‘WE LOST A GENERATION’
VQFF opener mixes pain with joy
This year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival (VQFF) opens with filmmaker Yen Tan’s stunning and powerful film 1985.
The film tells the story of a closeted young man named Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) who goes home for the Christmas holidays and tries to tell his conservative and deeply religious family that he is dying.
Tan set the film in 1985, a year when AIDS was at an epidemic level and when he himself was a scared kid in Malaysia figuring out that he was gay and that he was gay in a world that was being decimated by a deadly and, at that time, unmanageable disease.
“I was 10 years old in 1985 and I think that is the year I first had the inclination that I was gay,” said Tan, who came out at age 21. “It was an iconic year. That’s the year when Rock Hudson died of AIDS and it was in the headlines. I remember being 10 and having this sense of knowing that you are gay and then it’s ‘oh gosh then I’m going to die from it.’ I just made a direct connection. I didn’t think it was two different things and in that sense that impacted my sexuality and what I thought of it. I think that is the deeper reason I did the film. In some ways it was like going back in time and telling myself there’s a distinction between being queer and having (the) life that has a lot of pain, suffering and oppression.”
While there is a heaviness laid over this film, pain is not the whole of its parts. There is joy in some of the corners of Adrian’s world, especially as old wounds begin to heal.
The film also stars Virginia Madsen and Michael Chiklis as the parents and Aidan Langford as the kid brother who loves Madonna, theatre and his older brother. It’s the relationship between the brothers that offers the most hope in this story with no easy ending.
Shot in black and white, Tan’s film is one of 70 in the program for this year’s VQFF, showing between Aug. 9-19 at various venues around Vancouver. The film has the honour of being the official opening film, with Tan in the house for the screening and a post-film chat at the Vancouver Playhouse. The film will have a repeat showing on Friday.
“Amber Dawn and I loved watching 1985, we cried throughout” said Anoushka Ratnarajah, who is co-artistic director of VQFF along with Dawn. “Opening the festival with a film that reflects upon a particular crisis in queer history I think is important to us. To know that this is something that our communities had to deal with in a very real way and still do actually — HIV isn’t gone.
“Also the film is filmed in black and white on 16mm film and that’s something that never happens anymore. That is really, really special esthetically. I think that will get people talking. Film nerds and film buffs will be really excited that it is sort of filmed like an archival film and there is something about that.” To date, 1985 has hit some other film festivals and the reviews have been positive. But for Tan the win has come in the conversations that the film inspires.
“It’s been really meaningful is the way I would describe it,” said Tan about the festival experience. “I have met a lot of people who have shared with me their stories and what they went through and how grateful that a story like this is being told.”
Telling those stories is something Tan sees as his responsibility as a queer artist.
“We lost a generation of people who are not around to tell us what they went through. I think anything that gives them their voice back is a good thing,” said Tan about the people that died at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
“It’s such a manageable disease. It’s not a big thing anymore, but we need to honour the history of it.”
History can be considered a theme at this year’s festival as 2018 marks three decades of VQFF.
“I think our artistic programming is really stellar and has continued to grow in its quality and nuance and scope,” said Ratnarajah.
“I also think we have lasted this long because our community stood by us. Our audiences have grown and shifted, but really the festival exists because we have an incredible pillar of community support.”
Ratnarajah said another factor is that in the last couple of years the representation of queer and trans people in film and TV has grown and so has the appetite for their stories.
People are realizing that these are not just queer stories, but human stories and they are reminded that art is about empathy. You don’t have to watch a story that directly relates to your own experience in order to identify with it or care about it.
“Art and storytelling, if it is good, will touch you no matter what it is about,” said Ratnarajah, adding that art is key in opening minds and exposing us to the bigger world out there.
“I really hope that people who always just love film and love storytelling and are interested in the experiences and lives and thoughts of people they don’t interact with on a regular basis, folks that have open minds and open hearts, will also come to our festival,” said Ratnarajah.
The festival this year has a strong lineup of films from 15 countries. This year’s film spotlights include: RISE: Youth Spotlight, Trans Women on Screen Spotlight, decolonizing discipline(s): a twospirit showcase and Spotlight on The Artist, which explores what makes queer film subversive and important.
There will be a whopping 27 local directors attending the festival with their films screening. Such a strong and local showing led the festival to this year curate the brand new program The Coast is Genderqueer. This short film program is made up of pieces that showcase local trans, genderfluid and non-binary stories.
“This year we found so many submissions from gender queer and trans filmmakers and also so many submissions that were about local queer and gender non-conforming youth that we were able to create this entire shorts program the Coast is Genderqueer. We are really excited,” said Ratnarajah.
One of the films in the program is Beauty, an NFB-produced 23-minute film from Vancouver’s Christina Willings. The film, which screens on Aug. 17, at 5 p.m. at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, looks at the lives of five gender-creative kids. What makes this film a heartstring tugger is the stories are told by the kids themselves. Ranging in age from 10 to 18 at the time of filming, each kid is an inspiration.
“I have been thinking about gender issues for a long time,” said Willings, who came out as a lesbian in 1981 and met the kids from Montreal and the Lower Mainland through friends and support groups.
“These kids were so innocent, so pure that they were not influenced by any current school of thought or anything. I just wanted to capture that. To amplify their voices, because I feel like that kind of honesty has the potential to cut underneath resistance that is based in fear.”
Willings’ film is not out to scare people into supporting these kids, but to gain an understanding of their wants and needs.
“(I wanted) to have something to influence people who may be in a doctor’s office looking at a child’s file and trying to decide ‘am I going to call this child by the name that is on the file, Johnny, or am I going to look at this child who obviously
presents in their affirmed gender and ask them what they would like to be called? Am I going to call them out as the wrong gender in front of all the patients in this office or am I going to reach for compassion and ask them questions? If I am in a position to change a child’s vital statistics what decision am I going to make?’”
Beauty is a touching and honest film that is a wonderful part of a VQFF program that delivers bigger movies like the Miseducation of Cameron Post starring Chloe Grace Moretz alongside smaller pieces that will never land in a multiplex, but will in the case of festivals like this one get a chance to be experienced by a room full of people.
“There is always value in sitting in the dark and crying with other people, especially in our days when empathy is not a thing anymore,” added Tan. “I think there is not enough empathy in the world so anything that encourages that is always a good thing in my book.”