INSIDE? GO OUT TO ’INSIDE OUT’ FESTIVAL
LGBT films include a portrait of Jayne Mansfield, gender-fluid musical and doc-fiction hybrid
Inside Out: With its busy slate of screenings and events at TIFF Bell Lightbox, AGO’s Jackman Hall and Buddies in Bad Times to June 4, Toronto’s LGBTQ film festival, Inside Out, features a wide range of cinematic pleasures to discover. That includes the year’s most unusual portrait of a fabled Hollywood celeb. Making its international premiere at the festival on Sunday, Mansfield 66/67 delves into the seedy and possibly Satanic history of ill-fated blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield with a mix of archival material, bizarre performance segments and appropriately catty interviews with John Waters, Mary Woronov, Kenneth Anger and other underground icons. Another fascinating figure gets the biopic treatment in Tom of Finland, director Dome Karukoski’s drama about Touko Laaksonen, the illustrator famed for his hyper-stylized illustrations of gay men — the festival presents the film’s Canadian premiere at the Lightbox on Friday. Further Inside Out highlights include After Louie (screening Tuesday), a relationship drama by activistturned-director Vincent Gagliostro starring the great Alan Cumming, a new adaptation of Michael LaChiusa’s gender-fluid musical Hello Again (June 4), and The Ring Thing (June 2), a doc-fiction hybrid that explores the experience of same-sex marriage and divorce. Many more features, docs and shorts fill out the program at Inside Out until June 4. The Transfiguration: An initially familiar tale of adolescent hell takes a horrific turn in The Transfiguration, a debut feature by American writerdirector Michael O’Shea that’s earned much love from genre devotees since it debuted at Cannes last year. Eric Ruffin plays Milo, a bullied teen whose desire for revenge becomes intertwined with his obsession with vampires. Though packed with nods to other youth bloodsucker tales like Near Dark, The Lost Boys and Martin, The Transfiguration also shares Get Out’s eagerness to integrate genre tropes with issues of class and race. VICE and the Royal host O’Shea for a post-screening Q&A on the opening night.
Dan Savage’s HUMP! Film Festival: Founded in 2005 by Dan Savage, the sex-advice columnist and activist behind Savage Love, the HUMP! Film Festival is pretty much exactly as the title promises. Intrigued patrons can expect a freewheeling celebration of creative sexual expression in its many, many forms. This compendium collects the down and dirty handiwork of DIY filmmakers who’ve got their own ideas of what porn ought to be. The lineup of short films includes such instant crowd-pleasers as Savage Kingdom, I’m Not a Poly but My Boyfriends Are and Sock Puppet, and those are just the films with printable names. The HUMP! Film Festival plays the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on Saturday.
The Northlander: Métis filmmaker Benjamin Ross Haden puts an Indigenous spin on the postapocalyptic fantasy genre with The Northlander, a bold thriller that played imagineNATIVE last fall and returns for a onenight engagement at the Royal this weekend. Set in the year 2961 when nature has reclaimed land once dominated by humankind, it’s the story of a hunter who becomes embroiled in a violent clash of rival clans. Cast and crew members will be on hand for the screening on Saturday.
In brief:
A mock-doc thriller inspired by a corner of Yellowstone National Park where U.S. laws do not apply and crimes go unpunished (it’s true!), Population Zero opens Friday at the Carlton.
The EUFF Classics series of free screenings at the Royal presents the German comedy Good Bye Lenin on Saturday.
A new doc about the Six-Day War, In Our Hands: Battle for Jerusalem plays select Cineplex locations on Monday.
The Revue reaches back a century or so to treat Silent Revue patrons to Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 hit The Cheat on Sunday.