Fest Features Four Docs on the History and Ongoing Struggle for LGBTQIA Civil Rights, Streams Oct. 16-25, 2020
SDFF partner fest, OUTwatch calls attention to the history and future of civil rights with its 2020 fest theme “Looking Back, Moving Forward.” Held virtually this year due to COVID-19, OUTwatch will feature four outstanding docs that elucidate distinctive perspectives, ranges of experience and points in time. At a time when civil are embattled, festival organizers hope the films they’ve selected will honor LGBTQIA folks who have fought for civil rights, and shed light/inspire ongoing struggles to maintain and expand human rights to the entire community.
The festival will stream from Oct. 16-25, tickets are $12/household at www.OutWatchFilmFest.org. This year’s virtual festival showcases four enlightening, empowering and entertaining documentaries:
Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989). Two top Black Gay artists, a filmmaker and a poet, created this film in the late 1980s. The film seeks, in its author’s words, to “…shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” Tongues Untied combines political statement, spoken word and dance. Unfortunately, this film is as relevant today as it was in the ’80s and ’90s. If you believe Black Gay Lives Matter, you need to see this film.
Transmilitary (Gabriel Silverman, Fiona Dawson, 2018). This 2018 documentary chronicles the lives of four individuals who put their careers and their families’ livelihoods on the line by coming out as transgender to top brass officials in the Pentagon in hopes of attaining the equal right to serve. The ban was lifted in 2016, but with President Trump now trying to reinstate it, their futures hang in the balance again.
Ahead of the Curve (Jen Rainin, Rivkah Beth Medow, 2020). In 1990, Franco created a safe place for lesbians in the form of Curve magazine. Her approach to threats and erasure in the ’90s was to lift all kinds of lesbians up and make them beautifully visible. The magazine helped build a foundation for many intersectional movements being led by today’s activists in the face of accelerating threats to the LGBTQ community.
Cured (Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer, 2020). This powerful new documentary by Bennett Singer illuminates the campaign that led the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973.