- First Threshold slash Riceball Films
Utah Film Center's Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival returns Oct. 14 – 16 at the Regent Street Black Box off the Eccles Theatre (144 Regent St.) and online, offering a wide range of feature and short film offerings with LGBTQ+ themes. Here are previews of just a few of the 2022 offerings; the full lineup and schedule is available at damntheseheels.org.
Unidentified Objects: The set-up is tried and true—the "mismatched souls on a road trip" comedy—but the central performances in Juan Felipe Zuleta's feature steer it towards something more authentic than the quirkiness always threatening to bubble over the sides. In a New York apartment building, Peter (Matthew Jeffers), a misanthropic little person, gets an unexpected request from neighbor Winona (Sarah Hay): borrowing his car so that she can drive to Canada and rendezvous with the spacecraft she believes is coming to take her away. Neither Hay's performance nor the script by Zuleta and Leland Frankel underlines the notion that Winona is either clearly delusional or just a free-spirited kook; there's an edge to the character that suggests darkness Winona may be trying to escape. There's even more complexity to Peter, tangled in his dually-ostracized identity as a little person and a gay man, yet also tied to a death he still grieves. It's also one of the few recent fiction films where the COVID pandemic is treated as a fact of life with some impact on the narrative, yet not the defining subtext. The premise makes it hard to find an ending that would feel completely satisfying, and the obliqueness near the end feels a bit off. That stuff is more forgivable when scenes like Peter's awkward flirtation in a bar hint at the happiness for himself that he doesn't risk imagining might be possible. [Opening Night Film]
Framing Agnes: A solid conceptual foundation drives director Chase Joynt's documentary focusing on 1960s academic case studies of transgender people, built—in the words of historian Jules Gill-Peterson—on "performance as an aspect of trans-ness." For the primary framing device, Joynt employs transcripts of these case studies—beginning with "Agnes," the celebrated trans woman interviewed by UCLA sociologist Dr. Harold Garfinkel, and whose story inspired the discovery of many other such case studies in Garfinkel's files. These interviews are dramatized in performances by trans actors, and Joynt spends nearly as much time asking the actors what they're learning from the people they're playing as on the staged interviews themselves. Then there's a lot of time spent with Gill-Peterson talking about historical transness, including fascinating observations about what ideas like "visibility" mean both positively and negatively, and the history of science defining "aberrant" sexuality. As potentially compelling as all of these ideas are individually, they muddle one another: Is this primarily a story about what these case studies tell us about trans experience decades before social normalization was remotely conceivable? Or is it about modern-day trans people finding both comfort and frustration in these stories? The 72-minute running time feels too densely packed with data and anecdotes for it all to cohere.
Long Live My Happy Head: What starts as something that feels like a somewhat standard "triumph of the spirit" documentary evolves into a uniquely heartbreaking COVID era love story. Filmmakers Will Hewitt and Austen McCowan profile Gordon Shaw, a cartoonist who created a graphic novel titled Bittersweet chronicling his experience after receiving a brain cancer diagnosis at the age of 32. While the film does address his artistic projects—including a proposed music composition inspired by the sounds of MRI machines—the eventual focus is more on Gordon's mostly-long-distance relationship with his partner Shawn, an American director of an arts non-profit. And as a bleak turn in Gordon's prognosis coincides with the start of the pandemic in 2020, both men face the additional emotional strain of having to go through this process while separated by an ocean. Gordon provides a lively and engaging center, though the film isn't afraid also to show him at his most physically and emotionally vulnerable. But as much as this is a record of one man turning a terminal illness into art, it's also a record of the love in our lives that gives people a reason to want to keep going.
