Frameline, the oldest and longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival in the world, celebrates its FIFTIETH annual festival, opening this Wedesday and running through June 27. Frameline50 brings us festival award-winners from Cannes to the Berlinale, with over 140 films from 35 countries.
As in my Frameline coverage last year, I’ve focused on the international cinema in the program. The Frameline programmers have a gift for finding the promising films of new directors, such as last year’s Diciannove. Here are my recommendations, beginning with a Must See from Tunisia.
In the coming-out drama, In a Whisper, Lilia (Eya Bouteraa) is a Paris engineer who returns to her native Tunisia for her uncle’s funeral. Intending to come out to her family, she brings her French girlfriend Alice (Marion Barbeau), who is eager to meet and join Lilia’s family. Lilia plants Alice at a hotel until the time is right. But Lilia finds her family in turmoil, because the uncle has died in suspicious circumstances and the family is desperate to keep it a secret that he was a closeted gay man. Lilia and Alice launch their own investigation of the uncle’s death, that takes them from a gay-friendly nightclub in the city to a remote village. In her third film, writer-director Leyla Bouzid bases the story in her own home city of Sousse, and shows us a Tunisia where a legal ban on homosexuality is enforced by police and prosecutors. The attitudes of Lilia’s own family range from acceptance to unabashed homophobia and are split even within genders and generations. Will Lilia solve the mystery of the uncle’s death? Will she be able to cone out to her family? Can she maintain her relationship with Alice? Bouzid keeps us engrossed, right up to the emotionally powerful ending.
And here are three more Frameline tips:
- Montreal, My Beautiful: Joan Chen plays Feng Xia, a 53-year-old Chinese immigrant to Montreal who has invested her entire life in meeting other people’s needs at her expense. She and her professionally frustrated husband toil in their convenience market, and neither is finding success or fulfillment in the Canadian Dream, and the husband is increasingly unhappy. Feng Xia decides to explore her own queer sexual yearnings and meets Lisa (Charlotte Aubin) a younger Québécoise lesbian with her own family issues. Two forces – the duties manifest in traditional Chinese cultural values traditional and her own long-repressed need for self expression – are pulling her in opposite directions. As one would expect, Joan Chen’s performance as a woman whose emotions are roiling behind a contained countenance, is exquisite. Impressive second feature for writer-director Xiadan He.
- La Belle Anee: Filmmaker Angelica Ruffier, at age 36, returns to her hometown to clean out her late father’s effects. She finds her own diary from twenty years before, which recounts her first crush, a profound fascination with her highly professional literature teacher, 23 years older. As Ruffier mulls over that year in her life, the beautiful year of the film’s title, the tone of La Belle Annee morphs from cinéma vérité to dreaminess. Then we’re back to cinéma vérité with a meeting between the two women, which is so emotionally charged that it’s dreamy, too,
- Black Burns Fast: This queer coming-of-age story is embedded in a social satire. Two Black South African girls are scholarship students at an exclusive boarding school, where they employ humor to cope with the White Mean Girls and the cringe-worthy microaggressions (Your community must be proud of you) of the adults. An impressive new Black student shows up, triggering an infatuation. The tone of Black Burns Fast is sassy and breezy.
You can peruse the program and get passes and tickets at Frameline. Here’s the trailer for In a Whisper: