OUTFLIX FILM FE From Amherst to Alaska
Former “Saturday Night Live” comic actress Molly Shannon stars as the woman who might be America’s greatest poet in “Wild Nights with Emily,” a biopic that is unconventional in more than its casting: Unlike last year’s acclaimed “A Quiet Passion,” this Emily Dickinson movie is a “biographical comedy” that doesn’t shy away from speculation that the so-called Belle of Amherst was in love with her eventual sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert.
Written and directed by Madeleine Olnek (whose credits include the 2011 parody “Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same”), “Wild Nights with Emily” screens at 8:30 p.m. Friday during the 21st annual Outflix Film Festival, Memphis’ annual event devoted to cinema with LGBTQ+ content.
For those who need an explaination, LGBTQ+ — the acronym preferred by festival organizers — stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, plus more.” To a certain extent, content that qualifies for that designation is no longer novel. Such recent Best Picture Oscar winners and nominees as “The Shape of Water,” “Moonlight,” Call Me by Your Name” and “Lady Bird” contained gay characters or focused on issues of gay identity, and the recent box-office smash “Deadpool 2” introduced superhero cinema’s first same-sex couple.
Such visibility “speaks volumes about how our community has progressed,” said Outflix co-director Kat King. But at the same time, “there very much are marginalized parts of our community that need representation,” she said. To that end, Sept. 11 at the festival will be devoted to “Latinx” programming — films set within Latin culture — while Sept. 12’s lineup will focus on transgender stories.
A program of OUTMemphis: The LGBTQ Center for the Mid-South (which, according to its website, “empowers, connects, educates, and advocates for the LGBT community of the Mid-South”), Outflix originally was organized as what was described as a “queer experimental film festival” on the University of Memphis campus. The experiment worked: Outflix now typically attracts some 1,800 moviegoers — including many out-oftowners — for its seven-day run of films at the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill.
This year’s run includes 50-plus films: narrative features, documentaries and shorts, plus contributions from Memphis-area filmmakers. The eclectic mix includes romantic comedy (“My Big Gay Italian Wedding”), international drama (“Mario,” a soccer story from Switzerland) and urgent documentaries (“The 34th,” about the battle in Ireland over a national “marriage equality” law).
The schedule was winnowed down from more than 350-plus entries, according to the festival’s co-directors, King, 28, and Matt Barrett, 35, veteran Outflix board members and volunteers now in charge of the event for the first time. “It’s a tough decision every year to make sure we have the right mix of films,” Barrett said.
A few of the more promising sounding films on the schedule include Ondi Timoner’s “Mapplethorpe” (10:30 p.m. Sept. 8), a biopic that stars former “Doctor Who” Matt Smith as the controversial New York photographer and Marianne Rendon as his one-time girl-