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  • "An Afternoon with Aasif Mandvi"

    Aasif Mandvi, writer and star of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival’s opening night film, Today’s Special, charmed the audience during an interview with Festival Director Chi-Hui Yang.

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An Eternal Thought in the Mind of Godzilla

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Topic: sf international lgbt film festival

Most likely to....? Once brothers, "Prodigal Sons" Marc McKerrow (left) and Kimberly Reed (director) meet at their high school reunion in Montana. (Photo courtesy First Run Features)

Experience

Reed Redeems Promise of ‘Prodigal Sons’

If Kimberly Reed took a not particularly unique path into filmmaking, she certainly took an interesting road out of it. A native of Helena, Montana, she came to U.C. Berkeley in the late ’80s, discovered film and went on to earn a master’s degree at S.F. State while working in the seminars department at Film Arts Foundation. After transitioning from male to female, the challenge of adjusting to a new identity impelled her to trade her location (San Francisco for New York) and career (digital editing for magazine publishing). Call it necessity, call it a detour, but it’s in the rear-view mirror now. She makes a triumphant return to both filmmaking and the Bay Area with her first-person documentary Prodigal Sons, a raw and altogether remarkable debut that opens this month around the country.

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Bitter pill: Sunday's homophobia-in-sports double bill of "Training Rules" (pictured) and "Claiming the Title: Gay Olympics on Trial" was an emotional event at Frameline33. (Photo courtesy Frameline)

Critic's Notebook

Frameline33: Icons and unsung heroes

"What do they want from an old dinosaur like me?" quips John Hurt, reprising his career-making role as Quentin Crisp, in response to an invitation to regale a much younger audience about his life. By this point in An Englishman in New York, Richard Laxton’s sequel to The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and this year’s opening night film at Frameline33, Crisp has been branded a black sheep for refusing to retract flip comments made on the then-emerging AIDS crisis and is still adjusting to the slights that come with being perceived as some living relic of the past. To a large degree, the image of Crisp as a stoic holdover from an earlier age of faeries and rough trade who survived on wit and sheer force of will was one of his own making, and it is certainly a reputation that Claxton’s film helps secure.

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Teen triangulation: Frameline33 films including "Dare" (pictured here) explore teen angst. (Photo by Michael Fimugnari, courtesy Frameline)

Critic's Notebook

Frameline33: Youth in revolt

Traps set by lovers playing hunting games in the forest. Tween caterpillars getting ready to bolt the cocoon. Young communards turning their backs on outdated moral strictures. Ghosts of high school obsessions past. And multiple packs of teenagers on the road and on the run. In this year’s Frameline Fest, as so often in life, it’s all about the one(s) that got away.

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Oceanic: "Maggots and Men" infuses the sailor genre not just with the trans guys, but also with anarchist politics. (Photo courtesy Frameline)

Platform

Cary Cronenwett’s "Maggots and Men" debuts at Frameline

A case could be made that Cary Cronenwett’s Maggots and Men isn’t just the most unique work in the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, a.k.a. Frameline33, but of any festival all year. The black-and-white experimental narrative revisits the 1921 rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in post-revolutionary Russia, infusing the sailors’ jovial camaraderie and political determination with a poetic trans- and homosexuality. A lovely, bittersweet film that never takes itself too seriously, the hour-long Maggots and Men has its world premiere Sunday, June 21 at 1:30 p.m. at the Castro. Cronenwett was born and raised in Oklahoma, and moved to the Bay Area in 1993 after college. It was here that he transitioned from female to male and discovered film, though any connection may or may not be coincidental. We conducted our interview by email after a lengthy preliminary phone conversation.

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Yes, got “Milk:” Sean Penn (center) arrived as the beloved Harvey Milk in director Gus Van Sant's San Francisco-made “Milk.” (Photo by Phil Bray, courtesy Focus Features)

Platform

Gus Van Sant and Dustin Lance Black make a "Milk" run

Somewhere buried among my files, I have an inch-thick folder of newspaper clippings mapping Hollywood’s marathon on-and-off flirtation with the dramatic deeds and death of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. That checkered history—the movie-deal machinations, not the life and legacy of the first openly gay man to hold elected office in the U.S.—is finally rendered moot with the long-awaited arrival tomorrow night of Gus Van Sant’s vivid, vibrant Milk. The movie revisits a pivotal and still-relevant era in Bay Area history and, more so than last year’s Zodiac, deserves to be seen and discussed by local filmgoers. I interviewed Van Sant and the young screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who are collaborating next on an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s Haight-Ashbury-fueled The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the day after the film’s star-studded premiere at the Castro Theatre.

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