, but that’s the fascination of the tale.
South African filmmaking – oh that there were more! – is represented by stalwart Jack Lewis, showing A Normal Daughter. This documentary tells the story of Kewpie and other drag queens at the centre of the vibrant life of District Six from the Fifties to the Seventies.
As always, when it comes to the gay and lesbian film festival, diversity is strength. But if you want to keep seeing such movies over the years to come, you’re going to have to bring your chequebook.
The festival runs at Cinema Nouveau Rosebank from February 1, Brooklyn from February 2, and Cavendish Square from February 18. See Q, the website for questioning queers, for ongoing commentary on individual festival movies.