If you’d asked me a couple of months ago what I thought the country of origin of the best lesbian film at this year’s Out in Africa festival would be, I seriously doubt whether Zimbabwe would’ve sprung to mind. An African country with a sketchy movie history, a struggling economy and a homophobic nutter as a president is not the obvious candidate for the honour.
In making Forbidden Fruit directors Sue Maluwa Bruce and Beathe Kunath faced another problem — the cast pulled out days before shooting began, fearing repercussions from the government. Undaunted, Maluwa Bruce rounded up some family and friends and proceeded.
What she’s come up with is probably better than what she originally intended to make. Maluwa Bruce is an inspired storyteller — not just as a film-maker, but as a narrator/actor. She relates the tale of two rural women, Nongoma and Tsistsi, who fall in love and face the wrath of their families when their relationship is discovered. But this is no Romy and Juliet in the African bush, it’s a delightful story told simply and with plenty of charm. It’s a pity it’s so short.
In comparison, several of the other lesbian films seem heavy-handed and over-stylised. A case in point is The Journey to Kafiristan, about a trip taken by ethnologist Ella Maillart and writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach just before the outbreak of World War II. It’s filled with awesome desert vistas but the story is as arid as the location and the continuity errors start to irritate after awhile.
Slightly less doom-laden but equally disjointed is Shindo Kaze’s Love/Juice, described as a “cool chick chic Japanese flick”. More likely a “cool chick chic Japanese fish”. The endless scenes of everything from piranha to goldfish are worthy of Cousteau, but I stopped trying to unravel the deep significance of all this fishy footage once the resemblance of “Kyoto” to Deedee in Dexter’s Laboratory cartoons became apparent.
Lost & Delirious, Lea Pool’s offering from Canada, is set in a girls’ boarding school. It’s not quite Dead Poets’ Society in drag, but close.
Since the heydey of Marlene Dietrich, androgynous women have set the screen alight. Agathe de la Boulaye is the painter in The Girl, a French triumph of style over substance that is very pleasing on the eye.
Out of Season is one of those movies that are now mass-produced to please the United States gay market. Strip away the warm, fuzzy feeling you get from seeing two lesbians as the stars and you have a pretty pedestrian, formulaic film.
Lukas Moodysson’s Tillsammans (Together), on the other hand, is almost impossible to categorise. Set in a Swedish commune in the 1970s, at first glance it appears a strange choice for the Out in Africa festival. Gay and lesbian issues are almost peripheral to the central story, which involves a woman who leaves her drunken, abusive husband to stay with her brother in a liberated communal house. It’s about sexual awakening on all fronts, and brings a gentle, wry humour to its message of tolerance.
Besides Forbidden Fruit, the short films on offer are a mixed bunch. Atomic Sake is very pretty and pretty pointless, while Rebel Rebel gets across its message — that young lesbian drug-taking dropouts are infinitely preferable to middle-aged middle-class drones — with the subtlety of a brick lobbed through a plate-glass window.
Meeting (a bad translation from Entrevue) is an elevating experience, turning accepted norms on their heads, while Watching You marks Stephanie Abramovich as a young director to watch. Her story of love among working women in Israel shows low-budget does not have to mean low-quality.
Two of the highlights of the films about women are documentaries. My Left Breast is Gerry Rogers’s uncompromising story of her own experience of breast cancer and chemotherapy. Film-makers Rogers and her partner Peggy Hartwell manage to infuse their story with warmth and strength and breath-taking footage from around their home in Newfoundland. It’s a brave and affirming view of a topic few women feel comfortable discussing.
Southern Comfort, the title of Kate Davis’s documentary, is also the name of one of the biggest gatherings of transsexuals in the southern US and Robert Eads is determined to be there. What threatens his attendance at the conference is ovarian cancer — a cruel cosmic joke created by the fact that the doctors who turned Barbara into Robert neglected to remove her reproductive system. Female to male transsexuals are not as common as the reverse procedure, and Davis spends nearly a year documenting Robert’s efforts to find treatment and his eventual death. Doctors turn him away “because women might be offended if they saw him in [the doctor’s] office”. It makes you angry enough to bomb the World Trade Centre.
Out in Africa is on at Cinema Nouveau in Johannesburg until February 24, in Cape Town at the V&A Waterfront February 21 – March 3, then moves to Durban. Call 021Â 465Â 9289 or visit www.oia.co.za