STIVAL TURNS 21: to Colombia and beyond

friend, singer Patti Smith; Ruth Caudeli’s “Eva + Candela” (8 p.m. Sept. 11), a love story from Colombia; “TransMilitary” (6 p.m. Sept. 12), a documentary about the reported 15,000-plus people in the military who must hide their transgender identity; and Yen Tan’s “1985” (8:30 p.m. Sept. 13), set at the height of the AIDS crisis, with an impressive cast that includes Cory Michael Smith (The Riddler on TV’s “Gotham”), Michael Chiklis and Virginia Madsen.

In a testimony to the festival’s status, several filmmakers will represent their films at their screenings; some are coming to Memphis for the festival, while others will participate in post-movie question-and-answer sessions via Skype.

Among the latter group is writer-director Shaz Bennett, script coordinator on the Amazon police detective series “Bosch,” who is bringing her debut feature, “Alaska Is a Drag,” to Outflix. The movie screens at 5:15 p.m. Saturday.

“It’s the kind of movie that plays well in all sorts of festivals,” said Bennett, by phone from Los Angeles. “We’ve screened in a lot of queer festivals, a lot of black festivals, a lot of native (Native American) festivals, a lot of womendirecting festivals, but we haven’t played in Memphis.”

Loosely based on Bennett’s own pre-show business work experiences in an Alaskan cannery (“It’s a horrible job so you tend to daydream a lot,” she said), “Alaska Is a Drag” is the story of a young cannery worker (Martin L. Washington Jr.) who aspires to be a celebrity drag performer even as his quick fists and general toughness attract the attention of local fight promoters. “I find that drag queens and boxers are masculine and feminine in a way that hardly even exists in everyday life, so I kind of wanted to explore the ideas of gender they represent and ask why we think one is more powerful than the other,” she said.

Although the film (shot partly in Alaska but mostly on set in economical Michigan) has a grit-and-grind texture, thanks to the dangerous factory work, “it’s set at a time when you can actually see the Northern Lights,” Bennett said. “So throughout the film, there’s that magical element that comes from Alaska.”

This might be a metaphor for the Outflix experience, where stories of harsh injustice and fantasies of colorful reinvention complement rather than clash with each other. “These are not so much the coming-out stories of years past,” King said of the festival’s roster. “Some of these are just good, unique stories that just happen to feature gay characters.”