TIL&GFF 2008

ブログ・ザ・ファイナル　(The Final Post)

2008-07-26T03:11:00.000-07:00

Well, the festival ended 6 days ago, and now my work for the festival has come to an end. So I thought I would sign off by quickly telling you a little about my experience as a volunteer with this festival.

I started attending the festival’s weekly planning meetings near Takadanobaba in perhaps mid-May of this year, not sure what exactly to expect, but – after nearly 8 months of living just outside of Tokyo, wanting desperately to connect with the organized gay community here. I was immediately struck by how casual and relaxed everybody seemed. The real work of planning and executing the festival gets done at home, in hours of work that no one save the person doing them sees, except in so far as they produce the festival we have all enjoyed so much over the past two weekends.

I had been a volunteer at the Toronto’s InsideOut Gay and Lesbian Film and Video festival for the previous three years. That festival is about 4 times as large, and has several paid staff that work year round. This festival has none of those advantages. This is an all-volunteer operation. It’s a testament to how much they care about bringing this festival to Tokyo’s rather small and rather invisible gay community (all while holding down demanding full-time jobs, I might add) that they don’t just give up in frustration, as I am sure we have all been tempted to do at some point along the way.

There are, of course, other English-speaking foreigners who assist the festival in various capacities (writers, translators, transcribers, subtitlers, etc.) but – again – most of that work goes on doubly behind the scenes, with no one ever really seeing the faces of those involved until they appear at the festival to a hearty cry of ‘Hisashiburi ne!’ (Long time, no see!). I was the only visible foreigner who attended meetings from the time I began volunteering in the spring, so I was delighted to find that it is a very international group. Most of the core staff have lived abroad for several years, and even some of those who haven’t speak better English than many of the people teaching the language in Japanese public schools! As a queer foreigner, I am usually a bit guarded with most people I encounter in day-to-day life. The festival staff and – during the festival – its guests have been among the very few people with whom I can be totally relaxed in Japan. So I never really felt like an outsider. I felt immediately embraced by a wonderful team of people who have, I think – I hope –, all become my friends.

After completing a few odd jobs for them (transcribing a film, watching another to check the that the subtitle list was in the right order, editing and proofreading the festival brochure, press releases, in-theatre announcements and other English-language materials and messages), the question came up of what I wanted to do during the festival itself. In Toronto, I had always just been a ticket taker (I also did some rather mundane office work after the festival), since that way you basically meet everyone coming through the door – a great way to reconnect with all those people in the community you haven’t seen in a year, for one reason or another. Here, that role didn’t make sense, because aside from being able to answer the question, ‘Where is the toilet?’ with ‘Asoko de’ (Over there!), I would get into trouble as soon as any more complicated question arose in Japanese. So Sugawara-san, our head programmer, pitched me the idea of doing an English blog, so that people in other parts of the world could get not just information but a real flavour of what was going on at the festival. I agreed, thinking I’d just be going to films and writing reviews of a sort. I hardly expected to be thrust into the role of reporter and interviewer, as I was, that first weekend.

To admit to my bias, I have to say, as a Canadian I have been bombarded with American media my whole life, and I think I’ve consumed more than enough of it for one lifetime. Japan and Canada have something in common in that regard. Both countries are hugely economically interlinked with the U.S., arguably to the point of dependency in both cases. Both Canadians and Japanese consume a huge amount of American media. But the fascination is rather one-sided. We know a lot about the U.S., but most Americans know relatively little about us. Similarly, American films on Japanese themes are few and far between. Maybe once or twice a decade you get a decent film that rises above the stereotypes. Even if it doesn’t completely succeed in this regard, any film about a place as little understood abroad as Japan has a big impact. Readers of this blog may have gotten tired of my ‘Lost in Translation’ questions, but every foreigner I know (and very few Japanese, interestingly) have seen the film ‘Lost in Translation’, and many of them say that it was a big part of their reason for wanting to come here.

So, all of that said, I wasn’t particularly interested in spending my time at the festival seeing American films, though of course, in retrospect, I am glad I did because it means that I met a lot of really wonderful people. I would have been happy to focus on the Asian films, just as – personally – I choose only to watch Japanese films, with few exceptions, while I am living here in Japan. For gay people as well, I think it’s problematic that so many of the images of gay life that come to us – whether realistic or total fantasy – are coming from the U.S., and thus, have very little to do with the reality of queer life in Japan or other parts of Asia, or the world generally. If we believe what we often say about the value of diversity, then I think the conversation needs to go both ways, and not be a monologue running from West to East.

However, little as I expected to be thrust into the role of reporter, I really enjoyed chatting with the (mostly foreign, mostly English-speaking) guests of the festival. I was really impressed that there were no prima-donnas, no out-of-control egos – just a lot of really nice people, both serious as artists with something to say and good-humoured in their pursuit of their own brief adventure in this country. All of the films got a great response, as did the guests themselves, not so much hounded (that wouldn’t be Japanese!) as politely asked for autographs and photos. And those of us who had the time and the privilege to hang out with them outside of the festival made, I hope, a few new friends.

I say those of us who had the time because, really, I think I had the best job at the festival! With virtually no responsibility, I got to see maybe a dozen screenings for free, met all the guests, and didn’t have to work long hours manning a desk or a booth. The dedication of our core volunteers, astounds me, since many of them worked all day every day, and therefore, could not possibly have seen more than one or two films. But then, that is the work ethic that Japanese become accustomed to from quite a young age.

As anyone who has lived abroad knows, it’s a kind of constant battle to keep yourself emotionally even-keeled. It doesn’t matter where you are, if you are a foreigner – even the privileged sort of foreigner that English-speaking Westerners are in Japan – you face a number of daily challenges to your mental health. It happens to be the case that during the festival I was also going through a tough patch of dealing with my life in Japan, perhaps because I am coming to the end of my first year here, many of my foreign friends are going home, and I am faced with the reality of my life here, which is constrained in a number of ways it is not at home. If you stay for a year, it is possible to view it as a kind of long working holiday. After a year however, when many of the other holidayers that you arrived with go home, you have to face up to the fact that you are choosing to make some sort of a life here, and a year is really not long enough to learn a new language, make a new group of friends, adjust to a different culture, and make a new life.

Thus, there were definitely times during the festival when I was tempted, out of emotional frustrations that had nothing to do with the festival itself, to abandon it and this blog, and just take that time back for myself. What prevented me from doing so was precisely the realization that everyone else was working quite a bit harder than me and, in many cases, for a less immediate reward. It just wouldn’t have been right to let all those people – all those friends – down.

So to all of them, I wish to say a heartfelt thank you. Arigato gozaimasu! Otsukarasama desu! Thanks for giving me the privilege of being part of your festival.

We’ll have another chance on August 9th to celebrate and to see each other once again before many of us scatter to the winds of work and school and other pressing obligations until sometime maybe 6 months from now, when the wheels start turning slowly again, gaining momentum little by little, until next July is quickly upon us and the 18th annual Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is here. Barring some unforeseen disaster, I’ll still be here, and ready to bring you another year’s instalment of events, guests, interviews, reviews, and whatever else crops up under our tenacious little rainbow here in the land of the rising sun.

Until then, 気をつけてね　(Take care of yourselves, eh?).

さようなら (Sayonara)!

‘Guy’

‘Out at the Wedding’

2008-07-26T03:06:00.000-07:00

Directed by Lee Friedlander
2007 / USA / 90 mins
Screened Monday July 21, 18:50 - Spiral Hall

Ever since 1967’s ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’, Hollywood has been making hash out of the culture clash between urban and rural America, the coasts and the centre, the north and the south. ‘Out at the Wedding’ follows in this tradition beginning with a fairly realistic premise: a woman named Alex is engaged to be married to a black man named Dana (the gender-ambiguous name is key to the plot) and has lied to her family about him, and vice versa, for fear of how they will react. Alex, a sophisticated professional woman living in New York, goes home to South Carolina for her sister’s wedding (with a gay sidekick in tow) and suddenly finds herself outed as a lesbian, when the secrecy around Dana’s identity is misinterpreted. Rather than quickly resolve the problem by coming clean, however, Alex adds one ridiculous lie to another – egged on by the gay sidekick – until, in true Shakespearean fashion, all the characters (including a fraudulent lesbian girlfriend, Reesa, hired to lend credibility to the incredibly story) are brought ‘on-stage’ at the end for the improbable, but highly entertaining resolution.

The filmmakers wisely choose not to dramatize many of the conversations required to settle matters between the aggrieved parties in this film, showing them instead from a distance with the soundtrack sketching in the emotional content of these elliptical scenes. After all, the film requires the recently married sister, Jeannie, to discover that she is herself a lesbian, and thus, to abandon her husband of a few weeks in favour of Reesa, her sister’s hired ‘girlfriend’. He takes it surprisingly well, as the light tone of this farcical comedy requires. As Northrop Frye has said of comedies: “Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desirable.”

One of the most unique aspects of story, in so far as it is a gay film, is that the main character (Alex) is not gay. Rather, it is only as an indirect result of her shenanigans that her sister is enabled to come to terms with her sexuality – a novel twist in an otherwise familiar formula. A subordinate theme is Alex’s own prejudice in so far as this whole crazy misadventure is caused by assumptions she makes about the prejudices of others. To that extent, the film also challenges the stereotypes that make this genre – of the sophisticated urbanite going home to the country bumpkins – work in the first place.

The packed audience thoroughly enjoyed the film, not least the flirtation between Alex’s sister, and Reesa, as portrayed by the beautiful, strikingly tall and seriously athletic actress Cathy DeBuono, who – along with her real-life girlfriend Jill Bennett (who also plays a small part in the film) – joined us for the final Q&A session of the festival.

And, to round out the festival, MC Margaret joined us once again, this time dressed in a fabulous pink cocktail dress, and an enormous pink afro wig and top hat, that made her look perhaps like a flamingo escaped from the wardrobe department of ‘Priscilla: Queen of the Desert’. She began the Q&A by picking up one of the jokes in the film and asking audience members which they preferred, hot dogs or tuna sandwiches? Rather embarrassed respondents were rewarded with one or the other, fresh from one of Tokyo’s thousands of combinis [convenience stores], no doubt.

Then Cathy and Jill joined us and we were ready to begin.

Cathy: Thank you for inviting us. We’re really honoured to be here. This my girlfriend Jill. [Just to prove it, they shared a kiss, which was greeted with a wild reaction from the audience.]

Margaret: So how are you enjoying your stay in Japan?

Cathy: Everyone is so nice, so patient, and so helpful. We are really not accustomed to this back in the States!

Jill: We went out to some of the lesbian bars last night, and everyone was really friendly and welcoming.

Margaret: [With a hint of innuendo…] Have you met anyone special in Japan?

Cathy: Yes… we’ve met lots of special people! But I know what you mean… (laughter)

Margaret: After meeting you and having seen the film, my feelings have changed. I want to be held by your big strong arms!

[Cathy obliged by giving Margaret a hug, while a zillion flashes went off from the audience.]

Margaret: How did you get such strong arms?

Cathy: Genetics have a lot to do with it. I’ve been really lazy the past six months. But I was an athlete before I was an actor.

Margaret: What sort of athlete?

Cathy: I was a volleyball player for a while. I grew up playing sports. I played volleyball in college, but I knew that one day I would have to give up volleyball due to age or injury, so I wanted to be an actor as well.

Margaret: Now, Jill, you were also in the film…

Jill: Yes, I was in it for like 30 seconds! But I’ve done lots of lesbian TV and film roles as well.

Margaret: How did the casting for this film work such that you were both in it?

Cathy: I think it was just a coincidence. Jill and I didn’t actually get together as a couple until two years after this film was made.

Margaret: So did you meet during the making of ‘Out at the Wedding’?

Jill: Yes, but more recently we finished a film where we actually starred opposite each other, so that’s when we really got to know each other.

Margaret: Is seeing the film today the first time in a while that you have seen it?

Cathy: I have seen it lots of times at festivals. I always like seeing it with different audiences around the world – I like to see how they react to it. We also watched it recently with friends from out of town who hadn’t seen it.

Margaret: What scene do you like the best? Is it one with yourself in it?

Cathy: Of course it’s one with me in it! (laughter) I like the batting cage scene [when the flirtation between her character, Reesa, and Alex’s sister, Jeannie, gets into full swing – sorry, bad pun!] and the dance [also between Reesa and Jeannie]– they both turned out really sweet.

Margaret: So it was okay getting hit with that ball? [In the scene, Reesa takes a stray ball in the face!]

Cathy: Well, I didn’t really get hit of course. That was just a little movie magic.

Margaret: Have you experienced any difficulty as an out lesbian in the film industry?

Cathy: The biggest barrier for me is my physicality, not my sexuality. I am tall, dark and athletic, and there just aren’t that many roles for women of my physical type. But Jill has had a different experience.

Jill: I’ve done some mainstream film and TV work, but I do find that in recent years because I am out, it does come up as a problem with advertisers, and that’s where TV channels make their money. But the flipside of it is that I get to do a lot of lesbian and gay films and TV, and that’s my community, so I am really happy about that.

Cathy: It has worked in reverse for me. There are a lot more roles for me now because of the growth of lesbian and gay film. In the mainstream, I was always being cast in army roles or as a cop! That’s where they put me. But now I get to do more fun, leading lady sort of roles.

Margaret: There was an actress in the film called Mink Stole, from the John Waters family. What was it like working with her?

Cathy: She is a real character! She does cabaret and that sort of thing. She would just come to work, put on her wig, and we would have a blast with her.

Audience member: I think the story is really great. Very twisted in a great way. I wonder, how did the writer come up with such a great story? How did she write it?

Cathy: The writer, Paula Goldberg, is a very funny person, and I think a great writer. And she’s a lesbian. But the story is not based on her real life. Actually, the actress who played Aunt Cora in the film [Myrna Goldberg], who comes out at the wedding, is Paula’s mother.

2nd audience member: Were you told by the scriptwriter how to play the character, or were you free to do it as you liked?

Cathy: I spent some time talking to Paula, but I was left on my own a lot to create the character. I didn’t want the character [Reesa] to be the stereotypical tomboy lesbian who meets the cute straight girl, gets thrown a curve ball, falls in love, etc. I really liked that there is a human quality to her. She’s just a person with all the normal vulnerabilities.

Margaret: There is a scene in the film of you two [Cathy and Jill] fighting. When you fight in real life, does it look like that?

Jill: Yes! (laughter)

3rd audience member: I’m a fan of your blogs and know you’re both active in the queer community. What projects are coming up for you?

Cathy: We are doing a videoblog together called ‘What’s your problem?’ I am also a psychotherapist, so we sit down with a friend and discuss a problem they are having, and we make it funny, but there is also some real therapeutic value to it. My blog was on AfterEllen.com but now it has moved to the Here! Films site.

Jill and I are also doing an online travel show, and we are shooting some footage for it here in Japan. Our goal is to go to different cities and visit gay communities there to see what life is like. We want to help connect everyone around the world so that we can live the fulfilling, happy, creative lives we all know we want and deserve. We don’t have an online home for this project yet, but you can also check out our MySpace pages. We always blog about what we are doing on MySpace.
http://www.myspace.com/jillbennett
http://www.myspace.com/cathydebuono
http://www.cathydebuono.com/news.html

[After Ari-san had finished translating this long response into Japanese, Cathy added:] Oh, my god. Did I say all that?! (laughter)

Jill: You talk a lot, Cathy. (laughter) My blog is called ‘We’re Getting Nowhere’ (http://www.afterellen.com/taxonomy/term/2182) on AfterEllen.com. We have fun with it, but we are also critical and we talk about issues in the community. I’m also involved in an online show called ‘3WayTV’ (http://www.3waytv.tv/). It’s a comedy – who knew lesbians could be funny?! And I am on ‘Dante’s Cove’, which is a gay and lesbian supernatural drama, as strange as that sounds!

Going out last night and talking to women here and hearing their stories reminded us [she and Cathy] that we live in a place [California] where it is really easy to be gay, but that’s not the case for everyone. So we want to share your stories with the world. The Internet is such a great tool for that. As people get to know us, it brings our community together, which is what we have to do. And then the walls start to come down…

Cathy: [After another long translation from Ari-san…] See, Jill, you did it too! (laughter)

Margaret closed the session with a round of thanks to our guests and all the volunteers without whom the festival could not operate, and reminded us of a number of upcoming queer film festivals in Japan. For more information on those, check out the following links.

http://www.kansai-qff.org/
http://aomori-lgbtff.org/
http://www.kagawa-rff.org/
http://aqff.jp/

Cathy and Jill were greeted by dozens of mostly female fans in the lobby outside, and even stayed for the beginning of the mini-celebration that the staff had once all the patrons had left. They were asked if they had any comment to make to the staff, and egged on by – well, me actually! – Jill and Cathy tried their best at some Japanese phrases out of a travel guide. Jill’s Japanese was pretty rocky (no offence – she’d only been in the country a few days!) but Cathy managed to say – in Japanese – ‘I don’t speak Japanese’ with quite a good accent, which won her a hearty round of applause from the staff, and she celebrated her victory in true athletic fashion with a few triumphant fist pumps in the air. These two lovely ladies, who are using the platform their acting careers give them, to raise issues and try to push things forward for LGBT people, left us in a great mood - even as the festival came to its inevitable close for another year. So, thanks again, Cathy and Jill !

To them and to the festival staff, Otsukarasama desu (Thanks for your hard work !).

Japanese Rainbow Reel Competition

2008-07-26T03:05:00.001-07:00

Screened: Monday July 21, 16:25 – Spiral Hall

Each year, the festival screens several Japanese shorts and awards a 100,000 yen ($1000 US) prize to the winner of an audience award at the Japanese Rainbow Reel Competition. The goal, of course, is to connect these challenging independent filmmakers and their work with as large an audience as possible, and to encourage future production of queer-themed films. This year’s selection was as strong as it was varied, and provided a much needed view into the day-to-day challenges of gay life in Japan, alongside all the charming fantasies (as well as difficult realities) in the many foreign films that screened at this year’s festival. Let’s look briefly at each film, and then find out who our winner was!

Blue Seeds
(Director: Kawano Hiroki – 25 mins)
‘Blue Seeds’ is a story about an estranged father and son who reconnect while the father lies dying in bed of AIDS. In flashbacks, we see the relationship between the father and the woman who gives birth to his son. She obviously knows that the father is gay – they meet in a kind of club environment – and there is no suggestion of a sham marriage to legitimize the pregnancy. She accepts the fate she is consigning herself and her child to when she decides to have this baby. Years later, the son is a married man conducting a homosexual affair, which he feels honour-bound to break off when his wife becomes pregnant. It is thus a story of how we unwittingly repeat patterns we didn’t even know we had inherited. For all the grief and tragedy of these truncated relationships, however, the film ends with the promise that things will be different for this new baby, and that perhaps even the young lover cast out by the new father will be welcomed back into the life of his family. Provocative, moving, and ultimately hopeful, Blue Seeds speaks to the tremendous pressure gays still experience in Japan to conform to a heterosexual ideal of marriage and family, regardless of the costs to themselves, their wives, children, and same-sex partners.

Othello
(Director: Tanada Kiyoshi – 2 mins)
A film so short, cute, and clever, that to describe it even briefly is to risk revealing all! I shall do so here, certain that it will continue to screen and give pleasure to patrons at festivals around the world. Scene: A man and a woman play the board game Othello, in which pieces coloured white on one side and black on the other are turned over whenever the opposing player succeeds in trapping a row of the opponents pieces. This goes back and forth until, in about the third round, the piece turned over appears gray. Now a new player is sitting at the table. A title card reads, in Japanese and English: “The world is not only BLACK and WHITE.” Another new player places a bright red playing piece on the board. Title card: “It’s not all GLAY either” [‘glay’ is a popular misspelling of ‘gray’ in Japan; there is even a J-pop group with this name!] Another shot of the game; a drag queen has joined them and is filling up the board with all sorts of different coloured pieces. As we zoom out, rainbow coloured dots streaking across the screen, title cards read: “Be a colourful!” “Be a juicy!” And that’s it! A simple bi-lingual message in support of diversity and tolerance, delivered in charmingly mixed up Japanese English! What a treat!

Ten Years After
(Director: Igarashi Takayuki – 9 mins)
Imagine you are a young widow. One day, an attractive young man comes to the door asking about your husband. He’s asking questions about your late husband (a friend of his) from behind a beaded curtain that drapes the doorway – a beautiful cinematic metaphor for the barriers that stand between their mutual understanding of the same man. After some initial hostility, you let him into your home. After all, you intuited that your husband was gay. Part of you knew “where he got his kicks.” But this is your first chance to confront someone from the other side of that curtain of ignorance and deception. Your goal is not to lash out at this young man, but to understand. He explains that they had been lovers in college. But that in their final year, he broke it off. “We have to get married. This can’t go on forever,” he explained bluntly. This is the scenario of ‘Ten Years After’, another film that – like ‘Blue Seeds’ – interrogates the psychological reality of the pressure in Japan to remain in the closet. It ends with the cry of an infant, the young widow’s child, and an ambivalent, ambiguous look of compassion, incomprehension and doubt passes between her and the lover her husband cast aside.

When I Become Silent
(Director: Yamamoto Hyoe – 18 mins)
The only lesbian-themed film among this year’s selections, ‘When I Become Silent’ is perhaps the most understated and hypnotically beautiful, in part because of its stylish use of the austere urban landscape around Tokyo’s Metropolitan Government Building, and because of the serenely beautiful faces of its two lead actresses, who seem almost like and elder and junior version of the same person. It is the story of a professional woman and her younger lover who are about to move in together. The older partner, in perhaps her early 30s, is full of confidence, even promising to quit her job if she runs into any difficulties in fulfilling their dream of cohabitation. Her younger partner, a writer, is not so certain, however. Plagued with doubts, and unable to write, they go out for dinner together to discuss what is troubling her. When asked by her lover, the young writer tells her the story of the novel she is attempting to write, and we are forced to wonder if the plot, involving a love affair between an older boarder brought into a household with a young girl, is not some version of their own love story. Elliptical, beautifully composed, spare and economical in the information it conveys and conceals (both visually and through dialogue), this is a masterful film about the constraints and fragile hopes of a young couple secretly plotting their future happiness. Like them, we are unsure, but the film leaves us more hopeful than afraid that they will indeed find this place of expected domestic tranquility, and that the writer’s creativity will once again be unleashed.

HiBi-Chan
(Director: HiBi-Papa – 4 min)
A computer-animated cartoon about a rainbow-coloured assortment of (presumptively male) creatures that bear a passing resemblance to a Japanese Tanuki (raccoon-dog). They live in a little tumbledown shack behind, what appears to be, the iconic castle at the centre of Disneyland – a kind of low-rent dormitory complex for queers! When the orange HiBi-Chan comes home and tries, rather innocently, to watch a bit of porn (“I [heart] Mens” is the title!), his attention is repeatedly drawn away by the one working out upstairs, the one listening to symphonic music at full blast next door, the one practicing heavy-metal guitar on the other side, etc. Various slapstick scenarios play out, first with dueling remote controls, and then with a too-short headphone cord that keeps popping out of the TV, allowing the whole complex to hear what’s going on. Eventually, the whole place comes crashing down as the other HiBi-Chans strain to listen to – or better yet – catch a glimpse of “I [heart] Mens”. A cute, quick glimpse into a cartoon send-up of our own rather compartmentalized and media-saturated lives!

San-Kaku
(Director: Watanabe Kazuki – 25 mins)
Like a lot of young men, Kaku wants it all. And to get it, he has been lying. To his mother. To his girlfriend. To his boyfriend (an amateur drag queen) as well! But his lies are not uncovered until he dies in a tragic motorcycle accident, and all three descend on his apartment to sort out his worldly possessions. What begins in tragedy, soon becomes a kind of domestic farce, as the unlikely trio begins cohabitating, until they can decide what to do with Kaku’s stuff. (The title is thus a play on words: 'Sankaku' is the Japanese word for triangle, but in this film there are also 3 Kakus - the different Kakus that each person knew.) What they discover is that for all his deception, Kaku loved and was loved by all three of them, and that seems to be something worth holding onto. But this is not a maudlin piece about grief or deceit. It is a hilarious, punk-rock fuelled, kicking, screaming, howling celebration of the unexpected twists, and unexpected people, that love of whatever kind is forever bringing into our lives. As the slightly melodramatic opening title card warned us: “Love is the only thing that matters. Don’t laugh at me, or I’ll kill you!”

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After the screening, the directors and casts of all 6 films joined us, for a total of more than 20 people on stage – a living, breathing embodiment of the diversity of the community and of the films they were there to share with us. The director of HiBi-Chan, who credits himself as ‘HiBi-Papa’, even introduced us to his own little HiBi-Chan – a 16-month-old boy who was there being gentled dandled by his proud mother.

The audience were asked to submit their votes after the screening, and the winners were announced at the beginning of our closing event, with festival director Miyazawa Hideki, Margaret and Rachel D’Amour all in attendance for the festival’s last screening. Miyazawa-san informed us that the festival had attracted nearly 8,000 visitors, which makes it the most successful year ever (Tokyo’s rather modest annual Pride parade attracts a mere 3,000 participants).

All six directors from the Rainbow Reel screening were invited back up on stage, and then Margaret announced the winner of this year’s Rainbow Reel award…

San-Kaku, directed by Watanabe Kazuki, who was forced to reveal that he is not in fact gay! But which Margaret quickly interjected made us all the more grateful that he had chosen to make this very enjoyable and oddly inspiring film, with its infectious punk-rock attitude of ‘I am who I am and f**k you if you don’t approve’!

But since the Rainbow Reel award is an audience award, the festival thought it appropriate to add an additional juried award this year, and Jonah Markowitz (director of the excellent ‘Shelter’ – see my interview with him on this blog) graciously agreed to judge the selections and give the Special Jury Award to…

‘When I Become Silent’, directed by Yamamoto Hyoe.

Jonah was asked what he thought of the films, and this is what he had to say:

“I live in Hollywood, where lots of movies are made the same way. To see all these young filmmakers telling such different stories in such different ways is really nice to see.”

And why did he select ‘When I Become Silent’ for the Special Jury Award?

“I chose this film because I think it’s a film in which there was as much importance to what was not said as to what was said. And I think that’s very cinematic. But I also liked the way that all of the films showed the importance of women in our lives, even in men’s films, because that is something often left out of these stories.”

So, hopefully, all the directors went away feeling that their work was appreciated, as it clearly was. The festival will offer the Special Jury Award, as well as the Audience Award for the Japanese Rainbow Reel Competition, again next year.

So, with the prizes given away, and without any further ado, it was time to settle in for our final feature, ‘Out at the Wedding’, and bring the festival to a close with our final guests, Cathy DeBuono and Jill Bennett.

‘Shelter’ Screening & Interview with Director Jonah Markowitz

2008-07-26T03:04:00.000-07:00

‘Shelter’ (Director: Jonah Markowitz)
2007 / USA / 88 mins
Screened: Sunday July 13, 16:00 – Wald 9; Monday July 21, 13:40 – Spiral Hall

I didn’t hesitate to tell the director, and I won’t hesitate to tell you, I think this is one of the best films – perhaps the very best film – that screened at this year’s festival, and is one of the best queer films I have seen in my more than 15 years of watching queer cinema. Sometimes we hear people say, about a film like ‘Brokeback Mountain’, for example, “It’s not really a gay film; it’s just a very human film” – or something to that effect. It is meant as a compliment, of course, to the artists behind the project, but it sounds oddly homophobic, like a back-handed insult to the queer community. Why can’t a film be both ‘gay’ and ‘very human’, after all? In this case, however, I think one can pay the film this compliment without in any way slighting the queer community. It is a gay film, as the director insisted to me, but there is a seamlessness with which it has blended sexuality with its other themes and preoccupations that I haven’t often seen in (particularly American) films about queer characters.

On paper, it doesn’t sound like this film should work. A young struggling artist from a poor background and a gay writer who is the elder brother of his best friend reconnect while surfing and begin a love affair that threatens to tear the fledgling artist’s world apart. Throw in a chronically ill parent and an unmarried sister with a child, and set it against the backdrop of Southern California’s beaches and surfing culture, and you might have the makings of a bad made-for-TV issue-of-the-week movie. But here it is handled so skilfully that it never slips over into the sort of ‘Beverly Hills 90210’ melodrama that the film’s premise puts it in danger of becoming.

How does it avoid these pitfalls? Quite simply, through a miraculous combination of good writing, excellent direction, cinematography and visual design, a knock-out performance by its young lead, Trevor Wright, and an original folk-rock soundtrack that sets the tone without distracting us with over-familiar melodies. I cried through about 60% of this film, not because it is relentlessly sad – it actually concludes with a well-earned and in no way cheap happy ending – but because I found it so moving to see these elements brought together with such grace. It’s the kind of film that, maybe, we were hoping would become possible 10 or 20 years ago, in which being gay is just a normal part of life, even as the world takes its time adjusting to the fact of our existence.

The director, Jonah Markowitz, joined us after the screening for a Q&A session with Nishimura-san.

Nishimura-san: Thank you very much for coming.

Jonah: Thank you for having me in Tokyo. It’s an honor.

Nishimura-san: One of the most impressive things about this film is that it concludes with a gay couple raising a child. What made you want to tell this kind of story?

Jonah: I didn’t set out specifically to make a gay film. I just wanted to tell a story about two people coming together and taking responsibility for one another and for a child.

Nishimura-san: As you may or may not know, it is almost impossible for us to see gay couples raising children in Japan.

Jonah: On the two coasts, in New York and Los Angeles, it is quite well accepted and relatively common. In the middle of the country, you don’t see it. But in California we have gay marriage now, so you are seeing families develop. Maybe it has something to do with being near the ocean! (laughter)

Nishimura-san: While you were making the film, or as you watch it now, are there any scenes in particular that stand out for you?

Jonah: Each time I see it I like different things, but that image of the family at the end is really important to me. Seeing the three of them together, that’s still an ideal that we are working toward. And also that in this story the gay character is not a disturbance or a threat to the family, as we sometimes see in other kinds of stories. Here, he’s responsible and helpful – he’s the one that is holding the family together.

Audience member: Thanks for this great film. It made me homesick [for California], so thanks for that. My question is about the importance of place in this film. Why did you choose to set it in San Pedro, rather than Malibu or Manhattan beach?

Jonah: San Pedro is a less affluent community and it’s a place you never see in movies. It’s usually Beverly Hills or the places you mention. I really wanted the characters to meet outdoors, not in a gay bar or something like that. So it had to be a place with a beach, maybe a port, a bridge – a mix of the ocean and of urban landscapes. I wanted Zach’s environment to be very urban [he’s a graffiti artist], so San Pedro had all those things.

2nd audience member: I really enjoyed the film, but I was surprised that the sex scene was so soft. It’s unusual in gay films now not to be more explicit about the sex. I wondered why this was. Did you cast heterosexual actors for this reason, or were you worried about shocking your audience?

Jonah: Both of the actors are straight, but they had great chemistry so I was really happy to get them. It was much more important for me to show intimacy in this film, not just sex. I wanted to show what was going on with their faces. For Zach, this is his first time to be really intimate, really vulnerable with someone. So, when we rehearsed it, we just talked about being in love, which anyone can relate to. You know, it’s that experience of spending all day in bed with someone. By the way, that set of clips in the middle of the film of them doing things together we jokingly called our ‘Big Gay Love Montage’. (laughter)

3rd audience member: As a mother, I find it hard to watch that last scene where the mother walks away from her child. Was it difficult for you to tell the story that way? Did you ever consider letting a larger family structure form around that couple?

Jonah: Yeah, it was hard for us too. The actress who played the mother was pregnant at the time, so it hit home for her. But we weren’t seeing it as a final separation. She’s not going away forever. So the film is a bit open-ended that way, which I like.

I had a chance to chat – too briefly, I fear – with the director, Jonah Markowitz, after the screening. Of course, I began by enthusing about the film to him in much the same terms as I have here.

Guy: Is this your first feature-length film?

Jonah: Yes.

Guy: It’s a great looking film. Right from the opening credits, it has a very distinctive visual style. Where does that come from?

Jonah: Well, I worked as an art director for years before this. You know, again, we wanted to reflect that urban world of Zach’s, so the graffiti and the opening credits are all part of that.

Guy: How did you like the Tokyo audience for the film?

Jonah: They were great. They really responded well to the film. And it was nice to see so many women in the audience. Often at queer film festivals it is all men.

Guy: Sort of a technical question – was the film shot digitally or on film?

Jonah: We shot it on film, but then transferred it to video for editing. Most films are edited digitally now, because it is just so much easier. But then typically they are transferred back to film. We decided to stick with digital for projection as well. The projection here today was one of the best I have seen.

Guy: It’s interesting in this film that it’s a love story that crosses lines of class as well as sexuality. It put me in mind of E.M. Forster’s ‘Maurice’. Was there anything you were trying to say by introducing that theme?

Jonah: Sure, I mean, it’s the same idea really that in love we all connect regardless of class, race, sexuality.

Guy: In the end, this is a story about a kind of improvised family. Why did you want to tell that kind of story?

Jonah: From the beginning we wanted it to be about family. You know, losing our families is perhaps the scariest thing we can imagine. So stories about improvised families, as you say, are appealing because they suggest that we can make new families out of just the people that are already in our lives, and that gives us hope.

Guy: Did you have any models for telling that kind of story? My background is in literature more so than film, and often Dickens’ stories involve improvised families.

Jonah: No, there was no model. I wanted to create a new model.

Guy: Trevor Wright’s performance is fantastic. Did he have any difficulty playing this role?

Jonah: No, Trevor is a natural. He’s done a lot of TV work, and he grew up in the industry, so he is an experienced actor.

Guy: The surf setting is really interesting – it really sets the tone of the film. Did you have a special unit to do the surf scenes?

Jonah: Yeah, I had a great surf DP [Director of Photography] for those sequences.

Guy: Why was it so important for you to incorporate this into the story?

Jonah: Because I think in America male bonding tends to take place outdoors. These are not conventional gay characters, so I wanted them to connect in a kind of unconventional way.

Guy: Are there any films or filmmakers that you particularly admire?

Jonah: I admire anyone who can get their films made. I think we really have to honour and respect each other as fellow artists.

Guy: Where did the financing for this film come from?

Jonah: From Here! Films. They’re an all-gay cable TV channel in the U.S., and they’re primarily involved in distributing films and television programs, but they decided to set up a program where they would fund the development and production of a feature. This is the first feature film to come out of that program.

Guy: It feels to me that this is a film about which you can say, “It’s not a gay movie” without slighting the gay community.

Jonah: Well, it is a gay movie, but it’s not just a gay movie. I think young queer viewers in particular are not interested in the standard gay coming out stories any more. So this film sort of breaks out of that mould, and maybe is something young people can relate to more easily.

Guy: What about the child actor in the film? How did he deal with being a film with these themes?

Jonah: He didn’t really understand the context of the story, so there was no issue with that.

[At this point, Jonah’s partner Sean joined the conversation.]

Guy: Is the character Sean [played by Brad Rowe] in the film named after you?

Sean: No, no. I didn’t meet Jonah until after the film was finished!

Guy: So have you guys had a chance to get out and explore Tokyo? Does Tokyo live up to the hype?

Jonah: Absolutely. Yeah, we’ve been having a lot of fun.

Guy: What do you like best about the city?

Sean: I like just walking around the city and seeing the variety of scenery. I must have put like 2,000 miles on this pair of Vans [his shoes]! I like finding a park and you think it’s just going to be a few trees, and it turns out to be this forest in the city.

Guy: Earlier in the week we had Thomas Gustafson and Cory James Kruekeberg here with ‘Were the World Mine’. They’re a couple and they make their films together. Do you guys collaborate with each other?

Jonah: No, Sean is not in the industry – thank god!

Guy: So what is your next project?

Jonah: I am developing several things at the moment, some queer-themed and some not.

And with the success of ‘Shelter’, I’m sure we’re ready to watch anything else Jonah wants to show us.

EPILOGUE: ‘The Downtown Disco Wallet’

Incidentally... when we first met Sean the previous night he gave us an invaluable little urban survival tip, as he showed us what he calls his ‘Downtown Disco Wallet’. Suitable both for world travellers, like him and his partner Jonah, or just for style-conscious revellers out for a night on the town, the Downtown Disco Wallet is a practical solution to the perennial problem of how to carry cash and cards all in neat package that doesn’t make it look like you’re concealing an eggplant in the front pocket of your jeans (though that might well bring about other desirable opportunities).

So, what is the Downtown Disco Wallet? It’s simple: take your credit cards, your ID, business cards and any other essentials of the same size, and wrap your cash around them. Affix a standard type black binder clip, readily available at Business Depot or any office environment you happen to be slaving away in until you sell your first screenplay or land your first role in a Michael Bay film. And voila! No muss, no fuss! Just one handy, slender, ultra-practical and in no-way unfashionable DIY [Do-It-Yourself] Downtown Disco Wallet. Let’s see how long it takes this trend to catch on! Thanks for the tip, Sean.

‘Asian Shorts’ Screening & Interview

2008-07-26T03:03:00.002-07:00

Screened: Monday July 21, 11:30 – Spiral Hall

The Asian shorts program is new this year – a welcome and perhaps long overdue addition to the festival. I had a chance to talk with the programmer, Aki-san, but before we turn to that interview, let’s look briefly at the films.

It Seems To Rain (prequel)
(Director: Allen Tsai; Taiwan – 7 mins)
A charming and evocative, if teasingly vague, little film about a high-school romance between two boys. The clip is virtually devoid of dialogue and set to anthematic ambient music that makes the discovery of their affection for one another feel like the small triumph that it is. I couldn’t help feeling that it had the tone of a trailer for a longer film and, lo and behold, later in the program we got that longer version, with some important differences. They are discussed in my interview with the programmer [see below].

Katong Fugue
(Director: Boo JunFeng; Singapore – 10 mins)
Based on a play by Alfian Sa’at (this is an English language film), the story takes the form of a somewhat disembodied dialogue between a concerned mother and her emotionally distant teenage son. The boy is a piano player and throughout the piece we hear him playing portions of a Johann Sebastien Bach fugue. His prying mother wants to know what he is doing in his room, the inviolability of which – along with his piano – becomes a kind of cover (and metaphor) for his secret liaisons with his boyfriend. Played out in a series of images that are tableau-like in their composition and economy of action, it’s a little like flipping through a private photo album and trying to stitch together the narrative of this mother-son relationship from a series of hypnotic and beautiful fragments.

A Family Portrait
(Director: Boo JunFeng; Singapore – 9 mins)
The second of two films from Boo JunFeng, this film is in Spanish, and not one Asian face graces the screen. Instead, the setting is European. The conceit of this tidy little film is that while filling out an innocent questionnaire, the younger sister of the protagonist, a teenage boy, asks: ‘What is ‘Sex’?’ This conjures up his recollections of a moment years earlier when a photographically inclined cousin came to take the family portrait, and he later discovered his parents engaged in a three-way sex act with the cousin. Far from shocked by it, however, he sees their union as an act of love, and gives that as his definition of ‘sex’ to his sister, when all she really needed to know was whether to check the box marked M or F on her questionnaire!

Just
(Director: David Maurice Gil; USA – 12 mins)
Another English-language film, this time from the U.S., ‘Just’ takes us into the bedroom of a wealthy writer who has just woken up from a night of – we have to imagine – great sex with the impossibly cute trick he has brought home. The leads are two beautifully built and tanned Asian-Americans, one of whom is the cowriter of the film, Edward Gunawan. Their conversation shortly becomes tense, however, as the two of them realize that the assumptions they had made about one another the night before may have been mistaken. In 12 short minutes, ‘Just’ touches on all the thorniest issues of gay sexuality, promiscuity and fidelity, but leaves it up to the audience to decide where we stand.

Poetry In Motion: Fragile In Love
(Director: Mickey Chen; Taiwan – 14 mins)
Less a linear narrative than a series of impressionistic images of gay men in a minimalist night club interior, this film takes its inspiration from a classical Chinese ‘kanshi’ poem, but of course queers the story. Both the club and what little clothing its beautiful patrons have on are bright white tinted blue by black light. Title cards with the pulsating and morphing Chinese characters of the poem separate the various brief segments of a narrative involving a couple that appears to oscillate nearer and further away from the blue flame of the gay disco’s perennial promise of unlimited sexual adventure. Sexy, moody, and atmospheric it was nonetheless impenetrable to me due to the absence of English subtitles. (Sorry!)

It Seems To Rain
(Director: Allen Tsai; Taiwan – 38 mins)
The wonderfully intriguing music video / trailer that opened the program now expands into a fully fleshed-out, dialogue-driven short film. The story centres on a high school aged boy who hates his naturally curly hair and is constantly straightening it, only to loose the battle with the rain and humidity, which curls it up again. This, of course, becomes a metaphor for his desire to straighten out his sexuality as well. He has a kind of girlfriend, though their relationship seems rather platonic, but a new student in his class clearly sets his sights on him, and they begin to tip-toe toward some kind of queer relationship. This never gets much further, however, than an unreturned pass the one boy makes toward the other in a porn shop they briefly visit. Just as lush and brooding as the short, it nonetheless leaves us with more questions instead of fewer about the nature of this nascent homosexual high school romance.

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INTERVIEW: Aki-san

So what brought this program of films and the nearly sold-out audience it attracted together? Let’s ask Aki-san, the programmer.

Guy: How did you come to create this program for the festival?

Aki-san: It wasn’t really planned. This is the first year we’ve done it. I’ve actually been programming for the festival for about 10 years. We’ve had programs of Japanese shorts before, but not an Asian program like this. I just happened to have these films in front of me and it made sense to present them as an Asian program.

Guy: Do you mind me asking, are you Japanese?

Aki-san: My nationality is Japanese, but my blood is Chinese [Taiwanese].

Guy: How did you end up in Japan?

Aki-san: I was born in Taiwan, but my parents wanted me to be educated here. So when I reached the age to go to university, my parents sent me here to be trained as a doctor. My uncle was a doctor living in Japan and he said that he would adopt me and pay for my schooling, so I came to study here at the age of 20 and I’ve been here ever since.

Guy: In this program, we had a film in Spanish with no Asians appearing on screen. We also had two English-language films, one of them from the U.S. So what is your definition of an ‘Asian’ film?

Aki-san: Of course, there is no absolute definition. It’s just a matter of the feeling I get from these films. In each case, either the writer or director or some of the actors are Asian. You know, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was directed by Ang Lee, who is Taiwanese, so in that sense it is a partly Asian film too.

Guy: And I think that’s good – to shake up people’s expectations of what an Asian film is or can be. Can you tell us a little about why you think these are important films for us to see?

Aki-san: I wanted to show the whole range of possibilities for films that are – at least partly – Asian. So I included two films by Boo JunFeng from Singapore, because I think he is a really interesting filmmaker that we should be watching now. He’s just made another really good short film, but it is not gay themed. The American film, ‘Just’, was co-written by Edward Gunawan, who is a second-generation Vietnamese American. So this expands the idea of what an Asian film is.

Guy: The two versions of ‘It Seems to Rain’ were really interesting, but also a bit frustrating. In the shorter one, we are left wanting to know more about the characters. But at least it is clear that it is a gay relationship. In the longer version, however, this is more ambiguous. What is the relationship between these two films?

Aki-san: Well, the long version was actually made first, and the two are included together on a DVD. The shorter version was actually re-shot after the long version was completed.

Guy: Yeah, because there are definitely images in the short version that aren’t in the long one. They are more explicit – you see the boys actually holding hands, etc.

Aki-san: Right. I would actually have liked to show the long version first, and then the short one, but the director insisted we show them the other way around. We also contemplated showing only the longer version, but we thought people would be confused or dissatisfied. Both films are actually the director’s graduating project from film school. The second one was made as a kind of trailer for the first film. What he was trying to show was that something of professional quality could actually come out of a graduate film project, and I think he succeeded in that regard.

Guy: Yes, they are both great looking films. You know, I’ve really been looking forward to seeing these short film programs [including ‘Strange Couples’ & ‘Moon Shadow’ and the ‘Japanese Rainbow Reel Competition’] because we are so bombarded with American media. I mean, the popularity of a show like ‘The L Word’ – it seems like every lesbian on the planet is watching this show! Even my kids at school know this show and watch it. But I wonder if this is such a good thing. I mean, the situation for gay people is very different in America than it is in Japan or other parts of Asia. So, how do you feel about this dominance of mostly American English-language queer cinema and TV?

Aki-san: Certainly, there is a disparity between Asia and the West in terms of gay rights and queer visibility. Things are much more advanced in that regard in the West. So it’s inevitable that you’re going to see a lot of queer cinema coming out of these places. It’s only recently that it has become okay to be gay in places like Singapore and Taiwan. So we are still seeing stories about coming out and coming to terms with being gay there. Whereas in the U.S. and Europe, we are seeing films about gays raising children, etc. So it’s important for us to see these films too, to see a different perspective on gay life. There just are not enough Asian films on gay themes being made to fill a festival like this.

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Of the 15 features we screened this year, 3 (or 20%) were Asian (‘Drifting Flowers’, ‘No Regret’, and ‘Bangkok Love Story’), and of the 6 shorts programs, half had a Japanese or Asian focus. So the films are out there, and surely the audience for them is too. And while it’s important for people here to be able to see what the situation is for queers in other parts of the world – as so many of our selections did – I think it’s also important to remind Western audiences that the dominant images and ideas around queer visibility and queer rights are Western in origin, and aren’t necessarily consonant with queer people’s experiences, expectations, hopes or desires elsewhere in the world. I’m sure the mix of Asian films, European films, American films, and films from other parts of the world that we will be screening next year will give us more chances to consider those contrasts, and to evaluate what being ‘queer’ means through as many lenses as possible.

Incidentally, the Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is entirely staffed by volunteers, and Aki-san – a medical doctor of Taiwanese origin living in Japan – is just one example of the wide range of backgrounds, interests and skills that they bring to the festival. We look forward to another selection of Asian shorts at our 18th annual festival next year.

INTERVIEWS: James O’Shea & Philipp Karner

2008-07-26T03:02:00.000-07:00

‘Kiss the Bride’ (director, C. Jay Cox)
2007 / USA / 99 mins
Screened Saturday, July 12, 16:00 – Wald 9
& Sunday, July 20, 18:15 – Spiral Hall

James O’Shea is perhaps your typical American hunk in appearance only. Beneath the tanned skin, the perfect teeth – often glinting in a mischievous, boyish smile – and the chiselled body is a man utterly at ease with himself and those around him. This is all the more impressive given his small town Southern background, where the borders of masculinity are rigorously policed, and anything that strays from that norm is liable to be labelled ‘queer’. He has, I think, the most difficult role in ‘Kiss the Bride’, because he has to persuade us that a man can have a single, deeply intimate relationship with another man, without being gay, and still choose for himself something like the heterosexual ideal of marriage and monogamy, which challenges all of our ideas of sexuality, gay and straight. I began our interview by telling him sincerely that I thought he had done an excellent job of persuading us of the emotional reality of this character.

Guy: … you know, as a gay person, I’m often irritated by films in which straight guys play gay characters, because frequently there is a kind of escape clause built into the film for the actor. At some point, something comes up to suggest that the character is not really gay. But in this film, I think you really have the toughest role. People can accept gay characters [like Matt] now, as long as gay is gay and straight is straight. But you have to persuade the audience that someone who is not gay would have a relationship like this [with Matt] and stand up for it at the end as your character [Ryan] does, and they have to buy it. If they don’t buy your performance, then the movie is sunk. So congratulations for pulling that off.

James: Thank you, that means a lot to me. Yeah, there is definitely a conflict there that I felt I needed to be true to in order to make it come across for the audience. You try to do your job in a way that you bring that conflict the character is experiencing to life in a way that is three-dimensional.

Guy: But how do you do that, exactly?

James: You have to sort of find yourself in the most conflicted way you can, in order to sell that conflict on the screen.

Guy: Do you know of anyone in your own life who has been through something like this? I have certainly known of a friend of friends who, for whatever reason, developed a very intimate relationship with one other man, but his is not gay, and is now married to a woman.

James: No, I don’t know anyone who went through that. But I’ll tell you, I come from a small town in the south where gay and straight is very rigid, and people don’t stray from talking about anything that goes outside the norm of a ‘straight’ conversation. They don’t veer off into anything that might make them uncomfortable. I like to think of myself as having more aspects than that – that I can be poetic and artistic with what I do. But it’s uncomfortable for most guys. We are still struggling with that as a society.

Guy: So how did you come to be an actor?

James: I was actually started as an athlete. I was a soccer player attending college on an athletic scholarship – I wasn’t going to acting school. My brother was a musician, though, who went to Harvard, so I knew there were other possibilities. I was injured and lost my scholarship, so I needed to find something else. My girlfriend at the time introduced me to modeling. That led me California and eventually to acting.

Guy: Actors who play gay roles are always being asked what it was like to do the love scenes. (I think it’s actually a kind of homophobic question.) I mean, you guys are professionals. You’ve been working for maybe 10 years. But what about when you were just starting out? It has to be different when you are a teenager or a young adult and you haven’t dealt with this stuff yet.

James: Yeah, I was a shy fucked up kid. I had a lot of stuff to work through.

Guy: And how did you do that?

James: Just by making every mistake you can make! When I think back to the first performance I gave, or the first relationship I was in, I don’t even know who that person was [i.e. himself]. But you know, my feeling is that the more times you fall on your face, the more colors you have to show to the world.

Guy: It seems to me a lot of American actors enter the business through non-traditional routes. Unlike British actors, who for the most part are classically trained in theatre first. Have you done any theatre?

James: You’re right. And, no, I never did theatre. I took some acting classes in California, and I did some scenes from Shakespeare and that sort of thing.

Guy: I imagine L.A. is a pretty crazy place to live.

James: It is. New York is all about Broadway. But L.A. is all about movies and television. So anybody who wants to be a movie star ends up there. It’s tough – you are literally competing with the whole world.

Guy: Where do you see your career going, or where would you like to see it go?

James: Of course, I want to be able to choose my roles, not just have to take whatever comes along. I think you have to tap into some sort of positive philosophy and just envision the top and go for it. I need to work as an actor and be creative with what I do. So my ultimate goal is just to be fully realized as an artist.

Guy: How are you enjoying Japan?

James: I love sake! I love sushi! I think Japanese girls are super sexy. I like the ritualistic qualities to traditional Japanese culture, and the attention to detail. I mean, even this building [the Spiral Hall] is an example – everything is just so.

Guy: Have you had a chance to get out and explore Tokyo at all?

James: Yeah, we came with a group of friends. So we did Tsukiji – the fish market. We did shopping in Harajuku and visited Electric City [i.e. Akihabara, known throughout the world as a destination for cheap electronics and the main stomping ground for ‘Otaku’ – obsessed fans of manga an anime]. We went up to Ueno Park and checked out some of the museums there. I love just walking around the city and discovering things by accident.

Guy: So have you had any ‘Lost in Translation’ moments?

James: Crossing that huge intersection in Shibuya was a ‘Lost in Translation’ moment. Also, I’ve found that my humour doesn’t really work here.

Guy: Yeah, sarcasm sometimes doesn’t go over. They don’t seem to understand it.

James: And that’s my humour!

We’ll hear about this again when I put the same question to James’s co-star Phillip Karner.

Incidentally, Philipp’s brother – a beaming blond boy of 19 who has just completed his one year of mandatory service in the Austrian military – came along for the ride, and appeared to be getting every bit as much attention as his brother and James. Granted, both of the Karner boys are very easy on the eyes! But you have to wonder what purpose a picture with a random white stranger – even if a very cute one – serves in the symbolic universe of those festival goers (and there were a lot of them) who insisted on getting their picture taken with him. In any case, he was a very gracious subject, and didn’t seem in any way to mind the attention of his admirers, regardless of their gender!

Guy: So you have quite an interesting story. You grew up in Austria, but now you are an American actor working in Los Angeles. How did that happen?

Philipp: I came to the U.S. when I was 19, after I finished my year in the Austrian military. Everyone has to do it, which sucks. I just always knew as a little kid that I wanted to be an actor and that the U.S. was the place to do it, so I came over the first chance I got.

Guy: How did you break into the industry?

Philipp: I settled in New York first, where I studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Studio [famous graduates of this school include Anne Bancroft, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Paul Newman and Al Pacino]. I did some shows, sort off-off-Broadway, and then I got small roles on ‘Sex in the City’ and ‘The Sopranos.’ After 3 years in New York, I moved to Los Angeles in 2001.

Guy: L.A. must be kind of a crazy place to live. I was talking to James about this.

Philipp: It can be, sure, but I love Los Angeles. There is a lot nature you can access easily. You can have a dog there and a bigger house. It’s harder to do those things in New York. So you can make L.A. whatever you want it to be.

Guy: I don’t want to ask that standard question about doing love scenes – I mean, you are a professional actor with years of experience.

Philipp: Yeah, it’s hard to make those moments seem real, because it is very technical. You have all these lights and machines and people hovering around you, and you just have to focus on what’s going on between those two characters. Everybody knows what it is like to be in love and to be confused. So you just focus on that emotional aspect and ask yourself, ‘What would I do in that situation?’

Guy: You mentioned in the Q&A that you worked at a gay bar for four years. What did you learn about gay culture or gay men from that experience?

Philipp: I learned that everyone is crazy when they are drunk! But also that we are all looking for the same things – for company, love, companionship – it doesn’t matter what your sexuality is, that’s just human nature. You see people who clearly want something more substantial, but they are looking for it in casual encounter after casual encounter. So, I think it helped me to see that sometimes we are confused about what we are looking for, or we’re looking for it in the wrong places.

Guy: I’ve heard that the film industry is very hard on relationships. You know, you are constantly meeting new, interesting, attractive people. You often have to go away for long periods of time to work on a film.

Philipp: Yeah, it is tough on relationships. But if you are committed and serious about someone, you can make it work. If you’re not, then there are a lot of temptations and your relationships won’t last long if you’re working in the industry.

Guy: Years ago Ian McKellen—

Philipp: Who, by the way, is my favourite actor.

Guy: Oh, really?

Philipp: And my favourite writer is Ian McEwan [who wrote ‘Atonement’, recently turned into a successful film.]

Guy: Ian McKellen said that one of these days a really talented young actor would come out of the closet and everyone would love him and he’d make a lot of money for his agents and the studios. But it hasn’t happened. Why do you think that is?

Philipp: I don’t think the country [i.e. America] is ready for it yet. The film industry is about money, and that means the centre of the country. There is a huge number of people out there between New ‘York and L.A. that are just not ready for it. It’s very idealistic to think that you can be open about your sexuality, but the world is just not ready for it yet. Knowing that a man is gay immediately emasculates him in the eyes of many people. That’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality.

Guy: In the film there is this moment where Tori talks about a happy kid who gets an average report card and is then made miserable because his parents view him as ‘damaged goods’. The message is that it is okay to be average. But it is coming in a Hollywood film filled with people who are not average. So how seriously are we supposed to take that message, or how seriously do you take it?

Philipp: If you shot a movie with a bunch of average looking people, unfortunately no one would go to see it.

Guy: You just described most of British cinema!

Philipp: And I love gritty British cinema. But most people want a fantasy when they go to a movie.

Guy: But I mean L.A. must be full of people who went there with big dreams and didn’t quite make it. How are they supposed to feel about themselves? At the end of the day, it has to be okay to not be Tom Cruise.

Philipp: And I would hate to be someone at that level of fame. I think that’s a kind of hell. They don’t seem like happy people to me. As long as I can work and make films that I am proud of, that’s enough for me.

Guy: So have you had any ‘Lost in Translation’ moments?

Philipp: Only because of James! His humour doesn’t go over so well here!

Guy: Yeah, we talked about that! Sarcasm is not well understood.

Philipp: I am fascinated by the culture of politeness here. Having lived in New York, where everybody is in your face, it’s pretty incredible to be in a city this size and to find everyone so polite. It’s a nice thing.

Philipp, James and C. Jay were all due to leave the next day. James and Philipp both expressed regret at not being able to see more of the country, but promised to return soon. We suggested they come in spring, for Sakura, since the heat of July is probably not the best time to visit! But both of them made a big impression on our audience, and I’m sure lots of good roles and other opportunities await them in the future. We can only hope some of those roles will bring them back to our festival in the years to come.

Bride of ‘Kiss the Bride’!

2008-07-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

‘Kiss the Bride’ (director, C. Jay Cox)
2007 / USA / 99 mins
Screened Saturday, July 12, 16:00 – Wald 9
& Sunday, July 20, 18:15 – Spiral Hall

The festival’s second weekend was all about star power, with the lead actors from three of our most popular films (‘Drifting Flowers’, ‘Kiss the Bride’ and ‘Out at the Wedding’) attending their respective screenings. The hunky stars of “Kiss the Bride’, James O’Shea and Philipp Karner, were treated to a long round of applause and uncharacteristically loud and enthusiastic hooting when they emerged from backstage after the film’s second screening (it has also screened the week before with director C. Jay Cox in attendance). And it wasn’t just gay guys who turned out to see them. They were equally set upon by female fans looking for autographs and pictures in the lobby afterward.

Once again, Nishimura-san hosted our Q&A session, for which we were also joined by director C. Jay Cox, looking relaxed and refreshed from his trip to south western Japan earlier in the week (see below for more details).

Nishimura-san: Thank you for coming. I’m Nishimura-san, and this is Raina, our interpreter for the evening. I’m sure many of you noticed Tori Spelling in this film. We haven’t seen here in a while so it’s nice to see her again. Unfortunately, she is not with us tonight, but we do have the director and the two hot stars who played Matt and Ryan in the film. Would you mind introducing yourselves briefly.

C. Jay: Hello, my name is C. Jay Cox. I’m the director of the film.

Philipp: I’m Philipp Karner – I played ‘Matt’. Thanks for having us in Tokyo, we’re having an amazing time.

James: [Speaking in a funny low, brooding voice] I’m James. I played the other character [Ryan]. Arigato. (laughter)

Nishimura-san: My first question is for the director. What inspired you to make this film with the messages it has about marriage and commitment and also sexual identity?

C. Jay: I liked that we don’t know where this story is going to go. Every character is going to re-evaluate themselves, and be revaluated by the audience, by the end of the film. I particularly liked the Alex character [played by Tori Spelling], because there is a fluidity to her, the way she comes to accept her partner’s past love affair with a man.

Nishimura-san: [addressing both actors] Was there anything interesting going on behind the scenes? Was it easy or difficult to play a gay role?

Philipp: Well, for starters, he [James] is crazy, which made it difficult. (laughter) No, we read our parts together months before shooting began. Working with Tori was a lot of fun; we were really lucky to get her… James likes to get naked a lot.

James: To expand on that idea that I like to get naked, firstly, it was in the script. The script required me to have my shirt off a lot of the time, so… But then, you know, it’s different for different types of shots. For close-ups, you don’t need to be naked. But for medium shots, every time they said ‘Action’, I would drop my pants. (laughter)

Philipp: I think that’s called ‘method acting’. (laughter)

Audience member: [To C. Jay] I really enjoyed the film, so thank you for that. What was your reason for choosing Tori Spelling for the role of Alex?

C. Jay: I think because of who her father was [legendary TV producer Aaron Spelling] she is underestimated as a person and as an actor, and the same is true of this character, so it was a good fit.

2nd audience member: I wanted to ask [the actors], when you worked on the film, did you develop any emotions for each other?

[Hamming it up for the audience, James and Philipp reached their arms out to one another and stared mock-lovingly into one another’s eyes, which the audience thoroughly enjoyed.]

Philipp: Of course you hope to make the relationship seem real while you are acting, and naturally you develop feelings for people when you are working closely together.

[James, once again clowning for the audience, put one hand into his shirt and pumped it out repeatedly, Bollywood-style, to show us his heart throbbing with affection for his co-star. The audience howled with laugher.]

Philipp: [To James, with mock sincerity] Baby…

James: We had chemistry, you know. We were both chosen early on. In the middle of filming, I hated his guts. But in the end, we’re friends… [To Philipp] I love you. (laughter)

3rd audience member: In the closing scene, when you have all three of the lead characters together, and as they explain their feelings for one another, what was the significance of each person expressing their feelings?

C. Jay: For me, the point is that commitment is more important than the label you put on a relationship. In the U.S. right now there is a lot of controversy over gay marriage, but I just feel that if your relationship is really strong, it doesn’t matter what you call it – or what society allows you to call it.

4th audience member: In this film there is some emphasis placed on the importance of friends and family in developing and supporting the relationship that becomes a marriage. Is that emphasis coming out of what’s been going on in the U.S. over the past few years [i.e. the debate surrounding gay marriage] or out of an ideal of how we would like to see our relationships recognized?

C. Jay: That’s a great question. You know, this is a romantic comedy, so partly it’s the romantic comedy ideal where everything is resolved and everyone is reconciled in the end. But the way our relationships are viewed by friends and family is of vital importance to us as individuals, which is why gay marriage is so controversial and so important.

5th audience member: Firstly, thank you for the wonderful movie. I gained a lot from it. The film touched on a lot of social issues, but as you say it is a romantic comedy. So how did you feel while directing and acting in a comedy that touches on such serious issues?

C. Jay: One of the things I liked about this project is that it touches on those issues. Certainly we wanted to make an entertaining film, but I liked that there is some substance there, but that it doesn’t hammer us over the head with those serious topics – it isn’t heavy handed.

6th audience member: This is kind of a broad question. Once you got this role, did you do anything to research it, like going to gay clubs or anything like that? And also, the film has already been shown theatrically in the U.S. When will it be available in DVD?

James: I did a lot of push-ups and sit-ups! (laughter)

Philipp: I’d been bartending in a gay bar for four years, so I didn’t need to do any research. The movie is now showing on a gay cable channel in the U.S., so lots more people are seeing it now, which is great.

C. Jay: The film will be out on DVD in the U.S. this fall, and should be available here shortly after that.

James: It was such a good script that it was easy to do without doing homework. As an actor you just have to apply yourself to an imaginary set of circumstances and make it as believable as you can. So that’s what I did. Plus the push-ups, because I am shirtless for three-quarters of the movie! (laughter)

Having thoroughly charmed our audience, the Q&A session with James, Phillip and C. Jay came to a close. But I caught up with them again in the lobby, after the mob of fans had settled down and dispersed, to catch short interviews with each of them. So have a look for that post here on the TIL&GFF blog.

But first…

C. JAY’S BIG ADVENTURE!

As we mentioned last week, C. Jay arrived for the first screening of ‘Kiss the Bride’ on Saturday July 12, and then had half a week to kill before his stars arrived for the second screening. So being a writer and a man of the world, equipped with curiosity and a sense of adventure, C. Jay decided to head out and explore Japan on his own for a few days. Let’s find out how it went! (Ari-san, one of our programmers and MCs, also joined the conversation.

Guy: So how was your trip to Kyoto and Hiroshima?

C. Jay: Kyoto was amazing. My agent booked me into a Japanese room in a Western hotel, so I was sleeping on a nice futon with buckwheat pillows, which I love. The hotel also had a spa, and acupuncture, so I had that for the first time, which was great.

Guy: What did you do in the city? Probably visited lots of temples, right?

C. Jay: Yeah. Actually, as it happened, I was there during the Gion Matsuri. I sort of stumbled into it by accident.

Guy: Wow, that’s great! [The Gion Matsuri is an annual festival in one of the city’s temple districts to the east that easily ranks in the top 3 or 4 traditional festivals in Japan.]

Ari-san: So which was your favourite temple?

C. Jay: The one that’s set up on kind of a high cliff with falling water. I’m going to butcher the name…

Ari-san: Kiyomizu-dera.

C. Jay: Yeah, that’s it. Plus, of course, the Golden Temple [made famous by being burned to the ground by a crazed monk in the 1950s, a story later immortalized by queer Japanese author Mishima Yukio in his novel ‘Kinkaku-ji’ – The Temple of the Golden Pavilion]. There was also a really impressive one with a very high ceiling with a dragon painted on it and statues of 1,000 Buddhas. I actually walked into one just as it was closing for the day and the vice-abbot had changed out of his robes and was putting on running shoes to go for a jog! I had a nice little chat with him about Zen Buddhism for a while. And then, yeah, it was the Gion Festival at night and the huge parade during the day.

Guy: Did you have anyone to travel with?

C. Jay: No, I was all by myself, but you have interesting adventures that way. I got lost wandering around looking for a place to eat one night. So I found this little noodle house and ended up talking to the waitress for a long time. She got me to take out my map and she recommended which temples I should visit.

Guy: What about Hiroshima?

C. Jay: Hiroshima was very moving. I was only there for an afternoon, so I visited the bomb dome, the museum and the memorial site. I was in tears by the end. The personal stories in the museum really hit home for me. I grew up not far from where they did open-air nuclear testing in the U.S., and my relatives were exposed to the fallout from those tests.

Guy: There was a woman who spent 10 years researching a book on the history of this testing, and part of her thesis is that the U.S. government chose to do it where they did in part because the people who lived upwind of the tests were of a religious orientation that was disinclined to resist the government. I think she was talking about Mormons, which is ironic [Cox was raised as a Mormon, and of course his first feature as a director, ‘Latter Days’, is about a Mormon discovering his homosexuality].

C. Jay: Yeah, I mean I remember that when I was little a black government truck would drive up once a month and buy a galloon of our milk to test it for levels of radiation. I used to ask my parents, “If they are testing it for radiation, shouldn’t we be worried about this?” And their attitude was, ‘No, if was unsafe, the government would tell us.’

Perhaps that’s fodder for a future film of C. Jay’s. In any case, we had to cut our conversation a little short so I could squeeze in a quick interview with his two stars. But of all our guests, C. Jay really was one of the most gracious and giving of his time. We’re really glad he got to see more of Japan than just Tokyo, and look forward to welcoming him back with another film in the coming few years.

‘Freeheld’ & ‘A Lez in Wonderland’

2008-07-24T16:38:00.000-07:00

‘Freeheld’ (Director: Cynthia Wade)
2007 / USA / 38 min
‘A Lez in Wonderland’ (Director: Anna Margarita Albelo)
2006 / France / 26 mins
Screened: Sunday July 20, 16:00 – Spiral Hall

I have two confessions to make. 1) I don’t really like or watch much television. 2) I am probably still more naïve and idealistic that I ought to be at my age (I’ll be 34 this year). As a result, I have never been a fan of either ‘Queer as Folk’ or ‘The L Word’. I’ve seen a few episodes of each, but frankly, neither one represents gay life as I live it or want to live it. ‘The L Word’ in particular strikes me as fantasy, and outside of Miyazaki and the original Star Wars films (not those abominable prequels!), I really have no interest in fantasy.

So I was rather shocked when I saw ‘A Lez in Wonderland’, a half-hour documentary about a giant lesbian party -- the Dinah Shore Weekend -- held each year in Palm Springs. The festival asked me to prepare an English transcript of the film a few months ago, and I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Here was proof that ‘The L Word’ is not a fantasy, at least not for this one weekend each year, when thousands of affluent, attractive, and (apparently) extremely promiscuous lesbians gather for a party that makes gay men’s events seem tame in comparison! (Indeed, they are behaving like a certain stereotype of gay men, and taking it to the next extreme!) It looks like a lot of fun, if you can afford the hefty price-tag.

The film does a good job of showing both the fantasy and the reality of this hugely successful event, talking to dozens of regular visitors (including one young lesbian who is there partying alongside her mother -- also a lesbian) and special guests like ‘The L Word’s Guinevere Turner, who gives one of the film’s most interesting and intelligent interviews.

“The world is full of lesbians in the closet,” she says. “I would venture to say that 50 to 60 to 70 percent of women at this event are closeted in their real lives. But I also feel like, um, these are women who are just looking to blow it away. Just, like, ‘I’m just going to fucking put on a bikini and I’m going to make out with my girlfriend at the side of a pool.’ I’m not that girl, but I am the girl of, like, ‘Wow! Lesbians are really ruling right now. They are having so much fun, and there are so many women from all over.”

Its atmosphere of hedonism and sexual abandon (even the filmmaker’s sound engineer, who is straight, gets into the fun -- making out with several women, and wandering around topless) made for a rather dramatic contrast with the sobering, sad, but ultimately triumphant story of ‘Freeheld’, winner of the Academy Award for best documentary (short subject). A simple, intimate film about the lives of regular people fighting for the rights most people take for granted, it tells the heartbreaking story of Detective Lieutenant Laurel Hester, a career police officer in New Jersey’s Ocean County, who is dying of lung cancer, and leaving a young partner, Stacie Andree, behind. The film is a mix of at-home scenes that show Hester’s deteriorating health and the way her partner cares for her unstintingly, and scenes from the meeting chamber of the local assembly that show the obfuscating excuses and delaying tactics of the Freeholders -- the democratically elected representatives of the county authority.

The film thus serves as both a poignant and affecting human drama (one festival volunteer observed that perhaps 80% of the audience was left in tears) and a valuable object lesson in the fight for queer equality. Indeed, some of the most interesting interviews are with people like Lt. Hester’s first partner, a self-described conservative and Republican supporter, who would never have taken an interest in a question of same-sex rights, if not for the fact that the issue so dramatically affects “the best partner” he ever had.

Hester appears to have the support of the entire community and in scene after scene we see public meetings full of supporters essentially heckling the Freeholders into ‘doing the right thing’ by extending spousal pension benefits to Stacie. As one of her supporters tells the council of Freeholders: “You hold within your hands the awesome power to decide whether or not Laurel Hester dies in peace.” The entire community appears to be displaying signs in their window that say: “Don’t let Laurel Hester die this way.” Which raises the question: if the whole community supports their fight, why is it even a fight? Usually democratically elected leaders resist popular pressure because they fear there is a larger (silent) majority that opposes what they are being asked to do by a vocal minority. But the film never introduces us to any members of that silent majority, save perhaps a rather naïve high school girl who comes and makes a vacuous speech in support of the Freeholders (a moment reminiscent of Britney Spears’ mindless statement of support for George W. Bush in the film ‘Fahrenheit 911’). The principle of justice that animates the film is, of course, blindingly obvious to all of us. But this otherwise excellent film might have benefited from giving us some window into the lives and attitudes of those to whom it is not so obvious, since those are the people that stand in the way of full equality for members of our community.

The screening was followed by a talk by Otsuji Kanako, as well as Mr. Yamashita, a lawyer with the Tokyo Public Law Office, where he is part of team of lawyers interested in and ready to fight for expanded equality rights for same-sex couples and members of other marginalized groups.

Otsuji-san is perhaps Japan’s best-known lesbian public figure. She was a member of the Osaka Prefectural Assembly from April 2003 to April of last year. She had hoped to be elected to the National Diet in a seat filled by proportional representation, but did not succeed -- a difficult blow to the self-confidence of Japan’s still small and relatively quiet gay liberation movement. Since then she has opened an office in Shinjuku-Nichome, from which she continues her work as an LGBT activist. She has also been busy translating into Japanese a children’s book about a couple of gay penguins! (See her website at: http://www.otsuji-k.com/english.html)

The host for the discussion, Ari-san, began by asking for Otsuji-san and Yamashita-san’s thoughts on the two films.

Otsuji-san: Well, there was a very strong contrast between the two, wasn’t there? (laughter) The first film was a view into a world I didn’t know existed! So it’s valuable for us to see what goes on in other queer communities around the world. Both documentaries give us this opportunity. But now we’d like to focus on the issues raised by ‘Freeheld’, especially since we have a lawyer with us who can let us know what the legal situation is like in Japan. Most of us are just living our lives and don’t even think about what would happen if our partners got sick. But ‘Freeheld’ shows us that while we can get very comfortable in our everyday lives, as soon as something like this happens, we are reminded of what the barriers are. So it is a very pressing reality, and we need to take a close look at it.

Yamashita-san: [He started with a joke by telling us his name, height, weight, and age!] I work with a group of lawyers in the Tokyo Public Law Office. We’ve dealt with all kinds of law from personal injury cases to murder to law dealing with children and families. When you are working on social issues like the one we saw in this film [i.e. same-sex spousal and pension benefits], you have to remember that there is a legal and governmental background to these issues, but that if you raise your voice, things can change -- sometimes faster than you expect. In Japan, at present, there are no such benefits for same-sex spouses.

Ari-san: A lot of us don’t know what the current legal situation is in Japan surrounding this issue. But pensions in general have been a big political issue in the past few years. [Otherwise popular former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi ran into serious political trouble, for example, for his government’s mishandling of public pension monies.] Can you fill us in on the legalities around pensions?

Yamashita-san: My immediate reaction to the film was to wonder, ‘Is there such a pension, transferable to a spouse, in Japan?’

Otsuji-san: Yes, there is a pension you can pass on. It’s a national, public system. If a husband dies, his wife and children can collect his pension.

Yamashita-san: But you have to understand, this is the public system we are talking about. It doesn’t apply to corporate or private pensions -- only to the self-employed, or public employees. It is part of the same system as the workplace injury benefits system.
There are a few other important points to consider. If a couple is not married, the pension can still be passed on as long as there is evidence that they have been living together for a substantial amount of time, that it is a stable ‘marriage-like’ relationship.
The second point is that if a man dies, his pension can be passed on. If a woman dies, however, it cannot be passed on to her husband.

Otsuji-san: Actually, I believe the rule is that if the husband is 55 or older, and the wife dies, her pension can be passed on to him.

Yamashita-san: What about your experience as part of a same-sex couple?

Otsuji-san: Well, for all intents and purposes, I am married. As a politician, I focused on trying to create policies that would benefit gays and lesbians. So, for example, if one partner is Japanese and the other has a different nationality, this can cause problems, such as difficulties accessing the public health-care system. I know of cases of people in this situation being denied health benefits. Even if a couple is straight, there can be difficulties passing on property, shared apartments and things like that. I know of a case in which a gay man died and his family quickly came in to take his apartment, which of course his partner was still living in. So there are a lot of challenges. You can imagine, losing your partner and your home all in a short period of time is very difficult.

Ari-san: Are there any legal mechanisms to resolve these disputes with parents of partners?

Yamashita-san: Well, in Japan you can adopt adults. So that is one alternative to marriage for establishing a legal relationship between partners. But of course it requires the consent of the person’s natural parents, so that’s only practical in cases where you have a good relationship with your partner’s family.

Otsuji-san: But even in cases where you have a good relationship with the family, you can still run into issues like whether you will be allowed to be present at a cremation ceremony after your partner dies.

Ari-san: What is the power of having a movement in support of something like spousal benefits for same-sex partners?

Yamashita-san: In Japan, we don’t usually organize ourselves into big social movements. But individually we do have the power to change things. I was really impressed by the film because it shows people speaking out, talking about their own experiences – the conservative who never supported same-sex rights before, and who never would have been involved in a social movement like this, but who decides he wants to help solve this problem. That’s very powerful. In the film, Laurel talks about being told at her job interview [to become a police officer] not to talk about being a lesbian on the job, but she says that everyone nonetheless knew. So by being open about who we are, we can become stronger as a community. It still doesn’t seem like we have the right social conditions in Japan to do that. It is still scary to come out at work or to your neighbours. But we have to start doing that and building partnerships with people in that way.

Ari-san: From a legal perspective, how far off do you think we are in Japan from having our relationships recognized by the law?

Otsuji-san: Again, I think that presenting propositions for laws and debating them in the legislatures is a good way for society to move forward on these issues.

Yamashita-san: Yes, the law is very important. But even more important are the facts in the world. The law is there to help resolve conflicts that arise between those facts, such as the reality of same-sex couples and the denial of spousal benefits. You take the facts at hand and look for a rational solution to the problems they give rise to.

Otsuji-san: Of course, gay marriage is now being recognized in the U.S. and a lot of other places, but the legal system in Japan is very different. Gay marriage is not a pressing issue in Japan. As Yamashita-san said, you have to start with the facts at hand. I haven’t heard of any cases in Japan of people taking their employers to court to extend spousal benefits, but that is worth doing.

Yamashita-san: Actually, there was a legal decision made last year where a non-traditional couple [an unmarried man and woman living together who were actually blood relations - uncle and niece] fought for the right to pass on their pensions to one another. The court approved it, but the national government intervened and stopped it. Then it went to the Supreme Court, which later approved it again. So this is a non-traditional couple being granted the same right as a heterosexual married couple. In the court case, they had to break down their daily life in great detail [i.e. to show that they were living in a manner comparable to that of a couple]. So, in my opinion, the system can change – sometimes quickly – and is likely to change in the coming years.

Otsuji-san: I feel like it was really good for me to see this film and see what is happening with gays in other parts of the world. The people of that community didn’t want to let Laurel die in despair. They all had hope. We look at the world around us and we may be tempted to see the situation as hopeless and want to give up. But we really don’t know how much opportunity there is for change unless we push for it. So for me the question is how we can use our hope and build something with it.

Yamashita-san: I wish this was a world in which I could just make a law and change things, but it’s not that easy. Going to court, however, is very powerful, and a very legitimate way of making change. Maybe you are not sure what kind of lawyer to go to with these issues. So, if I can promote myself and the team of lawyers I work with a little, we are all ready to use out wits and our knowledge to push the agenda forward on these issues.

Ari-san: So if you have any problems, please call him! (laughter)

As both Yamashita-san’s example and the film ‘Freeheld’ show, same-sex couples are held to a double-standard when it comes to proving the legitimacy of our relationships. Whereas any unmarried heterosexual couple in the situation of Laurel and Stacie could simply go out and get married, and no one would question the surviving partner’s entitlement to the other’s pension, same-sex couples have to anatomize their relationships in court to prove that they are in stable, committed partnerships that are marriage-like. In fact, what they are being asked to show is not that they have a ‘normal’ relationship, but that they have achieved an ideal of mutual support and companionship that would put many heterosexual couples to shame – and Laurel and Stacie certainly succeed in doing that.

INTERVIEWS: Matsumoto Takuya (director), Takahashi Kanimaru (actor) and Ito Asuka (actress)

2008-07-22T23:30:00.000-07:00

‘Strange Couples’ (Director: Matsumoto Takuya)
2008 / Japan / 52 mins
Screened: Sunday July 20, 11:25 – Spiral Hall

The scene in the lobby after the screening of ‘Strange Couples’ looked a bit like a photo-shoot for a rock band, as Matsumoto-san and his bare-chested warriors of weird posed down with guitars and punky grins. Half-intellectual, half rock’n’roll punk, with thick black-rimmed glasses and hair standing up to the sky, he looked not unlike the off-spring of some queer liaison between Elvis Costello and Woody Allen -- and if you don’t find that sexy, you aren’t using enough imagination! He was f***ing adorable (but is, apparently, not gay)!

I had a chance to talk to Matsumoto-san, who spoke pretty decent English, and with the help of one of our stalwart volunteer, Nishimura-san (who counts translation to and from Japanese into English among his many services to the festival), conducted the following short interview.

Guy: I really enjoyed the film. It’s nice to see some Japanese stuff in contrast to all the American and European films screening at the festival. So where did the story for ‘Strange Couples’ come from?

Matsumoto-san: Thank you. I came to the festival two years ago to see a friend’s film, and I really liked the atmosphere and the audience. So I thought, ‘Hey, I should make a film for this festival.’ I thought it would be an ideal venue for my films.

Guy: This isn’t your first film, is it?

Matsumoto-san: No, I’ve made maybe 20 or 30 films now, both short and long.

Guy: Where does the money come from to make your films?

Matsumoto-san: I basically pay for it myself. It’s very low budget. The actors don’t get paid, other than for their transportation costs.

Guy: Do all of your films have gay themes?

Matsumoto-san: No, some do, some don’t. Most of them are a bit dark -- human dramas.

Guy: How long are your longer films?

Matsumoto-san: The longest are about 100 minutes.

Guy: Wow, that’s feature length. So where are your films usually shown?

Matsumoto-san: Well, my short films have shown at festivals like this one. But in Japan they don’t tend to want to show longer films at festivals, so we have to organize independent screenings at community centers, schools, and special events.

Guy: Really? It’s hard to imagine why. You mean they prefer to show programs of short films?

Matsumoto-san: Yes, there is an audience for shorts at festivals. And for bigger budget features. But not for the kind of features I make. I’ve made about 10 feature-length films, but I can’t get them screened at festivals. My films have never played at commercial cinemas, but they’ve screened at the Tama Film Center, near Hachioji, in West Tokyo.

Guy: Well, I’d like to get out and see some more of your work.

Matsumoto-san: That’s great. But it will be difficult for you, because we aren’t able to present them with English subtitles. That’s one of the great things about showing at a festival like this, is they have the resources to show the film with subtitles.

[Please visit http://matsumoto-movie.hp.infoseek.co.jp/ for information on upcoming screenings.]

Matsumoto-san presented me with handbills for some of his other films, all of which look like pretty major productions. One of the more intriguing was ‘Otokotachi no Baka’ (‘The Men’s Stupid Song’, loosely translated -- he uses the kanji for horse ‘ba’ and for song ‘ka’, but ‘baka’ also means idiotic, silly or crazy). It’s a series of 3 ‘documentaries’ (in the same sense that something like ‘Jackass’ is a documentary!) of him and his friends/partners-in-crime going across the country having various misadventures. The name of the film is a play on ‘Otokotachi no Banka’ [‘The Men’s Elegy’], the Japanese title of the John Woo film ‘Better Luck Tomorrow’.

A man of somewhat manic energy, he was off on another adventure before long, and I was eager to chat with his star, Takahashi Kanimaru.

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INTERVIEW: Takahashi Kanimaru

Dressed in a smart grey suit and sticking to the no-shirt policy, Takahashi-san is a fine-looking man with one of those hypnotically symmetrical faces onto which you could project any mood, any emotion. Indeed, the film depends on just this quality, with its many close-ups of Takahashi-san’s blankly affecting visage. He’s also a bit of a flirt, with a mischievous sense of humour. With very little prodding from Rachel D’Amour, he showed his nipples off to the audience during the Q&A, ensuring everyone’s amusement and pleasure! With Nishimura-san’s translation assistance, I managed to capture this interview.

Guy: So how did you get involved in this project?

Takahashi-san: Well, firstly, Takahashi Kanimaru is my stage name. It was given to me by Takahashi Tete, who does a lot of theatre work and also worked on ‘Strange Couples’. I am a stage actor, and Matsumoto-san saw one of my shows and decided he wanted me for this project.

Guy: Have you appeared in any films before?

Takahashi-san: Yes, I have appeared in several films by Obayashi-san, a well-known Japanese director [a recent film of his would be translated into English as ‘Time-leaping Girl’]. I also had a small role in ‘Lost in Translation.’

Guy: Really? Where can we see you in this film?

Takahashi-san: You know the scene where Bill Murray is filming a commercial for Suntory Whiskey?

Guy: Of course…

Takahashi-san: Well, there’s a documentary film crew following his character around, and I am the director of that film crew.

Guy: How did you enjoy working on this film?

Takahashi-san: Ah, it was really nice. Sophia Coppola spoke with me while the other actors were changing their costumes.

Guy: Did she speak any Japanese? What was she like?

Takahashi-san: No, she doesn’t speak Japanese. But she was very kind. She responded really well to me.

Guy: So can I ask you, are you gay?

Takahashi-san: No! Actually, I am married.

Guy: Any children?

Takahashi-san: Not yet!

Guy: So how was it acting in this gay love story? You guys are really all over each other throughout the movie. It’s very fun and sexy.

Takahashi-san: I had worked with the actor who plays Jackson [a nickname based on the sound the character makes when he sneezes!], my boyfriend in the film, so that made it easier. It’s not hard to show that intimacy on screen. But I would do things to help us get into the mood, like holding hands before shooting.

Guy: Getting older seems to be an issue in the film. The character you play is turning 21 and seems to be anxious about his age. Were you able to relate to that anxiety?

Takahashi-san: Well, I am 31 -- 10 years older than the character I was playing. So it took some time for me to get back into the headspace of someone that age. But I didn’t really focus on my own past, like, trying to remember what it was to be 21, but on the relationship between him and Jackson, and what it feels like to be in love for the first time when you are young.

Because he’s so cute, and because he gave such a persuasive performance as a “full-time homo” we’ll forgive him his being straight! Actually, he was a total gentleman and was the last of the three actors to put his shirt back on after the screening, which shows just how sensitive he is to the needs and desires of those attending the festival! We wish him well!

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INTERVIEW: Ito Asuka

Ito Asuka is a gorgeous and gracious embodiment of the Japanese adjective ‘genki’, which we really ought to coin into English usage, since it captures a unique mix of liveliness, good health, youthfulness and up-beat spirits without any implication of being manic or hyperactive!

Guy: How did you get your role in ‘Strange Couples’?

Asuka-chan: I was in Matsumoto-san’s last film, a documentary [‘Otokotachi no Baka’].

Guy: But you’re not a guy! [‘Otoko’ means male person.]

Asuka-chan: I know. But I’m a guy in spirit!

Guy: So how did you get involved in that film?

Asuka-chan: I was playing in a rock band -- I play keyboards -- and the drummer had worked with the director on one of his previous films. I was invited to do the film only one week before they started filming.

Guy: Are you trained as an actor, or are you primarily a musician?

Asuka-chan: Actually, acting is my main passion. Music is a side project.

Guy: As a foreigner, the image we have of Japan from the outside is of a very homogeneous society where there is a lot of pressure for people to conform and be the same. Your character is really weird -- she confesses that she is [romantically] in love with her brother! But the idea behind this film is that ‘it isn’t weird to be weird’. What do you think of that idea?

Asuka-chan: As for my role, I can accept that a sister might idealize her brother and allow that to become something like romantic love. As for being different, the title is ‘Strange Couples’, so I knew it would be a bit weird, that it would be about strange things. So I just acted in keeping with that.

I have lots of gay and lesbian friends, and I didn’t think there was any discrimination against them. I didn’t see that they had any particular difficulty being who they are. But then one day we got into a cab together in Kanagawa, and the cab driver said he couldn’t take lesbians in his cab. That really shocked me.

Guy: In the movie, your character reacts very badly when she finds out her brother is gay. Did you ever have this kind of experience? How did you feel when you met your first gay person, or made your first gay friend?

Asuka-chan: Yeah, of course I was surprised. I didn’t know what to think. But a few minutes later, I just thought, ‘Well, I have a new kind of friend.’ At first, it was like counselling a friend about their love affairs.

Guy: Why was that?

Asuka-chan: Because this person was telling me about the problems with their relationship, but I didn’t know that it was with a person of the same sex.

Guy: Ah, that’s funny! You can do that in Japanese, because you don’t usually make clear whether you are speaking about a man or woman [gendered pronouns are rarely used in Japanese, and nouns are not gendered]. In English, you couldn’t talk about someone in such a gender-neutral way for very long. It would be very awkward, and it would arouse suspicion.

[Nishimura-san mentioned the use of ‘partner’ in English when people are talking about a same-sex boyfriend or girlfriend, but that word has now been ‘queered’ by queer people using it this way, such that when straight people say ‘partner’, it sounds like they mean a same-sex lover!]

Asuka-chan: Yeah, so I only found out later. But we were already friends, so it wasn’t really a problem, just a surprise.

Guy: How do you see your career as an actress developing?

Asuka-chan: Well, I belong to a small acting agency, so they give me assignments -- usually for commercials or internal corporate videos and that sort of thing. So I will keep doing that work. But I also want to keep doing indies like ‘Strange Couples’.

Guy: Are you making a living from your acting at present, or do you have to do something else as well?

Asuka-chan: Yeah, I have a part-time job. Many of us do. In the end, though, I would like to be an oba-chan actress [a ‘granny’ actress who achieves a ripe old age and is still working]!

We certainly hope she achieves her goal. She’ll make one mighty cute granny (oba-chan)!

‘Strange Couples’ & ‘Moon Shadow’

2008-07-22T23:29:00.000-07:00

‘Strange Couples’ (Director: Matsumoto Takuya)
2008 / Japan / 52 mins
‘Moon Shadow’ (Director; Yoshino Ryouhei)
2007 / Japan / 40 mins
Screened: Sunday July 20, 11:25 – Spiral Hall

Because this is an English-language blog (and because my Japanese is not very good!), we so far haven’t been able to bring you much coverage of the Japanese and other Asian films that screened at this year’s festival. We went a little way toward correcting that with our two long posts on Taiwan’s ‘Drifting Flowers’, and will go further with this post, as well as upcoming posts on the ‘Asian Shorts’ and ‘Japanese Rainbow Reel’ programs.

The directors and stars of these two unique independent films were all able to attend the screening, which meant we had about 10 people on stage after the screening for the Q&A session. It was hosted by local drag personality Rachel D’Amour, who was dressed in a vibrant green and red embroidered silk cape over a two-piece number that made her look like a cross between a hostess in a high-end Chinese restaurant and a Las Vegas show-girl. The four men among the ‘Strange Couples’ crew (director Matsumoto Takuya, lead actor Takahashi Kanimaru, and two of his male co-stars) all came on stage in suit jackets over bare chests (because showing a little skin, of course, always goes over well at a queer event!), and the director added a touch of formality by wearing a tie! But what they were talking about, I haven’t the foggiest clue!

‘Strange Couples’ & ‘Moon Shadow’ are two longer Japanese short films that screened together on Sunday morning, representing two very different independent film aesthetics.

Shot on video, ‘Strange Couples’ is a zany but very touching comedy about what it means to be ‘normal’. It poses this question by surrounding a loving gay-male couple (loving to the point of near-constant molestation) with a cast of heterosexual nuts! One believes she is an alien and expects to be repatriated to her home planet at any moment, much to the consternation of her boyfriend. Another is in mourning for a dead boyfriend, but speaks to him as if he were still alive, and seems to believe he can live again if a suitable host body is found! When the sister of one of the gay partners barges in, freaked out that her brother is a homo, the whole group decides to hit the road in flight from the prejudices of the ‘normal’ world (and the sister, who is maybe more lonely than bigoted, comes along for the ride). Their misadventures take them to a mountain cabin where they encounter yet another group of freaks-- this time gangsters! The action-packed ending (imagine ‘The Matrix’ made with no budget whatsoever) is as hilarious as it is improbable in this joyfully silly film with a serious message at its heart -- ‘There’s nothing weird about being weird’, and nothing abnormal about being in love.

What I admired most about it was that it begins from a totally different premise than most gay stories, which are (typically) about either coming out, or finding or losing love. The one thing we don’t doubt in this story is the love that its two leading male characters share for one another -- indeed, they can’t keep their hands (mouths, tongues) off of each other! If that’s a problem, it’s somebody else’s, not theirs, and this rock-solid love is the focal point of certainty around which their little universe of crazy friends and crazier mishaps rotates. Playfully sexy, touchingly weird, and utterly immune to cynicism, the ‘Strange Couples’ screening was the most fun I had (inside the theatre, at least) at this year’s festival.

‘Moon Shadow’ is a more serious but still funny and moving film about an odd pair of accidental roommates and their various romantic disappointments and frustrations. Hirose-san is a school-teacher of ambiguous age (in the film she looks like she might be pushing 50, but in reality the actress is perhaps not 30!). One morning she wakes up to find a gay man, who has just broken up with his boyfriend and been kicked out of their apartment, sleeping in her bed. It’s unclear whether they were friends (or neighbours) before, but he is not leaving! He cooks and cleans for her, and before long they have settled into a cozy domestic relationship. Perhaps it is something about her new roommate that allows Hirose-san to admit to herself that she is infatuated with one of her young male students. Eventually, we learn that her roommate too became aware of himself and his sexuality through the attentions of a particularly fond teacher, with whom he is briefly reunited toward the end of the film. Filled with lines cruelly cutting (“She’s like one of those nerds having a fake romance in a hostess café”), frank (“I chose someone to love who wouldn’t love me back. It’s safer that way”), redeeming and ultimately liberating (“You made me realize who I am”), it is a quiet, meditative piece about the secrets we keep, the disappointments we endure, and the strange places we find strength.

It is also, intentionally or not, an homage to an older kind of independent cinema, one made clear by the strong contrast of its style and texture when screened alongside ‘Strange Couples’. Shot on film, ‘Moon Shadow’ has the buttery yellow-gold look of 1970s cinema, and is -- perhaps intentionally -- devoid of props or other signifiers (no cell phones, no personal computers) that would root it firmly in the present. We’ve become so used to digital photography, and now digital projection, that to actually see something shot on film is a nostalgic reminder of cinema’s material history, rapidly dematerializing in the digital age.

For more on ‘Strange Couples’, see my interview with the director Matsumoto Takuya, lead actor Takahashi Kanimaru and actress Ito Asuka.

LGBT Youth Exchange Project

2008-07-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the constant activity of the festival at Omote-Sando’s Spiral Hall was a table bedecked in rainbow flags, brochures and information, and staffed by bright-eyed young people working hard to make a difference for queer youth. As you’ll recall, at the request of director Thomas Gustafson, and with the help of an anonymous donor, a group of 16 queer youth were invited to attend our opening night screening of Gustafson’s ‘Were the World Mine’ free of charge. So where did these youth come from? And what sort of queer youth organizations or programs exist in Japan?

I finally had a chance to find out on Saturday, when I spoke with Inoue Yuko-san of the Center for Gender Studies at Tokyo’s International Christian University (http://subsite.icu.ac.jp/cgs/). They are working together with people from an initiative called Peer Friends on the LGBT Youth Exchange Project. This is the first year of the project, and it will bring a group of queer youth from Bristol, England to Japan this summer, for a ground-breaking exchange program. It will culminate in a public event on August 24th, when people like you and I can go to the Yoyogi Olympic Centre and find out what these inspiring young people have been doing during the exchange. (For more information, please visit: http://www.delta-g.org/youth/ Or send an email to: young_lgbt@yahoo.co.jp)

Yuko-san is a truly unique soul. Her father is a Presbyterian pastor at a church here in Japan, and although she is not gay, she is committed to fighting homophobia both in the Christian community and in Japan generally. She speaks excellent English; she even has a bit of a Southern twang. So I couldn’t help but wonder why. She explained that spent one year on exchange in Arkansas, and that her parents are bilingual, so she grew up using both Japanese and English.

Guy: So tell me how the project works? Who is running it? How long will it go on?

Yuko-san: Our project will run for two weeks this coming August. Taiga Ishikawa of Peer Friends has contacts in Toshimaku, where the group will have a kind of retreat. They will also spend 3 days travelling to Kyoto and Nara. And then they will report back on their activities at the big event in Yoyogi on the 24th.

Guy: Has anything like this been done before in Japan?

Yuko-san: No, this is the first exchange of its kind. Previously, Japanese LGBT youth had no opportunity to get together with foreign youth to discuss issues of homophobia and coming out. The U.K. is a frontrunner in this area.

Guy: So who is paying to bring these kids to Japan?

Yuko-san: The city council of Bristol. They have an office called Youth and Play Services, and they spend 20 million yen annually [about 200,000 US dollars] on programs that address LGBT issues. It involves teachers and senior government officials, so it is a very well-established program.

Guy: Really? That is quite surprising. Bristol is maybe not such a big city, is it?

Yuko-san: Actually, it is the 6th largest in the U.K. But, still, these programs are quite unique.

Guy: So how many people will be coming?

Yuko-san: Seven students and three staff. The students are all between 16 and 21 years of age. They will attend five different workshops, on issues such as overcoming homophobia, accepting yourself, and coming out to your parents, as well as learning about queer history, etc.

I volunteered the fact that there is a great organization in Toronto called S.O.Y. -- Supporting Our Youth -- that creates programming for queer youth and helps foster healthy interactions between younger and older queer people. They might be a good partner for future Youth Exchange Projects in Japan, and will be of interest to anyone doing work around youth and sexuality. (For more information on S.O.Y. please visit: http://www.soytoronto.org/)

Yuko-san had the good manners and the curiosity to ask what had brought me to Japan, and I explained that I had always wanted to live abroad, and that several friends of mine (gay men and women) had come to Japan to teach English and had good experiences here. That led to some comparison of our experiences living abroad. In response to my question about racism, she said that the community she lived in Arkansas was definitely very segregated. At her school, "the black kids sat on one side and the white kids on the other," she said, "with the Asian kids making a kind of border down the middle!" I offered that a lot of foreigners complain about being treated like outsiders in Japan and never being truly accepted, but to that for me -- as a gay person -- I have never expected the world to just embrace me with open arms. As long as you don’t run into open hostility, you count yourself lucky. In that sense, being gay is a good preparation for being the kind of minority you are when you choose to come and live in a foreign country. However, it has to be said, that being a white foreigner in Japan makes you a kind of privileged minority, quite different I am sure from the experience of other Asians or Africans in Japan, or the experience of Asians in North America.

Guy: Why do you think the level of homophobic violence in Japan is so relatively low?

Yuko-san: I think it has to do with the lack of Christianity.

Guy: This from a pastor's daughter!

Yuko-san: Yeah, really! But while it’s true that homophobic violence is quite rare in Japan, we have had cases of gay people being attacked and even murdered because they are gay. About 9 years ago, there was something called the Shin-Kiba incident, in which a man was attacked and killed by a group of teenagers. They later told the police that they didn’t think he mattered as a human being because he was gay.

Guy: I think it’s the case that because queer visibility is low in Japan, violence is also low. But it may be the case that as queer visibility increases, so too -- unfortunately -- will certain kinds of attacks on gay people. At least that seems to have been the pattern in North America.

Yuko-san: What about lesbian visibility in Canada? In Japan, it is even lower than the visibility of the gay male community. You know, gay men give money and organize events and spend money at those events, but lesbians are quite invisible, even within the gay community.

Guy: I think in Canada there is probably a similar disparity -- gay men’s events and programs attract more attention and money. But in terms of visibility, I would say lesbians are definitely not invisible, either in the general society or the gay community. They are quite well organized and vocal, like gay men.

So going back to the gender and sexuality program at ICS [International Christian University], it seems quite unique. Are there many other programs like this in Japan?

Yuko-san: No, it’s the only one of its kind here. There is no capacity to do research, but you can graduate with a concentration in Gender or Sexuality, or a combination of the two. Right now, it is an undergraduate program, but in the future of course we hope to be able to offer graduate degrees as well.

Guy: How were the young Brits that will participate in this exchange selected?

Yuko-san: The city of Bristol organizes something called ‘Freedom Youth’ -- a weekly group that meets to allow queer youth to socialize and also learn about things they don’t teach in schools, about queer history, etc. Many of these kids are interested in Japanese culture, though maybe they only have a stereotyped image of what that is -- you know, cartoons and that sort of thing. So the Bristol city officers decided they would fund several of them to come to Japan. Seven students said they were interested in going, so they started preparing. They’ve been studying Japanese and learning more in depth about Japanese culture for about seven months know. We’re really excited for them to arrive!

Guy: So the exchange is not about these kids coming over and ‘teaching’ their Japanese peers about being out or something?

Yuko-san: No, no, of course not. At this point in history, it would be pretty ridiculous to bring them over here for that purpose. No, this will be a true exchange of equals. The British kids have a lot of supports, so in that way it has become very safe for them to be gay. Whereas in Japan, the Japanese kids really have to fend for themselves. So both groups have a lot to learn from each other.

Guy: The event on the 24th sounds really great. I am looking forward to attending.

Yuko-san: Yeah, we would like to attract as many teachers and people who work with youth as possible.

Yuko-san spoke of the desire of her and her colleagues to see more teachers come out at school, to help make it easier and safer for students to come out. I was not happy to have to report that even in Canada, which has a reputation as a kind of paradise for queer people (or at least for queer rights), most gay teachers are not out at school, at least not to their students. It is a sad contradiction that although teacher’s college is typically a hot-bed of leftish idealism, where everyone becomes sensitized to issues of race, class, gender and sexuality, at the same time the message when you enter the workforce as a teacher is, ‘Keep your head down. Don’t rock the boat. Wait until you are in a secure position, and then maybe you can begin to try to come out at work.’ I’ve even heard of cases of student teachers being encouraged in teacher’s college to incorporate queer issues into their lessons, who have then gone ahead and done so during their teaching practicums, got into trouble with their host schools, and then were denied graduation as a teacher (from the university that encouraged them to do this in the first place) because they failed to complete their practicum successfully!

One of the reason for this hesitance of teachers to come out is that there is a widely held fear, in the predominantly Christian West, that gay people are a threat to children, and as recently as 15 years ago, a gay teacher in Toronto was murdered by students from his school. That led to the creation of Toronto’s Triangle Program (http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/triangle/), a special alternative school for queer youth. It is a single-classroom program that can accommodate about 18 students at a time housed in the basement of a church that is well-integrated into Toronto’s gay community (indeed, the pastor, Reverend Brent Hawkes, is himself gay and conducted some of Canada’s first gay weddings).

As Yuko-san and her colleagues know, however, nothing will change if we are forever keeping our heads down for fear of provoking hostile reactions. Events like the Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (and countless other queer film festivals around the world), programs like the Youth Exchange Project here, GLSEN (http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/home/index.html) and the Gay-Straight Alliances it has fostered in U.S. and Canadian schools, and the Triangle Program and S.O.Y. in Toronto show that gay people in general -- and isolated queer youth in particular -- have a tremendous hunger for images of queer life that they can identify with, and opportunities to meet, socialize and learn from each other outside of the usual adult venues of gay life. We look forward to hearing a lot more about the great work people like Yuko-san are doing to create those opportunities here in Japan. Otsukarasama desu! (Thanks for your hard work!)

For more information on the LGBT Youth Exchange Project, please visit: http://www.delta-g.org/youth/ Or send an email to: young_lgbt@yahoo.co.jp

INTERVIEW: Chao Yi-lan and Serena Fang of ‘Drifting Flowers’

2008-07-22T01:02:00.000-07:00

‘Drifting Flowers’ (Director: Zero Chou)
2008 / Taiwan / 97 mins
Screened: Sunday July 13, 13:55 – Wald 9; Saturday July 19, 16:00 – Spiral Hall

Films wouldn’t get made without writers and directors, of course. But since the beginning of cinema, it is the stars we see on-screen that have always received the lion’s share of attention. As stars-in-waiting, newcomers Chao Yi-lan and Serena Fang were easily the most glamorous and attention-getting guests we had at the festival up to that point, and the audience response proved it. They spent a long time taking pictures and signing autographs with fans in the lobby after the screening. Serena looked extremely feminine, with flawless make-up, a flowing, semi-transparent silk top over blue jeans, and lots of delicate jewellery hanging from her neck, wrists and ears. Chao Yi-lan looked smashing in a black (men’s style) dress shirt and black jeans. Indeed, they both presented themselves very much as they appear in the film : Serena as vulnerable, girlish, and movie-star beautiful; Chao Yi-lan as a slightly swaggering but equally beautiful tomboy, with an adorable mop of black hair cascading over an unadorned face that even the most attractive among us would kill for. Everyone found the pair utterly charming - and they were.

When the frenzy around them had settled down, I had a chance to chat with them, with the help of my volunteer translator, Cynthia, who was also an active participant in the conversation. As it happened, however, both Elaine and Serena spoke excellent English. They only slipped back into Taiwanese to express more difficult ideas or to give longer responses. Totally relaxed and unpretentious though they were, I was concerned not to offend them by butchering or being too casual with their names. So I began by asking them how I should address them, which is when Chao Li-yin explained that she goes by ‘Elaine’ when dealing with English-speakers like me.

Guy: How did you come to use the English name ‘Elaine’?

Elaine: My father chose it for me because it sounds like my Chinese name, Yi-lan.

Guy: Have the two of you had a chance to explore Tokyo?

Serena: Oh, yeah. I love shopping, so we have already done Omote-Sando and Harajuku. On Wednesday, I got up at 5 :00 in the morning to go to the fish market at Tsukiji. The sushi was amazing.

Guy: Have you had a chance to travel to some other international festivals with this film?

Serena: Yes, we went to Berlin with it.

Guy: How was Berlin?

Serena: I really liked it. It was not so humid, so I liked the weather - and the food.

Elaine: No, the beer!

Serena: The food, the drinks - everything was incredible. At our hotel, they served champagne with breakfast. It was almost too much.

Guy: What kind of food was it? German food doesn’t have the best reputation - too heavy, or…

Elaine: You mean like sausages…

Guy: Yeah, and sauerkraut. But I imagine in a city like Berlin the food is very international?

Elaine: Yeah, it is.

Guy: So, Elaine, you were a university student when you got the role in ‘Drifting Flowers’. Are you still in school?

Elaine: Yes, I am in my second year, majoring in theatre, not film.

Cynthia: What do see as the main difference between theatre and film ?

Elaine: When you perform in theatre, you have to enlarge your voice, exaggerate your gestures. But in movies, it’s the opposite. You have to tone everything down.

Guy: Yeah, if you do stage acting in a film it tends to looks really stagy, really fake.

Elaine: Right. The director was constantly telling me, ‘You’re not in a theatre. Tone it down!’

Guy: This is the first feature film for both of you. How do you see your careers developing from here?

Elaine: I have no idea. I just want to explore different performing arts and develop my skills as a performer.

Guy: What are the opportunities for a Taiwanese film actor? I was reading an interview with Zero Chou where she said that they market for Taiwanese films is quite limited, particularly for ones with gay content, because they can’t be shown in mainland China.

Serena: Well, it’s true that until recently there hasn’t been a lot of investment in Taiwan in theatre and cinema. But now there are more opportunities. And Taiwanese films are reaching a wider audience around the world.

Cynthia: It seems to me that in the past, Taiwanese films tended to be very serious. But now there is a lighter tone, and more mainstream, entertaining films.

Serena: Yeah. And there wasn’t so much gay and lesbian cinema. But now it is changing. The industry and the audiences are really opening up to these stories.

Guy: You both speak very good English. You could make movies in America or Europe…

Elaine: I’m not limiting myself to anything. So we’ll see!

Guy: So are you a celebrity at school now that you have done this film?

Elaine: No, all my friends are also appearing in films, so it’s not unique.

Cynthia: Actually, the film hasn’t been released theatrically in Taiwan yet, has it?

Serena: No. It opens August 15.

Guy: What about your families? How do they feel about you appearing in this sort of a film?

Serena: Actually, my father doesn’t know what the film is about.

Guy: [Shocked] Really?

Elaine: But he has to find out sooner or later!

Serena: Yeah, I am sure he will. I just told him I had to go to a film festival in Japan, but I didn’t say it was a gay and lesbian film festival! But my mother knows about it and is supportive.

Elaine: My family is really supportive of my work. My dad reads the papers, so he knows what is going on.

Serena: My dad reads the paper too, but he still hasn’t figured it out!

Guy: Were you both cast in the film through a similar process?

Serena: Yes, it was an open audition - the same for both of us.

Elaine: I met Serena at the second audition - my second, her first. We tested some scenes together, and I guess the director just liked the way we worked together.

Guy: Did you have to do anything special to prepare to show this relationship in the film?

Elaine: Well, we just rehearsed the scenes together before shooting, like you would in theatre.

Cynthia: How much of yourselves did you put into your roles?

Elaine: Of course, there is a lot of yourself in any role that you play. You take whatever life experiences you’ve had that you can apply to it, and you put that into the role. You want there to be a truthfulness to what you are doing, so that helps. For me, all I need to do to make a character real is to believe that a person like this really does exist in the world. When you have faith that someone like this exists, it comes easily. It’s easy to portray love or whatever else if you can believe in the reality of the character.

Serena: To prepare for the role, I just really focused on the relationships between Jing [her character] and Diego [Elaine’s character] and May [Jing’s younger sister], and tried to make them as real as possible. I am really glad that the director gave me a lot of freedom to create the character as I imagined her. She didn’t tell me how perform the role. She respected my own creativity and instincts as a performer.

Guy: There is a moment in the film when the foster mother suggests that Jing give May up to her, and Jing and Diego are both there, and the line is something like : ‘Your lifestyle is not appropriate to raising a child.’ But it’s a little ambiguous. What does she mean by lifestyle? Does she mean that they are a lesbian couple? Or that they are musicians who play in nightclubs, and thus are out late all the time? Or that she is blind?

Elaine: I don’t think it is emphasized that it is gay relationship. I think it’s actually downplayed. The focus is more on the sisters and their relationship, [which is deteriorating at that time].

We thought we had detained these two beaming young actors long enough, and released them to their fans again with warm wishes for their future success. My translator suggested that we are really catching the two of them before the storm breaks, that is, before the film’s inevitable success in Taiwan makes them into celebrities with screaming fans following them wherever they go. If the charisma they exuded at the TIL&GFF - and the corresponding audience response - is any indication, I think she’s right. For my part, I hope they are able to taste the fruits of success without suffering too much of the downside of fame. And I hope they can come back to us in a year or two years’ time with another beautiful, sexy, moving film to share with the Tokyo audience - which I’m sure cannot wait!

Four Taiwanese Flowers in Full Bloom

2008-07-22T00:59:00.000-07:00

‘Drifting Flowers’ (Director: Zero Chou)
2008 / Taiwan / 97 mins
Screened: Sunday July 13, 13:55 – Wald 9; Saturday July 19, 16:00 – Spiral Hall

You could easily be forgiven for thinking that ‘Drifting Flowers’ was either our opening or closing film, because it certainly generated as much excitement as either of those events. Why was this sold-out Saturday afternoon screening such a draw ? The reason, of course, is that we had four of the creative minds and spirits behind this project present for our second screening on Saturday July 19 - the director, Zero Chou, producer Hoho Liu, and stars Chao Yi-lan and Serena Fang. The four of them together made for an irresistible attraction for an audience perennially starved for images - strong images, delicate images, sexy images, moving images - of the lives of queer women. ‘Drifting Flowers’ has it all in spades, as well as one of the most memorable performances is recent, and not-so-recent, queer cinema.

‘Drifting Flowers’ is the third instalment in a planned 6-part series of queer-themed films from the team of ‘Zero + Hoho’ (that’s how they credit themselves in the film) - each film representing a different colour of the rainbow, which has become an international symbol of queer culture and pride. (‘Drifting Flowers’ represents Red and the theme of Life; ‘Splendid Float’ was the yellow instalment, and ‘Spider Lilies’ the green.) More grounded in gritty reality than it’s fantastic predecessor (‘Spider Lilies’), ‘Drifting Flowers’ tells the interlinked stories of Diego, Jing, and Lily, three women struggling to find themselves and their place in the world against the alternately lush natural beauty, and haunting and seedily glamorous urban environments, of Taiwan.

Jing is blind and is raising her younger sister, May, as best she can, while working as a singer in a nightclub, where despite the eerie beauty of her voice, and Diego’s atmospheric accompaniment on the accordion, the customers are paying attention only to their beers and their own petty quarrels. For a time, the three of them enjoy a kind of idyllic life, supporting one another like a family should, but May’s jealously of her sister’s growing intimacy with Diego will help to drive them apart, only to be reunited years later.

Diego’s story, of course, starts long before the film’s opening scene, while she is working for the family shadow puppet theatre, and getting into conflict for failing to conform to her assigned gender role. Lily is the daughter of a competing, and more forward-looking, purveyor of cheap, local entertainment, who puts her on stage in a glittering costume that leaves little to the imagination, and gets Diego’s going. She joins Lily onstage, discovers her talent for performing, and drives a wedge between her and her elder brother, due to inherit the family business that Diego is undermining by - almost literally - hopping into bed with the competition. With an accordion under her arm, she sets out for the world we later find her inhabiting with Jing and May.

Lily resurfaces years later, as an elderly woman battling Alzheimer’s. Having married a gay man for show, she is now a widow, her lesbian partner having died. Her husband, Yen, is also alone, and fighting HIV. He comes to her for help, but ends up helping her instead, as they become the devoted couple that they had only ever been pretending to be.

It is a gorgeous-looking film, its many diverse parts woven skilfully together by shared thematic, tonal, and stylistic threads. Accordion music gives the entire film a French ambiance, and serves to continually pull our imaginations back to Diego. The visual metaphor of trains and railway tunnels, perhaps as conduits of memory, also links the three sections, as does the film’s final - impossible - scene in which Diego (as a teenager runaway), Yen & Lily (as elderly, virtually homeless wanderers), and May (also as a teenager, years after being separated from Jing and Diego) ride the same train car, passing through each other’s lives like ghosts.

The film is also tied interstitially to Chou’s larger body of work by a post-modern moment when Yen, wandering the streets of what I assume is Taipei, walks past a hypnotically symmetrical row of posters for a strangely queer looking film - Chou’s own ‘Tiger Lilies’, of course.

It’s another impressive achievement, and bound to be both a critical and commercial success for this woman of rare talents and unique credentials (she began as a journalist before moving first to documentary and then fictive filmmaking). And it is bound to make stars of its two leads. Chao Yi-lan, in particular, gives one of those fascinating, utterly natural performances that come along perhaps once every ten or fifteen years, and announce the arrival of an ingénue who seems to have been born to live her life in front of the movie camera.

As you can imagine, the audience couldn’t wait to get a look at this fantastic group of talented, vibrant women. And the Q&A session did not disappoint. It began with a lengthy round of applause, and a good many camera flashes, before our host, Ari-san, asked our guests to introduce themselves.

Zero: Hello. I’m Zero Chou, the director. We’re really happy to be here to experience the film with all of you and to connect with the local gay community.

Serena: [Speaking in Japanese, to everyone’s surprise and delight] Hello, I’m Serena. I play the role of Jing. I love sushi. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu. [An untranslatable expression in Japanese that expresses the hope that things will continue to go well between whoever is saying it and whoever it is being said to.]

Chao Yi-lan/Elaine: [She explained to me later that her English name is ‘Elaine’, since it sounds like Yi-lan, so we’ll call her Elaine for our English readers here! She also introduced herself in Japanese, which thrilled everyone.] I’m Chao Yi-lan. I play Diego in the film. How was the movie - good? [The audience roared its approval.] Arigato! [Slipping back into Taiwanese…] Hi, everybody. I’m really happy to see so many people here today. Thank you for coming.

Hoho: [Speaking in English, also to everyone’s surprise!] Hello, I’m Hoho Liu, the producer of the film. Sorry, I can’t speak Japanese, so I will speak in English. Thanks for coming to enjoy our film today. I’m very sorry, but I have to take photos [of the Q&A session], so I won’t be joining the discussion.

Ari-san: [To Zero] Your previous film, ‘Spider Lilies’, won the Teddy award at the Berlinale [Berlin International Film Festival], and was a commercial success in Taiwan. How did that change your situation as a filmmaker?

Zero: Before I answer that question, I just want to thank the organizers of the festival again for inviting us to be here. I am very grateful.

Because ‘Spider Lilies’ was so successful, I was able to make this film much more easily, and it’s a film I really like, so I am very happy about that.

Ari-san: Was there something new you wanted to do with this film, a different approach you wanted to take?

Zero: Yes. ‘Spider Lilies’ was more of a fantasy. It has a dream-like quality. For this film, I felt a responsibility to Taiwan, and to the gay community in particular, to make something that was closer to the everyday reality of that community.

Ari-san: You are here today with your partner Hoho Liu. You are an openly lesbian couple and have been together for 8 years…

Zero: Yes. Although we often travel to festivals and events together, this is the first time we have been asked to appear on-stage together as a couple. I hope you like her! [laughter; the audience obviously liked her!]

Ari-san: I’d like to ask Serena, how did you prepare to play the role of a blind singer who falls in love with another woman?

Serena: In terms of portraying a blind character, it was a somewhat difficult role to play. I researched being blind by watching blind people and documentaries about their lives. But in terms of falling in love with a woman, love is natural - we all experience it - so that part was not difficult. [Serena later told Ari-san that Zero also asked her to watch ‘The L Word’ to help prepare for the role!]

Ari-san: Serena, in March of this year you were photographed for a fashion magazine in a very sexy pose with Xu An’an, an actress who has appeared in the famous Taiwanese lesbian film ‘Candy’. You were both sort of half-naked, and embracing each other. What was it like posing for this photo?

Serena: [Perhaps a little embarrassed, as the audience reacted with laughter and obvious excitement at the discussion of this photo!] Yeah, so they wanted us to pose together in the nude. We had characters for this picture - we were supposed to be dancers. All I can say is we had to do some stretching and yoga to get into that pose ! (laughter)

Ari-san: This question is for Chao Yi-lan [Elaine]. This is your first role in a feature film. I understand you are studying acting at the National Taiwan University of Arts. How did you get the role?

Elaine: I really don’t know. You’ll have to ask the director why she cast me ! (laughter) It was an open audition, so I came in and the director told me about the role and the story, and I was really happy about that [the story and character]. I was so happy to be cast. I’m really grateful to have been given this role.

It really is a star-making performance, and as we’ll see in our interview with them later, neither Elaine nor Serena seem to realize just yet how their lives are going to change when the film is released theatrically in Taiwan in August, and they become instant celebrities, as they surely will.

The audience was invited to ask questions, the first of which was : The performances and the casting in the film are really great. I have two questions. How did you [Zero], as director, go about finding actors to play the openly gay roles of Diego and Yen? And, for Yi-lan, did you already know how to play the accordion, or did you have to learn how for the film?

Zero: The casting for Yen was difficult, because most male actors don’t want to do roles in drag. However, I found Sam Wang, an actor who was already out, and was more than happy to play this role. Actually, he also appeared in my first dramatic film, ‘Splendid Float’.

Elaine: Yes, I did have to learn to play the accordion for the film. I didn’t know how to play before. I also had to learn to perform with traditional Chinese shadow puppets. I learned a lot from the great teacher they found for me.

2nd audience member : I noticed that in the last section of the film, which actually is the first section chronologically, Diego appears to be taller than in the first section. (laughter)

Elaine: Yeah, maybe I grew between the two stories ! (laughter)

Zero: She isn’t actually any taller in the last section. [Films are usually shot over a period of 10 - 12 weeks - not long enough even for a growing teenager to show any height difference on screen!] But I did ask her to slouch in the last section, because she is playing a teenager who is a bit unsure of herself, so I wanted her to appear smaller. In the first section, she is in the role of protector, of Jing and May, so I wanted her to stand up and look like she could protect them.

At the close of the Q&A session we were reminded that a selection of 8 Taiwanese feature films will be screening over several weeks this summer (August 23 to September 26) at Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills, and that ‘Spider Lilies’ - Zero Chou’s previous film - will be among them. For more information, please visit: http://www.cinemart.co.jp/taiwan2008/

For more on this film and its stars, see my interview with Chao Yi-lan and Serena Fang.

UPDATE... It’s over, but it ain’t over!

2008-07-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

Well, the festival came to a fantastic close last night with our closing night film, ‘Out at the Wedding’, with two of its fierce and fabulous stars -- real-life girlfriends Kathy DeBuono and Jill Bennett -- in attendance.

This year’s festival was a huge success -- the biggest yet, with the most films we have ever screened, the most fabulous international guests we have ever hosted, 8 days of screenings, and nearly 8,000 visitors (more than double that of Tokyo Pride). But just because the festival is over doesn’t mean this blog has come to an end. I was at the festival virtually non-stop this weekend, taking in more than 8 programs of films, and talking to as many guests as my stamina (and, in some cases, the availability of a Japanese translator) would permit. So I have a huge backlog of stories to prepare for the blog, which I will be serving out to you in a tantalizing trickle as the week goes on.

Here’s some of what you can expect to read about in the coming days…

LGBT Youth Exchange Project
Remember that group of 16 youth who attended our opening screening (‘Were the World Mine’) for free, at the request of the director, Thomas Gustafson, and with the help of an anonymous donor? My interview with Inoue Yuko of the LGBT Youth Exchange Project will expand your understanding. You can also attend their special public event taking place on August 24th at Yoyogi’s Olympic Centre.

‘Drifting Flowers’
This week, it’s time to make up for our lack of coverage of women’s and Asian films. We get a good start on both with ‘Drifting Flowers’! I’ll have a transcript of the Q & A session with Taiwanese director Zero Chou and her producing partner (as well as life -partner) Hoho Liu, and interviews with the film’s two beautiful young leads -- Chao Li-yan and Serena Fang.

‘Strange Couples’ & ‘Moon Shadow’
Q & A session with the directors and stars of these two great Japanese short films that screened together on Sunday, as well as interviews with the director (Matsumoto Takuya) and two stars (Takahashi Kanimaru & Ito Asuka) of ‘Strange Couples’.

‘Freeheld’ & ‘A Lez in Wonderland’
Q & A session with Japan’s most famous lesbian, former politician and perennial queer activist Otsuji Kanako, as well as Mr. Yamashita, a lawyer with the Tokyo Public Law Office, to discuss the legalities of gay spousal benefits and other issues in relation to the film ‘Freeheld’.

Bride of ‘Kiss the Bride’!
C. Jay Cox is back for a second week, and this time he’s brought his two hunky stars, James O’Shea and Philipp Karner! Get ready for the three-way Q & A session that followed our second screening of ‘Kiss the Bride’, plus one-on-one interviews with James and Philipp, and a mini follow-up interview with C. Jay about his trip to Kyoto and Hiroshima!

‘Asian Shorts’
Mini-reviews of each film, plus an interview with Aki-san, the programmer of this unique group of shorts.

‘Shelter’
Q & A session and interview with Jonah Markowitz, director of ‘Shelter’ -- one of the best and most well-received films at this year’s festival!

‘Japanese Rainbow Reel Competition’
Mini-reviews of each film, plus the results of the competition, with guest juror Jonah Markowitz (director of ‘Sheter’).

‘Out at the Wedding’
And last but certainly not least, our closing night event, hosted once again by local drag queen and unstoppable MC, Margaret, with stars Kathy DeBuono and Jill Bennett in attendance for the film and a great Q&A session that left us all in high spirits, even as the festival came to its inevitable close for another year.

C. Jay Cox Interview – “We’re too hung-up on labels.”

2008-07-16T16:47:00.000-07:00

‘Kiss the Bride’ (director, C. Jay Cox)
Next Screening: Sunday, July 20, 18:15 – Spiral Hall, with special guests in attendance: C. Jay Cox (director), Philipp Karner & James O’Shea (lead actors)

I wasn’t quite expecting to meet C. Jay Cox when he waltzed up to me, as I was loitering in front of the festival reception desk, and said, “You look like you speak English.”

“I do...” I said, a little flustered, not sure who I was speaking to.

It took me half a minute to properly acknowledge the tall, blond, tanned and cheerful American who was so casual, so at ease with himself that it hardly dawned on me he might be the director of that afternoon’s feature, ‘Kiss the Bride’. I guess I was expecting someone a little more... self-important? Pretentious? A little more... Hollywood? But C. Jay Cox is none of these things. He’s just a really nice guy, and I like that about him. Perhaps it’s his Christian upbringing – he has the manners of an angel.

So, long before I sat down to formally interview him, the conversation had already begun. And to my surprise, he was just as interested in hearing about my experience in Japan, and my reasons for coming here, as he was in having me demonstrate an interest in his films. Maybe that’s the sign of a good writer: he’d rather gather information than monopolize the spotlight and listen to himself talk. He was also eagerly looking forward to exploring Japan on his own, during the interval of a few days when there are no screenings (Monday through Wednesday of this week), the festival staff takes a deep breath, and C. Jay waits for his stars – Philipp Karner and James O’Shea – to arrive for ‘Kiss the Bride’s second Tokyo screening on Sunday, July 20th.

He sold his first script, the Reese Witherspoon vehicle (and hit) ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, before beginning production of ‘Latter Days’, for which most of our audience knows him. Alternating between writing for Hollywood and directing for himself, as well as for all of us, C. Jay has managed to do something most artists only dream of – actually making a living from his work, and having the freedom to develop projects at his own pace, in his own sweet time.

With this success, however, comes the perennial accusation of selling out. Having grown up in a trailer park, C. Jay said, he’s always felt that you need a certain level of affluence to begin with in order to worry about ‘selling out.’ There has to be a feeling that you are wasting that degree in French literature or something, he said, which only someone already coming from a position of privilege can be expected to fret about. C. Jay has no such hang-ups. He tells the stories he wants to tell as skilfully and as unpretentiously as he can, and has found a wide audience that enjoys them. As we say in Japan: ‘omedetou gozaimasu’ – a hearty congratulations to him!

Our conversation continued again after the screening in a little Japanese coffee shop just on the edge of Shinjuku-Nichome, and began with the state of his career just before ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Latter Days’...

And since C. Jay was so self-effacing with me, I think I’ll step back for a little while and let him do the talking here!

C. Jay: ...I had been working on a project called ‘The Thing in Bob’s Garage’, which had been optioned, so I had meetings with all the different production companies. At the first meeting I went to, they pitched the ‘Alabama’ script to me. They had been working on it with a screenwriter who did action movies, so it wasn’t the best fit. The focus of the story then was on the male lead, who was a dirt track racer. But the core of it really was a romantic comedy, so I stepped in to bring that into focus.

The ‘Bob’s Garage’ project got pulled away from me, essentially because it had attracted too much interest. No one was going to let me direct it myself. Sometimes, you have to just go ahead and make a movie to prove that you can make a movie. So I started developing ‘Latter Days’.

In the midst of production on that film, ‘Alabama’ came out and was a hit, so all of a sudden I wasn’t just some guy who had never made a movie before. I was the writer of the number one movie in America, which got people a lot more interested in the film I was making.

So, I had essentially given up on breaking into the industry, and – ironically – that’s when it happened!

The ‘Bob’s Garage’ script starts with a gay wedding, and then it becomes this collage of styles and genres. Everybody really liked it, but they also said they would never produce it.

[The film was ultimately directed by veteran comedy director Penelope Spheeris and released in 1998.]

When I started writing ‘Latter Days’, I thought that I was past all the emotional issues in it. But I wasn’t. I thought it would just be a kind of time capsule, to tell that kid [that Cox himself had been] that he’s okay. So the character wrote a lot of it for me.

[The film, of course, is semi-autobiographical, and deals with a set of experience similar to his own, as a young Mormon, out on his two-year mission to win converts and prove himself to his church.]

Unlike the character in the film, I didn’t get sent home from my mission for being gay. I completed my mission and didn’t start to deal with that stuff until afterward. The ex-communication part of the story was something I had to research, and actually I ended up making it harsher in the film than I had first intended to because of what my research revealed.

I moved to Los Angeles after my mission was over. I struggled with a lot of things, but I saw an article in the L.A. Times about this Mormon writer who was questioning the religion. I read his book and he said that Mormonism is a great religion and lifestyle until logic rears its ugly head. He felt that if God hadn’t wanted us to use our reason, he wouldn’t have given it to us.

[Despite the life-changing effect of this book, however, C. Jay couldn’t remember the author’s name or the book’s title!]

There were a lot of prominent people who fell away from the church around that time. The church has this inability to retain intellectuals. Shortly after I left Brigham Young University, there was actually a purge of intellectuals from the university. Professors and historians were fired and kicked out of the church. A number of documents had been discovered that came into conflict with the official version of the story the church tells about itself, and these scholars were interested in these documents.

Guy: It’s sort of foolish, isn’t it, that religion tries to dress itself up as science, as the Creationists do in the U.S., because fundamentally religion and science address different questions. The moral and ethical questions that religion addresses can never be answered by science.

C. Jay: Yeah. If religion can’t come to terms with science and discovery, then how long can it last?

Guy: So you directed ‘Kiss the Bride’, but unlike ‘Latter Days’ you didn’t write it. What attracted you to the script?

C. Jay: Ty Lieberman first wrote it at the Outfest screenwriting lab, and I was helping lead that workshop. Like me, he was writing from what he knew. An ex-boyfriend of his, who had dumped him, was getting married, and he had gone back to his hometown for the wedding. But in the early drafts, the Ryan character [the one getting married] was always an asshole. Ty was obviously still hurting from this experience. And the wife was going to be this terrible shrew. I liked the set-up – it’s kind of this classic formula of the old love showing up at the wedding – but the more I looked at it the more I found myself pulling for the girl. So I encouraged Ty to take it in that direction, to make the characters more sympathetic. I like that you can sympathize with all of them – it means that you don’t know where the story is going to go. I really like the take Alex [Tori Spelling’s character] has on it in the final film. She would rather have the relationship end based on truth, than continue with it as a façade. And I like what Matt says at the end, that she loved him [Ryan] enough that she would have let him go for someone else that he loved [i.e. Matt].

Guy: Maybe it is too strong a word, but there is a pretty explicit critique of marriage in the film. Gay marriage is now a reality in California. What are your thoughts on it?

C. Jay: I don’t think ‘critique’ is too strong. I think a lot of us are too fixated on labels. A lot of gay men fixate on straight guys – you know, if he’s had a gay experience, then he must be gay – and there is this rigidity to these labels. We want our relationships to be called marriages, but maybe it is more politically expedient not to insist on that label, and to push for something else, like ‘civil unions.’ Some people insist that anything less than the word ‘marriage’ means we are second-class citizens.

Guy: But gay marriage is now a reality in California and some other states.

C. Jay: Yeah, but there’s a ballot initiative for this fall’s election in California to change the state constitution and outlaw it. They are trying to plant landmines so that if one day it becomes legal at the federal level, they’ll still be able to block it at the state level. Not surprisingly, a big source of money for this initiative is the Mormon church.

Guy: But what are they going to do? Unmarry thousands of couples?

C. Jay: Yes, that is the point – to invalidate all these marriages. To say that they were never valid.

Guy: Something like gay marriage is totally off the radar here. It’s not that hard to be gay in Japan, but it is also not that visible.

C. Jay: Yeah, I recall reading an interview with I think it was the Japanese foreign minister who said that they have no problem with homosexuality – because there are no homosexuals in Japan!

Guy: What about being gay in Hollywood? In my conversation with Tom Gustafson and Cory James Krueckeberg [director and co-producers of ‘Were the World Mine’] they said that in Hollywood everyone knows who is gay, it just doesn’t filter into the media.

C. Jay: Yeah, there are a lot of highly respected figures in the U.S. that everyone knows are gay, but it’s not talked about. It is basically a non-issue in the film industry. But I tend to feel that with actors, actually, the less you know about their personal life the better. It’s a distraction. When I am watching a film, the less I know about them as people, the more I am able to enjoy their performances. I am in favour of actors coming out, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it won’t affect their careers.

Guy: There are still no actors of the leading-man type that are out in Hollywood. What do you make of that?

C. Jay: We used to hear that [a big Hollywood star, who is probably not gay] was going to come out and that would make it okay for everyone else. I don’t know if he’s gay or not. I don’t care. There are some popular young actors now who are out in the industry, and will probably transition from TV and become big movie stars, like George Clooney did.

[C. Jay did name names, but to protect him from libel lawsuits, it might be best to omit them here.]

So I think if people have known for years that an actor is gay, it won’t be such a big deal when they become movie stars. But, you know, very few people make it to the level of a Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt anyway. So it’s not realistic to think that someone like that is going to become a big star and then come out. If they are going to get there, they will have to arrive at that level already out.

Guy: Like Rupert Everett and Ian McKellen did. They basically arrived as stars in America already out in England, so it was never an issue.

C. Jay: Yeah. ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘X-Men’ were huge, and Ian McKellan was everywhere [even on the plastic cups at Burger King!--Guy]. So we do have prominent out stars. For some people, though, until we have an out star who’s the biggest star in the world, it won’t be enough. But I just don’t see it happening that way, and I don’t think it matters.

Guy: I found it strange to see in the news a while back that Jodie Foster was breaking up with her partner of 14 years. I thought, ‘When did she ever publicly confirm she was a lesbian?’ But then she is kind of on the waning side of her stardom anyway.

C. Jay: Well, that is more a function of being a middle-aged woman in Hollywood than of being a lesbian. That last sort of action film she did, ‘The Brave One’, didn’t make enough money, so the head of Warner Brothers announced, ‘We’re not making any more films for women.’

Guy: But now you have ‘Sex in the City: The Movie’ and it’s a big hit.

C. Jay: Yeah, so now they’ll look at that and say, ‘Oh, well, that was a success, so maybe we can make money doing films for women.’

Guy: There is a really interesting moment in ‘Kiss the Bride’ when Tori’s character basically says it’s okay to be average, to have an ordinary life and be happy with it, if that’s what you want for yourself. But it’s a message that’s coming from what is basically a Hollywood movie that’s full of people who are not ordinary. So I wonder, how seriously do you mean for us to take that idea – that it’s okay to be average?

C. Jay: Again, I think it’s a question of labels. It’s okay to be extraordinary if that’s really what you are. But if you are not, it’s okay to be ordinary too. In the movie, the kid whose parents are disappointed by his average report card goes from being a happy kid to feeling like damaged goods, because of a label. It’s the same with gays and the labels we want for ourselves. We think we’re second-class citizens if we can’t call our relationships ‘marriages’. It’s the same thing. Do you need society to recognize you as extraordinary in order to feel good about yourself? I know lots of straight couples who have been together for years and aren’t married. But they know the value of their relationship. They don’t need the label ‘marriage’ to validate it.

Guy: I tend to think that gay people and straight people have been sort of heading in opposite directions. It used to be that there were very few options for gays to be open about their sexuality or to have sort of settled relationships, so you had the anonymous sex thing and a lot of secrecy. Whereas for straights, it was the opposite problem. Marriage was the only valid kind of relationship you could have. You weren’t even supposed to have sex unless you were married. So I think maybe we are sort of meeting in the middle, where it’s okay for straight people not to get married and it’s also okay for gays to have long-term monogamous relationships.

C. Jay: Or maybe we are on a collision course and we’re just going to crash in the middle!

Guy: Maybe! But I think gay lifestyles can open things up for straight people. I know a woman here in Tokyo raising a daughter with a former partner of hers, and she said that her sister – who is straight and unmarried – didn’t think she could have children until her sister and her partner did. And then it was like, ‘Well, if they can do it [as lesbians], why can’t I [as a single woman]?’

C. Jay: Yeah, sure. Again, we get so hung up on these labels. I mean, I grew up in cowboy country, where men were men. But you know, I went to this diner in my home town again recently, and there are all these pictures on the walls of miners, cowboys – from like 100 years ago. And, you know, they clearly portray something like a gay relationship. They have these little captions that say things like, ‘Lifetime riding partners.’ I mean, men outnumbered women 50 to 1 in the old west, so it’s not unlikely that some of them were gay.

Guy: There is an American academic who collects those photos, and did a book about it called ‘Dear Friends’[:American Photographs of Men Together 1840-1918, edited by David Deitcher].

C. Jay: Right. I know that book. Or, take the Mormon thing. You put 19-year-old boys together in pairs of two, send them out together for two years, they are not allowed to have any contact with women, they are supposed to be together 24 hours a day. It’s perfect training for being in a gay couple! And once a week you have a ‘companionship evaluation’ meeting where you are supposed to talk about your feelings for each other. It’s like date night. Then you close with a prayer and reaffirm your love for one another. This is what I went through, and it was the most homoerotic period of my life!

Most of those guys were terribly straight! But still you saw them rubbing each others knees and being very physically affectionate with each other.

Guy: You see the same thing in schools here. But I think it’s because homosexuality is still far enough below the radar that it doesn’t register as queer. I mean, you see outrageous gay people on TV; everyone knows gay people exist. But I don’t think the average person here has accepted yet that the person next to them – their friend, fellow student, or co-worker – might actually be gay. So there is a lot of freedom for boys to be affectionate with each other. Plus, there is such a barrier to socialization between the sexes, even in co-ed schools, that I think boys have to get affection from each other because there is nowhere else to get it.

C. Jay: I have a 13-year-old son, and we are very affectionate with each other. But sometimes, it is more satisfying to wrestle or play fight than to hug each other. I think that’s just the way boys are.

Guy: Well, that’s the way young male animals play with each other.

C. Jay: His mother is much more uptight about this than I am. He’ll be inside all day doing something quiet and creative, and then he’ll just want to throw a punch at me or something. His mother thought he needed to be in therapy, but you know roughhousing is just what boys like to do.

It’s kind of incredible that straight relationships ever work, because men and women are so different. I know lots of straight guys that, aside from sex, really have no interest in or use for women. They would rather work on their cars, watch sports, hang out with their buddies – anything but spend time with women.

Guy: At the same time, though, I think that as gay people become more visible, straight men have to police their sexuality more closely. I gather that in the Arab world, again, homosexuality is so under the radar, that there is a lot of freedom for men to be affectionate with each other, because it is not read as queer. But I think Japan is kind of right on that edge, and that as queer visibility increases, a lot of the nice affectionate stuff that you see between boys here will start to get shut down.

C. Jay: Yeah, straight guys are wary of anything that might be perceived as gay. My son is junior high-school aged, and at that age anything you don’t like or that’s uncool is ‘gay’.

Guy: Do his peers know that his father is gay? This can’t be all that uncommon in Los Angeles?

C. Jay: Yeah, no, it’s not. He sort of has to find something else to be embarrassed about!

Guy: How about having a dad that makes movies? I guess that’s not that uncommon either.

C. Jay: Yeah, for him it just means he has to come to meeting sometimes and be really bored.

Guy: Did you always want to have kids, or did you think you had to choose between fatherhood and living as a gay man?

C. Jay: Yeah, I sort of grew up with that assumption, that it was one or the other – being a dad or being gay. But as it worked out, I didn’t have to choose.

So there you go. Add being an upstanding, responsible dad – to the point of being unembarrassing! – to C. Jay’s growing list of credits. We wish him well with ‘Chilled in Miami’ and ‘Three’, and look forward to seeing him again this coming weekend, when ‘Kiss the Bride’ screens for a second time at this year’s festival, with its two stars in attendance. Maybe we’ll have to quiz C. Jay on what he’s learned about Japan from his 3-day jaunt to Kyoto and Hiroshima. Stay tuned!

Le Grand Bal : A Sex-bomb and a hint of Perfume !

2008-07-15T23:17:00.000-07:00

No film festival (queer or otherwise) is really a festival without a party — preferably good, big, noisy and naughty. Our opening night master of ceremonies, Margaret, did not disappoint, throwing the annual ‘Le Grand Bal’ bash at Bar Hijouguchi. A few of us stopped by earlier in the day as Margaret, looking just fine — indeed, downright butch! — out of make-up and in a pair of sweaty overalls, worked on the inflatable splash pool that would not come into ‘play’ until the wee hours.

The evening kicked off around 11 :00, with Margaret arriving on stage in a wig and heels so high she was in danger of breaking through the typically low Japanese ceiling. The audience was treated to two main performances, the first around 11 :00, the second at about 3 :00 am, as well as the special finale in the splash pool, out front of the bar, so that even casual passers-by could get in on the fun.

Performers, DJs, and other contributors to the happy mayhem included : Emi Eleonola (エミ・エレオノーラ), Jon the Dog [ジョン（犬）], kokushosumire (黒色すみれ), Rachel D’Amour (レイチェル・ダムール), Aira, Alpina, Cutie Pai, Nakamura Sunao (中村直), Tsugawa Eiji (津川エイジ), Diamond Cutter, Joe & DC Beauties, lala-miria, Lil'Grand-Bitch, Vivienne Sato (ヴィヴィアン佐藤), and last but certainly not least, wrestler "Seibakudan" [Sex-bomb] Shinobu ("性爆弾"　忍). (For a complete list of credits, links to the performers personal websites and blogs, as well as images, please visit : http://www.hijouguchi.com/lgff2008/)

As the curtains were drawn aside for the first set, they revealed an elaborate cabaret space of three brightly-coloured rooms. It looked like nothing so much as a life-size version of a doll’s house, or the set of one of Michel Gondry’s more surreal Björk videos. These were brought to life in successive performances in each room, with torchy piano and accordian numbers, and even a sentimental ballad perfromed by – yes – a giant costumed dog! The bulk of the audience settled in on the floor, like eager children attending the studio taping of a favourite TV show. It was half-Hedwig, half-Romper Room!

The second set was distinctly more risque, with more than one pole dance, and a fabulous strip performance that went improbably on and on, as the lithe dancer seemed to have concealed an infinite series of thongs in descending sizes, one underneath the other. At the end of the song, he stood with his back to an audience dying for a look at the last little bit of anatomy he’d managed to conceal. He stripped off the last thong, turned around, and – with his top hat placed gingerly over the desired spot – took a bow and departed, as tantalizingly mysterious as he’d been when he first arrived (despite having lost all his clothes in the meantime).

The other highlight was a 20-minute performance by Cutie Pai, known as the ‘Perfume of Nichome’, for their pitch-perfect imitation of the Japanese techno-pop act Perfume. Despite being, oh, perhaps 10 to 15 years older than than their idols, Cutie Pai put on a fantastic show. There was no sitting on the floor for this one. The audience were on their feet, thrusting their arms forward in sync with the song, and each other – a gesture from one of Perfume’s most popular videos. Afterward, the crowd descended into another frenzy of dancing and cheerful chaos.

To cap the night off, however, the action shifted from the dancefloor out to the street, where Margaret was playing host in front of the bar. You remember, of course, that little splash pool we’d caught her preparing so carefully earlier? It was now occupied by none other than Seibakudan ‘Sex-bomb’ Shinobu, a local wrestler and performer possessed of admirable talents, and of course, an absolutely killer body! His hair dyed a to-die-for blond (perhaps in homage to Kitano Takeshi?), and wearing nothing more than wrestling boots and the tiniest pair of skin-tight lace-up wrestling trunks (both in the vibrant Grape Ape colour of 1970s motorcycle leather), he squatted, writhed, and generally thrust his pelvis at those only too eager to play "Super-ball sukui" (‘Catch the Superball !’). The pool having been filled with both water and hundreds of multi-coloured rubber super-balls, as well as rubber duckies and other pool and bath-time favourites, contestants were given tiny paddles with which they had to try to roll the ball or duck or whatever else they fancied up out of the water and over Shinobu’s crotch to claim it as their own! Not only did Shinobu not mind all this attention to his purple-clad nether regions, he even had the impish sense of humour to egg us on in English : "Come on! Catch the balls! Come on! Come on!"

When the bar closed around 5 :00, and the weary but satiated revellers wandered out into the streets under a sky already brightening with morning sun, it was a little like stepping off of a movie set, or out of a music video, back into the real world. For the most part, those of us working for the festival were not sober, but were quickly sobered up by the thought of having to return to Wald 9 in a few hours for another day of packed screenings and fabulous guests. And, of course, we were already looking forward to next year’s Grand Bal. 楽しみに!

Coming Out... Not as Gay, but as a Muslim

2008-07-15T17:03:00.000-07:00

‘A Jihad for Love’ (director, Parvez Sharma)
Next screening: Friday, July 18 – 14:50 at the Spiral Hall

For a long time, we have been accustomed to seeing stories about queer people who want nothing but to escape their communities of origin, whether geographic or religious in nature. These stories ring true because they reflect the reality of many of our lives. Many of us, certainly in North America and Europe, did grow up in stifling small-town environments where narrow-minded religious people and just general homophobia make life next to impossible for queer folk.

However, in the last 10 years or so we have started to see more stories about queer people who, despite the difficulties they face in living there, want to remain in their communities of origin. ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ (which won Hilary Swank her first Oscar for Best Actress) and ‘Brokeback Mountain’ are both about queer or transgendered people who, for better or worse, want to remain in rural America, a place regularly depicted (and often unfairly) as a kind of hell for queer people. It is more clear in the original short story than in the film, but the characters in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ know that they could move to a big city, like Denver, and live an urban gay lifestyle. But that’s not what they want for themselves.

This is an important development in the history of queer storytelling, because as we all know, urban queer life is not a paradise either. Even C. Jay Cox’s ‘Kiss the Bride’ (screening twice at this year’s festival) deals with a person who may or may not be gay, but in any case bucks the trend of embracing an urban queer lifestyle to such an extent that not only does he stay in his hometown, but he marries a woman!

In 2004, Sandi Dubowski’s ground-breaking documentary ‘Trembling Before G-d’ (it is forbidden in orthodox Judaism to write the name of God) took us inside the lives of orthodox Jews who are queer and want to reconcile their religion with their sexuality, rather than abandoning it. Now, Dubowski (this time as Producer) has teamed up with director Parvez Sharma to give us a glimpse of the lives of queer Muslims who, similarly, don’t want to give up their communities or their faith for their sexuality. This award-winning film is extremely important, and we are delighted to be able to screen it twice at this year’s festival (you can catch it again this Friday, July 18 – 14:50 at the Spiral Hall), as well as to welcome Parvez Sharma and Sandi Dubowski to Tokyo.

As his comments below clearly show, Sharma is able to speak both passionately about this film, and about the hope for a reconciliation between Islam and homosexuality, and to make us laugh at the same time.

Before the first screening, director Parvez Sharma gave his message to the audience:

“I’d like to thank you all for coming. This is only our second day in Japan ever and we’re really enjoying this wonderful country. This film has screened at 18 festivals around the world. It is an honour for us to be here, and we want to thank Sugawara-san for inviting us. I hope you enjoy the film.”

Afterward, Nishimura-san, one of our volunteer PR staff and a skilled translator himself, joined Parvez and Sandi on stage for a Q & A session.

Nishimura: We’d like to welcome back our special guests, the director and producer of this wonderful film. It screened at the Toronto and Boston film festivals, and it is quite a unique and unusual film, so we are lucky to be able to see it elsewhere in the world. We’ll open the floor to questions after a few from myself. So I’d like to start by asking, what triggered you to make this film?

Parvez: I’m gay and Muslim myself, so that helped! It was my feeling that after September 11, 2001 a film needed to be made that would change the discussion around Islam. I like to say that in this film everyone is coming out not as gay or lesbian but as a Muslim.

Nishimura: Now Sandi, you are not Muslim but a Jewish Amercian. Why did you two decide to make this film together?

Sandi: I directed ‘Trembling Before G-d’ about gay people in the orthodox Jewish community, and I was doing a lot of inter-faith work around that film with Christians, Muslims and Jews. Parvez approached me at one of these events in Washington, D.C. with an idea for a film about queer Muslims, and here we are six years later.

Nishimura: Perhaps it was easier to raise money for ‘Trembling Before G-d’ than it was for this film. Did you run into any problems finding financing for the film? Our image in Japan is that Jews and Muslims don’t exactly go hand-in-hand.

Sandi: We like to say that Parvez and I have a Muslim-Jewish collaboration that is mostly non-violent! (laughter) [To Parvez] Do you want to talk about your search for the gay Sheikh who can fund us for the next 40 years? (laughter)

Parvez: It was difficult for us to find funding. Which is why I really have to thank and congratulate Sandi, because he opened a lot of doors for the film. I was a new immigrant in America when we started work on this film, and those same doors would not have been open to me. We like to say our film has the longest list of credits in history!

Sandi: We also like to say that we have a mailing list outside, and that we do accept credit cards. (laughter)

Nishimura: It took nearly six years to make this film. You travelled to 12 countries, and we hear 9 different languages in the film. It is a film of such diversity. What are the most memorable moments or challenges you faced in making it?

Parvez: Can we talk all night? (laughter) Every frame of this film has my blood on it. But it’s the same for any documentary filmmaker. Editing took one year and a half. And during that time, a lot of people who are in the film called me up to ask that their faces be blurred to hide their identities. So that is when the gay Muslim penguin with the blurred face entered the film. I was getting frustrated with the need for people to hide, so I blurred his face!

[For those who haven’t seen the film, there is a sequence with a gay Imam in South Africa, Muhsin Hendricks, who visits the seaside with his children and encounters several penguins. Sharma blurred the face of one of the penguins – a species notorious for its same-sex bonds – as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the need that many queer Muslims feel to conceal their identities.]

Making the film was very challenging. I was often shooting all by myself, with a handheld camera, because I had to pretend to just be a tourist. Egypt was a very difficult country for me. I had to make three separate trips there. And it was very difficult to convince people to appear in the film.

I met Maryam, the Moroccan lesbian in Paris who goes to Egypt, through a group of victims of domestic violence in Paris. When we met, she couldn’t even say the word ‘lesbian’. It took six years of talking to her to get her to that point.

The same was true of Mazen [a young man caught up in the raid of a gay club in Cairo, who was imprisoned and tortured for two years]. When we started filming, he insisted on hiding his face. It took three years for him to show his face to us on camera.

I had this much hair when I started the film [Sharma held a hand above his head, as if to suggest a huge, flowing mane of hair], and now it’s all gone! (laughter)

Nishimura: We’d like to open it up to questions from the audience. Are there any mysteries you would like to have revealed, about gay penguins, or anything else? (laughter)

1st audience member: Thank you very making a film that is not just about religion but is very human. Many of us are wondering, what has happened to the subjects of your film?

Parvez: Thank you for your question. Of course, in any documentary, the lives of the subjects go on after the film stops. I am still close to all of these people; they have become my friends.

Muhsin, the gay Imam in South Africa, has had a lot of success. You see some of these signs of hope near the end of the film [when he is invited to speak to a group of Muslim clerics who had previously rejected him to discuss homosexuality and Islam]. His daughter, who you see in the film, is now 14 years old, and she was able to attend a screening of the film in South Africa, where she stood up in front of the audience and told them she was proud of her father.

Mazen is still living in Paris, and he has had some trouble finding work there.

The four Iranians are all now living in Toronto.

[Parvez later told me that they were able to attend a screening of the film when it played the Toronto International Film Festival.]

Maryam is no longer wearing the Hijab, because she couldn’t find work in Paris while wearing it. But she also still thinks that she wants to be punished by God for being a lesbian.

[In the film she explains that while non-Muslims tend to see the Hijab as a sign of female oppression in Islam, she has never been interested in being attractive to men, so for her wearing the Hijab makes her feel free.]

And, let me add, to clarify – in many Muslim countries, if you choose to be invisible, it’s okay. You can live your life. It’s only when you adopt a Western idea of gay pride that the problem starts. But it’s not the case that gays and lesbians are being killed all the time in the Muslim world.

2nd audience member: Thank you for this film. As a Japanese person, it is shocking for us to see this conflict between homosexuality and Islam. I think, you’re a human being first, and a person of faith second. How difficult would it be for you simply to abandon your religion for the sake of your sexuality?

Parvez: It’s very difficult. Islam is really practiced in community. There are large families, extended families. Leaving that whole social system is very hard. It is not just about beliefs. It affects the way you eat, the way you dress. But there are Muslims who have left Islam because they are gay. I filmed some of them. They are often people who have moved to the West, but there are also some living in Muslim countries. I chose not to include them in the film, because I was interested in this question of how people who want to remain in the faith manage to do it.

Islam really is a total system of beliefs, a whole universe in itself. I’ve been blogging about these issues at http://ajihadforlove.blogspot.com/ and people around the world are participating in that dialogue, so I encourage you to visit the blog and offer your own thoughts.

I also have a question. If we made a T-Shirt with the blurred gay penguin, would it be a hit in Japan? (laughter)

Nishimura: Well, it’s been a serious discussion, but Parvez and Sandi have shown that they are both very cheerful and unique individuals. So if you are looking for a date, you can feel free to leave your telephone number and email address on the blog! (laughter)

Sandi: Thanks also to our translator, who did a wonderful job. (applause)

Translator: And thank you to Nishimura-san, for the wonderful work of leading the Q & A session. (applause)

Soon to follow: An email interview with director Parvez Sharma...

UPDATE!

2008-07-15T05:44:00.000-07:00

While you anxiously await our second weekend of screenings, we aim to bring you continuing coverage of the past weekend's festivities.

The Opening Night entries have been updated with fabulous photos of MC Margaret and our attractive guests! Check them out at:
http://tilgff08.blogspot.com/2008/07/opening-night-sweet-dreams-indeed.html

We've also added some information about the opening night screening of 'No Regret', including pictures of star Lee Young-Hoon.
http://tilgff08.blogspot.com/2008/07/no-regret-second-opening-night-feature.html

COMING SOON!
Le Grand Bal - What happened between 11:00 pm and 5:00 at Bar Hijouguchi...? Stay tuned to find out.

An in-depth interview with C. Jay Cox (director of 'Kiss the Bride').

Plus, 'A Jihad for Love' screening with director Parvez Sharma and producer Sandi Dubowski. The film is showing again this coming Friday, July 18, at 14:50 (Spiral Hall).

Making Movies With Your Friends

2008-07-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

‘Kiss the Bride’ (director, C. Jay Cox)
Next Screening: Sunday, July 20, 18:15 – Spiral Hall, with special guests in attendance: C. Jay Cox (director), Philipp Karner & James O’Shea (lead actors)

On opening night, a musical fantasy helped us to appreciate the full meaning of Shakespeare’s line: “The course of true love never did run smooth.” The following day, director C. Jay Cox’s ‘Kiss the Bride’ shed further light – this time in the form of a romantic comedy – on the same truism, though from an acutely different angle.

Romantic comedies entertain us precisely because we know what to expect. A couple will fall in love, they will run into a number of obstacles and seem in danger of losing that love, but by the end they will be happily reconciled, and usually married. It worked for Jane Austen 200 years ago, and it works in Hollywood today – and anywhere else people still want to believe that ‘love conquers all’.

Cox’s film (written by Tyler Lieberman) begins with a zany premise that puts its characters on a collision course that promises all manner of hilarity – a gay man goes back to his home town to break up the wedding of his first boyfriend, who has obviously lost his mind, as he is about to marry a woman! But it cleverly takes that slightly outrageous twist on a stock premise (the film repeatedly and self-consciously acknowledges its debt to the late-90s Julia Roberts/Cameron Diaz hit ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’) and treats each character with such equal sympathy that by the middle of the film we have lost all confidence in our ability to predict the ending. The film manages to reaffirm the value of romantic love, even as it raises interesting questions about the value of marriage (for straight people as much as for gays), while troubling our binary notions of sexuality – all while keeping us entertained and unsure of what is coming next!

That’s no small feat for a film with an essentially mainstream, commercial sensibility. But it’s this ability to deliver the unexpected within an otherwise familiar and comfortable package that has made C. Jay Cox both a successful screenwriter who is able to work within the Hollywood system, and a successful director crafting queer stories that delight and provoke just inside the commercially viable edge of that same system.

To the delight of our audience, C. Jay joined our programming director, Sugawara-san, on-stage after the screening for a Q & A session.

Sugawara: I have a lot of questions. First, of course, is – is this your first visit to Japan?

C. Jay: Yes, I’ve never been before.

Sugawara: When did you arrive?

C. Jay: I got in yesterday afternoon.

Sugawara: Do you have any impressions of Tokyo from your first night here?

C. Jay: You know, it’s so busy, and yet so friendly. I sort of expected to be overwhelmed and out of my element but it’s been really fun and easy so far.

Sugawara: Well, on behalf of the festival, welcome to Japan. To start off, let’s talk about your last film, ‘Latter Days.’ There is a lot of angst in that film, would you agree?

C. Jay: Yes, certainly. It was written from a very personal place, and making that film was at times a really wrenching experience for me.

Sugawara: For those of you who haven’t seen it, it deals with the Mormon religion in the United States, which forbids homosexuality, and it’s a love story that deals with a young Mormon who discovers his [homo]sexuality.

Today’s film, ‘Kiss the Bride’, is of a different kind. It’s a romantic comedy. Was there a particular reason you wanted to make this kind of a film?

C. Jay: One reason is that during the making of ‘Latter Days’ it was a very joyful experience but it was also painful in a lot of ways. So we joked that our next project would have to be one we could have some fun with.

Sugawara: Could you talk a little bit about how you went about casting the film?

C. Jay: Our two leads are Philipp Karner and James O’Shea – who will both be here next week for the second screening of the film.

Sugawara: [To the audience] So if you have a chance to come and see them next week, please do.

C. Jay: Yeah, so they both read for the parts they ultimately played in the film about five months before we started shooting. We kept looking at other actors. About forty to sixty more auditioned. But Philip and James just kept rising to the top through that process.

Sugawara: What about Tori Spelling? How did she get involved in the project?

C. Jay: Tori and I were actually on the same flight to Miami. She and her husband were sitting behind me. He also appears in the film, by the way. He’s the plumber [i.e. stripper!]. I couldn’t help eavesdropping on their conversation, and as she was talking I just felt that I was hearing the voice of Alex [Tori’s character] that I had been hearing all those months as we were getting ready to shoot the film.

Sugawara: This question may or may not be appropriate – was she pregnant during the shooting?

C. Jay: Yeah, she was. When we first met in a coffee shop to talk about the film, there was all this paparazzi following her. There were rumours circulating that she was pregnant. Two months later, when she arrived to begin shooting, she was really pregnant! So we had to keep putting stuff in front of her to hide it in the film.

Sugawara: Usually, in films, there is this pattern that a character who is gay is gay, and someone who is straight is straight. But in this film it is more complicated.

C. Jay: One of the things that really appealed to me about this script is that it calls into question the firm boundaries that we like to draw around each other. In L.A., it can be very rigid. People know who is gay, and like to think that everyone else is probably gay! In the film, Matt [the ex-boyfriend] is dead sure about Ryan [the one about to marry Alex, played by Tori Spelling]. But then he shows up and he is not so sure. He also has an unexpected reaction to Tori’s character. I really liked that about the script, that it’s not so clear-cut.

Sugawara: We have some time for questions from the audience.

1st audience member: I’m a fan of ‘Latter Days’ and today’s film as well. Will it be available in Japan on DVD?

C. Jay: Arigato. I believe it will be out on DVD in the U.S. in October. I don’t think it is scheduled for a theatrical release in Japan, but certainly you will be able to get it on DVD.

2nd audience member: I have two comments. I really love romantic comedies, and this one had a flavour of romantic comedies from the 80s and 90s, so I really enjoyed that. I also really liked seeing Joanna Cassidy and Robert Foxworth, from ‘Six Feet Under’, so thank you for casting them in this film.

C. Jay: Yeah, it’s funny because Joanna and Robert have actually played a married couple three times in their careers!

3rd audience member: In the very last scene, Matt makes a phone call to Joey, the boyfriend that he is in the process of breaking up with. Do you think that they will get back together?

C. Jay: We certainly left that door open. You know, he gets the answering machine, so we don’t know how Joey will respond. Maybe he takes him back and maybe he doesn’t. But, yeah, we like to think that it might end with them getting back together.

Sugawara: The actor who played Matt’s boyfriend [Charlie David] has also appeared in the gay film ‘A Four Letter Word’, which is not such a nice role!

C. Jay: Yeah. He’s also on the TV series ‘Dante’s Cove’, and he will be in the film ‘Mulligans’ which will be premiering at Outfest in Los Angeles.

4th audience member: I’m a big fan of ‘Latter Days’. I noticed that one of the actors from that film, Steve Sandvoss, also play’s Ryan’s friend Chris in this film. Why did you choose him for this role?

C. Jay: I’ve always said that my goal is to make movies with my friends. I started out my career with several friends, like my director of photography, and people that I didn’t know became friends through the process of working with them. Steve is one of those people. He’s just become part of the family, and that family keeps growing with each film I make. This role is a huge departure for him. ‘Latter Days’ was actually his first role, so he wanted to do something very different in this one.

Another member of the family is the actress that plays the character Monica – Elizabeth Kell – is Steve’s brother’s girlfriend. So, we just love making movies with our friends.

5th audience member: Thank you for the wonderful movie. Was there any particular line or piece of dialogue that you are most fond of? There are a lot of great lines in the film.

C. Jay: I like the scene where Alex tells the story about being a kid and using a word that she and her friends didn’t realize was slang for vagina, and then talking to Matt about the wedding dress, and the confusion of offering to show it to him, and Matt thinks she means her vagina! That bit always amuses me.

Sugawara: Could you talk a little about your future plans? What projects do you have in the works?

C. Jay: There is a movie that I wrote, ‘Chilled in Miami’, starring Renee Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr., coming out in the U.S. in January. I am also working on a film called ‘Three’ that I wrote and am directing.

Sugawara: Are these gay-themed films?

C. Jay: No. ‘Chilled in Miami’ is a big studio movie. The other one [‘Three’] is about a straight housewife living in a trailer. The idea that I started with was a married woman in a trailer park who finds a genie [so ‘three’ is a reference to genie’s three wishes].

Sugawara: Thank you so much for talking with us. And, again, if you are able to join us next week, please come to the second screening of ‘Kiss the Bride’ with the lead actors, Philipp Karner and James O’Shea.

Soon to follow: My interview with director C. Jay Cox...

‘No Regret’ (Second Opening Night Feature)

2008-07-12T05:33:00.000-07:00

South Korea’s ‘No Regret’ is an erotic, if also tragic, tale of seduction and obsession that takes place between a poor art school student and the son of his employer (see the festival schedule for more information: http://www.tokyo-lgff.org/2008/e/schedule/index.html). The film only screened once at the festival, but you haven’t missed your chance to see it. Beginning July 19, there will be a special weekly late show of the film at the Wald 9.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to present this film with English subtitles, and there was no English translation for the Q & A (only Japanese), so all we can offer our English readers are a few fetching photos of our guest, Lee-Young Hoon, who portrays the poor student Su-min in the film.

MC Margaret, having transformed out of her Elizabeth I costume, and raided Natalie Portman’s wardrobe from Star Wars: Episode I, interviews Lee-Young Hoon.

Lee-Young Hoon takes an important phone call: "Moshi-moshi... Who's calling, please? Hollywood? Why, yes, I am ready to cross-over..."

INTERVIEW: Thomas Gustafson and Cory James Kruekeberg

2008-07-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

'Were the World Mine' (Opening Film)
Thomas Gustafson (writer, director)
Cory James Kruekeberg (co-writer, producer, production designer)

We made our way out through the crush of festival visitors waiting to see the South Korean film ‘No Regret’, our second opening-night feature, and down to a more relaxed lounge on the 10th floor of the huge Wald 9 cinema complex. On the escalator ride, Tom wondered aloud about the subtitles (actually, more like ‘side-titles’, since they run vertically at the left-hand side of the screen, rather than at the bottom of the screen), saying he is always curious to know how the Shakespearean excerpts are handled when the film screens abroad. Ari-san, one of our co-programmers and a fluent English-speaker, told us that the translator tried to use older Japanese that would ring similarly in the ears of Japanese speakers as Shakespeare’s 400-year-old verse does to native English speakers.

Tom and Cory are, by now, old pros at the festival circuit, and didn’t seem in any way flustered either by the overwhelming scale and intensity of Tokyo, nor by the late July heat. Both dressed in sharp suit jackets – Tom’s a summery beige, over a smartly pressed striped shirt; Cory’s a sober blue over a cheerfully contrasting crew-neck shirt and indigo jeans – they looked every bit the sophisticated international filmmakers that the success of ‘Fairies’ and now ‘Were the World Mine’ has proven them to be. I was joined for my interview by Kim, our interpreter for all events involving English-speaking guests.

Guy: So you arrived in Tokyo maybe last night? How has it been so far?

Tom: Well, I woke up at about 2:00 last night and did some work. Then fell back asleep, and woke up again at 7:00.

Guy: How long will you be here?

Tom: Just until Monday. We have to be in L.A. early next week for Outfest.

Guy: Did you have some time do some sightseeing today?

Tom: Yeah, we went to the Meiji shrine [in Yoyogi park], and then wandered up through Harajuku. We saw the huge line of people waiting outside the Apple store for the new iPhone.

Guy: Yeah, there is a similar line daily at the Krispy Kreme donut shop here in Shinjuku.

Tom: I went to Krispy Kreme – it’s right near our hotel – at 7:00 this morning! I had some kind of star donut.

Guy: This is maybe an ‘only in Japan’ variety of donut?

Tom: Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before!

[Tom and Cory graciously gave autographs to some fans and accepted greetings and thanks from members of the Peer Friends / LGBT Youth Exchange Project group.]

Guy: Cory, did you also grow up in small-town America?

Cory: Yes, in Indiana. I went to the University of Northeastern Illinois, and then became an actor in Chicago. Tom and I met there 10 years ago before moving to New York together.

Guy: So you’ve been to lots of festivals, but it must always be a bit disorienting. Are you having your ‘Lost in Translation’ moments?

Tom: Yeah, of course. But, I mean, we are from New York, so Tokyo is not that overwhelming for us. As Americans, you know a little Spanish or maybe French. But here it’s frustrating because we don’t even know the basics of Japanese.

Guy: How many international festivals have you been able to attend?

Cory: We did about 15 with the sort [‘Fairies’], and this is now our 15th with the feature [‘Were The World Mine’].

Guy: So how does Tokyo compare with the other festivals you’ve been to?

Tom: We haven’t had time to do much yet. We went to the festival in Torino, Italy with it. That’s one of the biggest [queer] film festivals. But every festival is different. We’re really glad we were able to come to Japan for the first time with the film.

Kim: There were some young people in the audience who got free tickets. Is that something you do at every festival?

Tom: Yeah, at every festival we attend we ask that the organizers make about 20 to 25 tickets available to queer youth. That’s a high number for a space this size. At this festival, they made 16 tickets available, which is great. The goal is not just to get them to see the film but also introduce a new audience to the festivals as well.

Cory: In the states, the majority of people coming to queer film festivals is men in their 40s.

Tom: But most performing arts organizations make tickets available at a discount to youth, so we thought film festivals should be doing the same thing. This story was made for youth and I know if I had seen a film like this when I was a kid I really would have connected with this kind of story.

Cory: From a purely commercial angle too, outside of the gay festival circuit, young people are most likely to connect with this film, so we want to tap into that audience.

Kim: Have you encountered any resistance to making those tickets available? Or to involving youth in the festivals?

Cory: If it is a gala screening, with a high ticket price, they are more reluctant to make tickets available for free to youth. But, no, we haven’t experienced any resistance to involving youth in the festivals.

Tom: One of the ways we are hoping to keep the film alive after the festival circuit is to do school tours with it. We’ve had some press that has described it as the anti-‘High School Musical.’

Cory: You know, ‘High School Musical’ is this very squeaky-clean, Disneyish film that is very popular among kids in the states. There were two movies made for TV first, and then they did the feature film version. The star, Zach Ephron, became a pop culture phenomenon.

Kim: Do you ever meet the young people that are able to attend your film for free?

Tom: Yeah. Usually it’s just a ‘Hi’ and a ‘Thank you.’ But that’s great. We also have a MySpace page, and a FaceBook profile for the film so we make all these friends that way. It is a great way to promote the film to kids.

Kim: So which international festivals have you been to with the film?

Tom & Cory: Italy, Canada, Budapest – we didn’t go, but the film was there –, Dublin, Copenhagen, South Africa…

Guy: The film really does look great – not low-budget. How did you manage to do that?

Tom: The whole crew was paid the same wage, including Cory and me, so there was no hierarchy.

Cory: Everyone got the lowest level of pay allowed by SAG [the Screen Actors’ Guild].

Tom: But we also had a lot of help from sponsors. Kodak gave us about half of our film for free. MAC cosmetics donated make-up. Puma gave us shoes! That’s great for a film like this.

Kim: The woman who played the cosmetics lady in the film was really interesting.

Tom: Yeah, Jill Larson, she is a soap opera star. She has been on ‘All My Children’ for like 20 years.

Guy: So what are some gay films that you particularly admire?

Tom: Of course, Todd Haynes – ‘Velvet Goldmine.’

Cory: For me, ‘Parting Glances’ was the first [gay] film I saw that really felt authentic and real. But on the gay indie circuit, it’s pretty bleak.

Tom: We definitely wanted to make something optimistic.

Guy: Yeah, there seems to be some tension in the film between wanting it to be a fantasy but also keeping one foot on the ground. I liked that about it.

Cory: It’s funny, we don’t even think of it as a fantasy anymore. We’re in the habit of thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, this could happen…’!

Tom: The film was rejected from a lot of mainstream film festivals, maybe because it is too positive.

Cory: You know, if it had ended with somebody committing suicide or something, maybe they would have been more interested.

Tom: It sad to say, but that may be the reason it was rejected.

Guy: So the question came up after the screening about gay marriage. It’s taking off like wildfire in California – sorry, bad metaphor! What do you make of that?

Cory: It’s kind of incredible. I mean, until about 5 years ago, gay marriage wasn’t even on the radar. Then it became an issue in the last election. And now it’s just a reality.

Tom: I think it’s inevitable now…

Cory: It’s like with women’s rights and racial equality, it just gets to a point where it is so obviously unequal that it has to change and it can happen quickly. You know, it started in a few places – Massachusetts, California. But it might take 10 years for it to become a nationwide thing.

Tom: And now New York is recognizing gay marriages from other jurisdictions. I mean, it’s just a matter of time. If a couple gets married in Canada, and then there is some issue back home with one being denied the right to visit their partner in hospital or something, there’ll be a lawsuit.

Cory: My first boyfriend has been with an illegal migrant from Mexico for a long time. He was just arrested for a minor offence, but of course he is being detained and will probably be sent back to Mexico.

Tom: They did all the stuff you can do legally [i.e. to make their relationship official], but of course they are not married, so…

Cory: Marriage is just such a symbol. I mean, I don’t even know if it is so important to most [gay] people. We’re really just pushing through to the next plateau. Tom and I have been together for 10 years, but we don’t really think about getting married.

Guy: So do you have your next project mapped out? Can you tell us a little about it?

Tom: Our next feature is called ‘Mariachi Gringo’. It’s going to be filmed in the U.S. and Mexico, and it will be music-driven, like ‘Were the World Mine’.

Cory: It’s about an average Midwestern American guy who discovers a love of mariachi music and goes down to Mexico to become a mariachi musician.

Guy: So is there a gay aspect to it?

Cory: Yeah, in Mexico he befriends a young woman, and she eventually comes out to him as a lesbian. We were just down in Mexico making connections with the lesbian community there. We want to try to get a flavour of what life is like for lesbians there, because obviously it’s not something we have any direct experience with. It also makes sense for us to have gay content in this film, because we now have such a great relationship with so many gay film festivals. So we feel it’s necessary to create something that can be shown at those festivals.

Tom: Yeah, we’re interested in exploring the question of what it’s like to come out in a different culture.

Cory: So the woman in the film dated an American while she was at college, so there are all those issues of crossing the border…

Guy: You both seem very ambitious. You really seem like you are shooting for the Oscars some day. But also to sort of sneak queer content into more mainstream movies.

Tom: Yeah, we are always trying to take it to the next level. What’s the point in telling a small story?

Cory: But at the same time, our style just tends to be seen as more commercial than a lot of the other independent stuff.

Kim: Which festivals around the U.S. has ‘Were the World Mine’ been screened at?

Cory: The premiere was at the Florida Film Festival, where it won the audience award. It also played at Nashville, where it won the music award, which was really exciting. And it is going to the Taipei Golden Horse festival. That will be our first big international non-gay film festival.

But we were rejected from maybe the top 5 international festivals. Just like the film industry itself, the festival circuit is very complicated. Like, we were rejected from Berlin. And then a while later a programmer from the Berlin festival saw it in New York and asked us, ‘Why didn’t you submit it to our festival?’ So it’s hard to know what happens. In some cases, there is a head programmer, and if that person sees it and doesn’t like it, that’s the end of the story.

Tom: The film sells-out its screening wherever it plays.

Cory: Some festivals have told us that the film is too gay for a mainstream festival.

Guy: I hope Toronto didn’t tell you it was too gay!

Tom: No, the Toronto International Film Festival accepted the film for consideration and waived the fee for submitting it. But we haven’t heard back from them yet.

Cory: We’ve also had some really great press quotes in the states that have helped. Like one said something like, ‘This film surpasses in quality everything that screened this year at Tribeca and Sundance.’ So that puts some pressure on them to say, ‘Yeah, why isn’t this film showing? It should be at these festivals.’ Unfortunately, at Sundance this year they had two other films about students being inspired by their teachers!

Guy: About 15 years ago, there was this quote from Ian McKellan who said, ‘One of these days a really talented young actor is going to come along and come out, and everybody will love him, and he’ll make a lot of money for his agents and the movie studios.’ But it hasn’t happened. What do you make of that?

Tom: Yeah. It’s strange. The closet is very much created by the industry. An agent will say he doesn’t want his actor in a film, but you’re never sure if the actor is in the closet, or the agent is keeping him in the closet.

Cory: Everybody in the industry knows who is gay, but they just don’t get asked about it in the press. But, yeah, the agents and the managers are sort of in the closet too.

Tom: Even the stars of our film are now backing away from talking about their sexuality now in interviews.

Guy: One of the things that really irritated me when ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was released – I didn’t particularly like that film, but it was an interesting moment – was that the interviews with the guys were so homophobic. They kept getting asked these basically homophobic questions about shooting the love scenes, and they totally fumbled the ball. I just wish someone could have coached them on how to respond to those questions. I mean, if you want brownie points for making a ‘groundbreaking’ film, you had better learn to talk about your film in a way that doesn’t reinforce the homophobia you are supposedly combating.

Cory: The ridiculous thing too is Jake Gyllenhaal is from one of the most liberal families you can imagine. His parents are both in the industry. He’s like the most gay friendly person you could hope to meet. But as soon as you put a microphone in front of a young guy and start asking those questions…

Tom: Yeah, that and they sort of tried to market it as a love story, not really a gay film.

Kim: The same thing has happened with ‘The L Word’. It’s had a huge marketing push here, but it is aimed at straight women.

Cory: But that’s the same audience that is watching it in the states!

Guy: So what are your plans for your time in Tokyo? Is there anything you absolutely have to do?

Tom: Normally we are huge planners, but this time we don’t have any firm plans. Our sales representative gave us all these books and maps, she said, ‘Here, take this and this…’ And my aunt lived here for 5 or 6 years, so she is giving us some ideas of what to do.

Cory: I want to try to see some kabuki, and apparently there is a nice river cruise you can do.

Guy: What about trying a Japanese public bath? That would be a good cross-cultural experience for you! It’s too bad you are here in the heat of summer, because no one wants to take a hot bath now.

Tom: Actually, we saw a Japanese gay short film at the New Festival [New York’s queer film fest] about going to a bath. It was about an M-to-F transsexual who goes for a bath with her sisters, who are very protective of her. It played with the Philippine film ‘Queen Raquela.’

Guy: Do either of you recognize any influences of Japanese cinema on your own work?

Tom: [a little embarrassed, perhaps…] Not really. I mean, I haven’t seen much.

Guy: That’s one of the great things about living in Japan, is you can see all this film culture that never makes it across the pond.

Tom: I even went to film school!

Cory: Well, I come from a theatre background, so one of my professors – Shozo Sato – was a scholar of Kabuki, and a faculty member at my university, so he exposed us to that. He even brought his Kabuki MacBeth to Tokyo. We also studied tea ceremony with him.

Guy: Yeah, I think a lot of us have teachers like that in our past. They are sort of guerrilla ambassadors for Japanese culture, to start getting you curious about Japan.

What about future stage projects, Cory? You both seem to be in a film groove now.

Cory: Well, as far as theatre goes, I am an actor, so I probably will start going to auditions again sometime soon.

Tom: We get pressured a lot to do a stage version of ‘Were the World Mine.’ The film is compared a lot to ‘Lilies’ [Canadian film by John Greyson], and that started as a theatre piece.

We thought we had tortured Tom and Cory long enough, so we ended the conversation. They politely declined any help finding their way back to their hotel, just as they had insisted they could make their way into the city without an escort from the airport. Like their innovative films, these two are independent in every sense of the word! We wish them well and hope to welcome them back to Tokyo with their next project, ‘Mariachi Gringo.’ Thanks, guys!

For more info on the screening, and more interview nuggets with Tom and Cory, see Kim's piece at: http://www.fridae.com/newsfeatures/article.php?articleid=2263&viewarticle=1

Opening Night: Sweet Dreams Indeed!

2008-07-11T22:01:00.000-07:00

The festival opened to a packed house for Thomas Gustafson’s ‘Were the World Mine’(screening again Saturday July 19, at 18:50 - Spiral Hall), a lushly photographed musical fantasy with a big heart, about Timothy, a queer student at an elite all-boys high school, who discovers a love potion while rehearsing Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and soon turns the whole town (temporarily) queer.

Just before show time, the lights dimmed and the distinctive thump and buzz of Eurythmics’ 1983 dance-floor hit ‘Sweet Dreams’ came pumping out over the loud-speakers. From the back of the theatre, two beautiful bronzed gladiators, brandishing aloft glowing red swords and wearing just the tiniest little white straps of leather (and enormous white fun-fur boots), descended on us.

For a few moments, as they thrust and parried on the stage in slow motion (giving the audience plenty of time to admire their chiselled physiques), we weren’t sure if their quarrel was with each other, or if they came as guardians of some other queer dignitary. Our silent question was soon answered as ‘Margaret’ – a Japanese drag Queen with a capital ‘Q’ – entered stage left, in full Elizabeth I regalia. She stood perhaps 6’5”, a full foot and a half of which was made up by her powdered wig, with a bun on each side giving it the silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s ears, and doubtless six or eight inch platform shoes concealed beneath her enormous dress. This would be our hostess for the evening, and she welcomed us to the 17th annual festival to resounding applause.

During the introduction (which was all in Japanese, so alas, I can only give the flavour of it), Margaret noted that she had been a high school student when the festival first began. At the back of the theatre, a row of 16 queer youth from the Peer Friends / LGBT Youth Exchange Project were asked to stand and take a bow. They were invited to attend the screening free of charge, at the request of the director (see my interview with Thomas Gustafson for more details) and the festival happily complied, finding an anonymous sponsor to cover the cost of the tickets. Then she dispatched her bodyguards (introduced to us as Hirosomi and Satoshi) to fetch the director and his co-writer / producer / production designer Cory James Kruekeberg to the stage to kick off the screening with a short interview and introduction.

Margaret: Welcome to the festival. Is this your first time in Japan?

Tom & Cory: Yes, it’s the first time for both of us.

Margaret: So what do you think of Japanese fairies?

Tom: I like fairies everywhere! (laughter)

Margaret: Before we watch this wonderful film, is there any comment you’d like to make?”

Tom: Thank you all for coming. We’re really honoured to have the opening night screening. ‘Were the World Mine’ is based on a short film we made called ‘Fairies’, which we took to 100 different film festivals. After that, we decided we wanted to expand it into a feature-length version, with the help of William Shakespeare, so that’s what you will be seeing here tonight. We hope you enjoy the film.

Cory: Yeah, we’re really excited to be in Japan for the first time. We’ll be here for a few days and we’re really looking forward to meeting some of you and seeing more of the city.

Margaret, Tom, Cory, Hirosomi and Satoshi then posed for anyone who cared to take their picture, and there were plenty eager to do so. As she towered over all the others, even the very tall Cory, she had to slouch rather like Nicole Kidman habitually did during her marriage to Tom Cruise, to avoid attracting attention to her own Amazonian height. And with the photo session over, we settled in for the first of more than 40 wonderful films on offer at this year’s festival.

From left to right: Cory James Kruekeberg, Tom Gustafson, Margaret, and the gladiators.

‘Were The World Mine’ straddles a line between fantasy and reality, with one foot in the delightful world of Shakespeare and his ‘fairies’, and another in the real world, often marred by intolerance and homophobia. A group of about 10 young male actors have the challenge of convincing us that they can be rowdy, macho rugby players one moment, and horny love-struck homos the next, under the influence of Timothy’s newly discovered love-potion. The musical sequences are beautifully arranged, choreographed and photographed. What I admired most was the way the film manages to give us a hopeful and optimistic story – particularly important since it’s primary audience is young people (queer or not) – while recognizing the wisdom of the old saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ As Shakespeare tells us, and we are reminded over and over again in the film, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Timothy’s transformation of his little town into a hotbed of sudden same-sex infatuations has many unhappy results, and as in Shakespeare’s play, in the end he finds it is best not to interfere with the natural course of love. Luckily for Timothy, however, the object of his own affections, the rugby jock Jonathon, does turn out to be queer after all, and all is well that ends this well.

After the screening, Margaret returned to the stage, this time in a fetching cocktail dress – all the better to show off her rather athletic-looking legs! – and a different (enormous!) blonde wig, for a short Q & A session with Tom and Cory.

Margaret: I have many questions. But first I’d like to know, why did you choose to focus on high school aged boys?

Tom: I grew up in a small American town like the one in this film. And it was hard growing up gay in a place like that. So as filmmakers, we often tell stories about what we know.

Margaret: You have said in interviews that you wanted to make something different from a ‘gay indie’ film. What is your image of a ‘gay indie’ film?

Tom: Well, we wanted this to be more than just a gay film. We like to think that more than just gay people can relate to this story, and we wanted the film to reach a broader audience. In the U.S., as soon as you do a film with gay content it is immediately put into this gay film box, and then you are limited to the audience at gay film festivals. We wanted to break bout of that box and have more people see this film.

Cory: There is also this trend in independent cinema to shooting on video, with zero interest in how the film looks, telling everyday stories, with low production values. We wanted our film to look like it cost a lot more than it did.

Margaret: If you don’t mind me asking, how much did it cost to make? (laughter)

Tom: Well under $1,000,000 US. But we are still in negotiation with distributors, so it’s better not to say how much it cost exactly.

Margaret: Were you able to meet all of your costs, or did you go over-budget?

Cory: No, we still have some money in the bank!

Margaret: You are right about the production values – it didn’t look low budget. How about the casting? How did you go about finding the right actors?

Tom: We had already worked with Wendy Robie, who plays Mrs. Tebbit, the school teacher. She appeared in the short ‘Fairies’ that we did. I don’t know if it was popular over here, but she is quite well known from her role on the TV series ‘Twin Peaks’. So we got her first.

Margaret: I really liked her character the best. I wondered if, really, she is the main character of the story, sort of the Titania in this story, not Puck [i.e. Timothy].

Tom: Yeah, we liked her too. We like to imagine that maybe this is just one of her adventures, that she has maybe going around the world helping different people.

Cory: And the actress is very much behind that. Originally we approached her for the role of the mother, but Wendy didn’t want that role. She had taught Shakespeare in high school before becoming an actress, so she brought that to the role.

Margaret: I have an idea of three Japanese actresses that could play the three women’s roles in a Japanese version of this story. What about the two main guys?

Tom: We offered the roles to all the celebrity teen actors in Hollywood, but none of their agents would go for it. It’s very sad, in a way, that they are so afraid of playing a gay role. But we don’t know if they actors were against it, or just their agents. So we did open casting calls in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. We found both of the actors, Tanner Cohen and Nathaniel David Becker, at our New York casting call. This is the first big film role for both of them.

The teenage girl in the film, Frankie, is played by Zelda Williams, who is Robin Williams’ daughter. This is also her first big film role. I saw her on TV and thought we had to have her.

Margaret: The casting really is great. When I saw the basketball scene, at first I was thinking of ‘West Side Story’, but then later with the love potion I was thinking maybe George Romero’s zombie films! (laughter) Were you doing a parody of that film?

Tom: Hmm… should I say yes? I don’t know…

Margaret: I was thinking too deeply, apparently! (laughter) Okay, so we have time for a few questions from the audience.

1st audience member: In order to make a film like this, presumably you have some gay actors and some non-gay actors. How was it for the non-gay actors in the film?

Margaret: Let me first ask you [audience member], which one was your type? (laughter)

1st audience member: The principal! (laughter)

Tom: It was important for us to cast gay actors in gay roles. The two leads are gay—

[Here Tom and Cory had a short little private chat, which none of us was privy to, but elicited some curious giggles from the audience and Margaret as well.]

—You know, we’re getting tired of seeing straight actors playing gays. In terms of the other actors, this is an independent film so no one is doing it for the money. So, they are there because they believe in the project. There was some immaturity on the part of some of the teenage actors, but this is where Wendy Robie really helped. She sort of stepped in and said, ‘Look, we’re here to tell a story and if you can’t do what that story requires of you, then you shouldn’t be here.’

Margaret: And now back to the principal… (laughter)

2nd audience member: Thank you for this wonderful film. I have two questions: What was your favourite scene? And if you had some love juice in Tokyo, how would you use it?

Tom: Shooting the festival scene at night was fun. We had a lot of extras, and the energy was really high. When I look at the whole film now, the musical numbers are really fun to see. They were very complicated to stage.

As for the love juice, I would share it so you can all find mates!

Margaret: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ ends with a wedding, and gay marriage is a hot topic in the U.S. at the moment. What do you think of gay marriage? Is it the final goal for gay activism or the gay movement?

Tom: No, it’s not the final goal, but it has to happen, and I think now is the time.

Cory: You know, activism takes on different forms in every country and culture. It never stops. In the U.S., there are so many different cultures and races that there is a constant fight to feel equal to the person next to you, so there is always some new battle to be fought. I’m not sure how that translates to other cultures.

Margaret: So I have to ask, did your hotel reservation involve a double bed? (laughter)

After a little pause…

Tom: Yes, it’s just one bed! (applause)

And that appealing mental image brought to a close our sold-out opening film. For more discussion with Tom and Cory, see my interview (posted separately) with the producing partners, and – as the answer to Margaret’s final question revealed – romantic partners as well!

Tomorrow: ‘Kiss the Bride’, with director Jay Cox…

UPDATE: Trevor Wright appearance cancelled

2008-07-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

The scheduled appearance of Trevor Wright, who plays the leading character in SHELTER, has unfortunately been cancelled due to a change in the scheduling of his next project. However, the director of the film, Jonah Markowitz, will be in attendance for this screening.

Welcome to the Neighborhood! (Part 2)

2008-07-10T17:11:00.000-07:00

Spiral Hall (Aoyama)

Our second venue, the Spiral Hall, is located in Aoyama, which straddles two of Tokyo’s 23 wards, Shibuya-ku (‘ku’ means ward) and Minato-ku (both just south of the Shinjuku ward). While Shinjuku, along with Ginza and Shibuya, offer the stereotypical neon-saturated cityscape people have come to expect of Tokyo (from slickly-produced movies and a million picture postcards), Aoyama is a quieter, more elegant, less relentlessly vertical (!) neighbourhood, but no less exciting for all that. It is home to the sprawling Yoyogi Park, in the centre of which sits the Meiji-jingu temple – perhaps the most beautiful temple you can visit (and for free!) in the heart of the city. At the south end of the park, aspiring rock stars busk at 10 meter intervals on the sidewalk, and Japanese greasers dance (often shirtless!) to the tunes of the ‘50s, providing some of the best free entertainment in Tokyo.

Harajuku, recently made internationally famous by the rather forelorn-looking group of Harajuku Girls that are paid to follow Gwen Stefani wherever she goes, has long been a centre of Tokyo youth- and fashion culture. On weekends, tourists flock by the hundreds to have their pictures taken with – and/or get free hugs from – the Harajuku kids, who (ironically) have almost nothing in common with Stefani’s basically anonymous and homogeneous Harajuku Girls. The whole point, after all, of Harajuku fashion is to cultivate an extremely individualistic style, within a basically conventional set of characters and types (Goth and Lolita being the most popular). You can catch them Saturdays and Sundays at the south-eastern end of the park, on the bridge that leads from Harajuku station into the park.

Omote-Sando literally means ‘the big road that leads to the temple.’ It is both the name of the street that leads up from the entrance to Yoyogi Park and the name of the neighbourhood at the top of the hill. It’s one of the few streets in Tokyo that is lined with huge mature shade trees, making it an attractive spot for a stroll even in the most intense heat of summer. It also boasts some of the quirkiest and most credit-limit stretching clothes shopping in Tokyo. Running parallel to Omote-Sando, one longish block north, is Takeshita-dori. This pedestrian-only street has a somewhat hippie-ish feel, and is where the Lolitas and Goths buy the basics of their wardrobes. But Omote-Sando proper is dominated by the flagship stores of Gucci, Prada, Ralph Lauren, as well as an array of Japanese luxury brands, and some of Tokyo’s more charming independent cafés.

If you had any doubts about the international calibre of what’s on offer here, they would have been settled this past spring when opposing David and Mrs. Victoria Beckham billboards towered over the intersection of Aoyama-dori and Omote-Sando. On the northeast corner, he was lounging in his undies for Armani, a perfect image of Narcissus in cool black and white. While on the southeast corner, she – in full color (all the better to show off the contrast between her bottle-blonde hair and her perhaps also bottle-bronze skin) – was pimping for Samantha Thavasa, and appeared to be glaring across the street at David, as if to say, “Don’t get any funny ideas, David. We’re married!”

It’s here, at the top of the hill, and a short block south in the direction of Shibuya that you’ll find the Spiral Hall – an elegantly minimalistic multi-purpose hall located on Aoyama-dori, it is equally well-suited to hosting sophisticated live performances as well as other cultural events like the film fest. After three days at the Wald 9, and endless partying in Nichome, our visitors may be ready for the more relaxed atmosphere of Aoyama. The budget-conscious visitor will be happy to know that amid the riot of luxury there are some very good cheap eats (including some of Tokyo’s best vegetarian and vegan restaurants) to be found just around the corner. The trick is finding them, tucked away in this side-street or that alley.

A two-minute walk from the Spiral Hall is Japanese contemporary painter Nara Yoshitomo’s A-to-Z Café, on the fifth floor of the Equbo building. (http://www.jellyfish.bz/topics/0602/0602-atoz.html) It’s a personal favourite not just for the great food and desserts, the relaxed café atmosphere, and the gorgeous view east toward Roppongi and Nogizaka, but also because it is a kind of mini-museum of Nara’s work, including a cottage-like studio right in the middle of the café. If you’re in the neighbourhood during the afternoon, and have a little time to kill, why not wander east through Aoyama cemetery (check out the special section for foreigners who made a significant contribution to Japan’s modernization in the 19th century), or visit the incredible new National Art Centre, Tokyo (http://www.nact.jp/english/) at Nogizaka (on the Chiyoda metro line) – an architectural wonder of undulating glass and steel that always has multiple ongoing exhibitions of international and Japanese work.

One of Tokyo’s best cheap izakaya’s is also just down the street from both the Spiral Hall and the A-to-Z Café, but you might have to find me at the festival and get directions in person, because street names and addresses are just not how people find their way around here! It’s more of a “…walk about two blocks past a shrine and a ‘Family Mart’ on your right, turn left when you see the wooden tanuki [a Japanese racoon-dog], and follow that to the bottom of the hill…” kind of a town!

My favourite izakaya in Omote-Sando: it's literally a hole in the wall! But you might have to come find me at the festival for directions...

Welcome to the Neighborhood! (Part 1)

2008-07-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

Wald 9 Cinemas (East Shinjuku)

A night at the movies is all about fun’iki – that is, atmosphere – especially when you’re on a date, as many of our patrons doubtless will be. So visitors to the TIL&GFF will be happy to know that this year we have two equally enchanting venues (the Wald 9 and the Spiral Hall) in two exciting Tokyo neighborhoods (Shinjuku and Aoyama), each with their own distinctive fun’iki.

In an endless city of 30 million souls, space is at a premium, which means everything in Tokyo is vertical. The Wald 9 (for some reason pronounced ‘Vald’, even though it is run by the legendary Japanse film company Toei, not any Teutonic foreign outfit!), is a towering cinema complex that sits on a slightly quieter edge of East Shinjuku. But this is no strip-mall multiplex. It boasts the soaring ceilings, panoramic screens, elegant décor, and optimum seating, viewing and listening conditions one would expect from the finest cinema – it just happens to be the case that in Japan they stack these glorious cinemas one on top of the other. Indeed, on your ride up the glass-enclosed elevator, you’ll be treated to a sweeping view of Shinjuku, with all its neon, billboards, and evening revellers.

East Shinjuku is, of course, one of Tokyo’s premier pleasure districts, where people of all persuasions go to drink, dance, and discreetly pursue – shall we say – ‘other’ hobbies. But its local reputation for being a little dangerous is seriously exaggerated (indeed, downright fictitious). No part of Tokyo – surely the safest city of its size in the world – will feel even remotely dangerous to anyone who has ventured to the seedier parts of any large North American, European or indeed Asian city (other than in Japan). The atmosphere of Shinjuku is perhaps closest to that of New York’s Times Square after Mayor Giuliani made it safe enough for Disney to open a theatre there and to lure scores of families into the city on weekend afternoons. But that’s not to say that Shinjuku lacks excitement. Far from it. It just means that you can choose, between the relatively sedate pleasures of shopping or eating along Shinjuku-Sanchome (3rd district) and its tributary side-streets, or the more visceral and carnal amusements of Kabukicho (Ichome, or 1st district), so named for its long association with Japan’s famous cross-dressing form of opera.

Most of our visitors, of course, will be heading straight for Shinjuku’s 2nd district (Nichome) after the movie. Famous throughout Japan as the place queer locals and foreigners go to play, it is conveniently located just one short block to the east of the Wald 9 Cinema. It’s home to more than 200 bars and clubs (as well as cafés, restaurants and book stores), and has a lively street scene, particularly on the corner occupied by the Advocates bar – a tiny establishment that can’t help but spill its many patrons out onto the street, making it an ideal people-watching spot. Just stroll through the area and keep your ears and eyes trained for a noisy mixed group of foreigners and Japanese lingering around an open bar and adjacent patio – you can’t miss it.

During the day, Shinjuku is another place entirely, and has a completely other set of attractions to recommend it. Shinjuku-Gyoen Park, just a block south of the action in Nichome, is an ideal spot for cherry blossom viewing in the spring, or an afternoon stroll at any time of the year. Foreigners looking for English-language or other books have not one but two multi-storey bookstores (Kinokuniya) to choose from – the older one just a short walk along the main drag outside the Shinjuku JR station's east exit (also known as the Kabukicho exit); the newer one just south of the station, in the annex building of the Takashimaya Times Square department store (parallel to the railroad tracks).

On the west side of the station, you can shop for all manner of electronics, and visit the skyscraper district, famous for its hotels and the imposing, indeed almost oppressive symmetry of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building’s twin towers. Fans of Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation will find this area strangely familiar, as it is the setting of some of the film’s most charming nightlife scenes. You can visit the same karaoke bar and do your own rendition of Elvis Costello’s ‘Peace, Love & Understanding’ or The Pretenders’ ‘Brass in Pocket’ (bubble-gum pink Bettie Paige wig not included). Or, if you want to visit the bar in which Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson first meet, it’s on one of the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel (http://tokyo.park.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/entertainment/lounges/index.jsp). Just don’t get so drunk or distracted that you miss your show-time back at the TIL&GFF and the Wald 9!

Tomorrow…
Part 2: Aoyama – home of the Sprial Hall!

TIL&GFF Going for Gold!

2008-07-07T05:21:00.001-07:00

The Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival has a lot in common with the Beijing Olympics: it’s hot, it’s Asian, and there are lots of hurdles to jump over! Putting on a festival of this kind requires the surmounting of more than a few obstacles, some of them typical of film festivals and large events, others specific to Japan. Creative problem-solving ability ranks high on the list of skills required of our volunteers. So here are just a few of the challenges our veteran staffers face, and fend off, to bring you the world of queer cinema over eight glorious days in July.

For better or worse, English is the default language of international communication, so to make the festival accessible to as wide a range of visitors and participants as possible, the festival staff strives to present a fully bilingual program – English and Japanese. This is no mean feat, since many of these films would never reach the Japanese market if the TIL&GFF weren’t bringing them here. That means commissioning, coordinating, and projecting professional-quality Japanese subtitles for many films, all on the tiny budget of an all-volunteer operation.

Of course, many of the films shown will be from the English-speaking world, and/or from Europe. This year, all but two non-English-language films will be presented with English subtitles, and all non-Japanese films will be screened with Japanese subtitles as well. Translators will also be on hand for all special events involving the filmmakers and performers, which it will be my job to attend and report faithfully back to you!

The festival receives government funding through the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and is supported by the Japan Foundation and corporate sponsors – even foreign embassies and cultural agencies get into the act (yay, Canada!). But that doesn’t mean we have the resources to mount a huge ad campaign, or to host any number of international guests in the sort of luxury that Tokyo is renowned for. This year, we were fortunate in that more than 20 guests, including filmmakers and performers from our opening and closing films, were able to accept the invitation to attend the festival. So there will be no lack of excitement at the screenings. But we still depend a great deal on word-of-mouth, the support of the bars and clubs of Shinjuku-Nichome (Tokyo’s queer district), and the informal promotion system through local cinemas, to fill our seats with beautiful bums!

For the past three weeks, volunteers have fanned out across Tokyo each Saturday to distribute our elegantly designed festival brochure (thanks, Hideaki – otsukare sama desu!). Thankfully, amidst the humidity and unpredictable weather of Japan’s rainy season, we had good weather all three weeks. And we all doubtless improved our muscle tone somewhat lugging those heavy packs of brochures around, on Tokyo’s excellent public transit system no less!

Japanese film culture has, of course, a long and rich history, and can stand toe-to-toe with any other world cinema culture. Last year, in fact, Japanese films out-grossed foreign (that is, largely American) movies in Japanese cinemas for the first time in decades. But aside from those major films that can afford big ad campaigns, Japanese films depend on a remarkably informal (and cordial) method of promotion. Cinemas agree to display dozens of small posters and flyers for films showing at competing cinemas, in exchange for the display of their own materials at those other cinemas. It makes going to the movies feel a bit like going to see some obscure band that only you and a few friends know about. Cinemas are small, numerous, and sometimes difficult to find here, and they have a charming café-like atmosphere that suggests the existence of a real culture of cinephilia, outside the pre-packaged blockbuster system that dominates the larger, more conspicuous cinemas.

Queer foreigners may be surprised to know that in greater Tokyo-Yokohama, a sprawling metropolitan area of 30 million people, the gay pride parade attracts a mere 3,000 visitors. It is one of the odd paradoxes of Japan that while there is no indigenous religious tradition that is particularly hostile to homosexuality, and violent homophobia is virtually unheard of, the level of queer visibility in daily life remains surprisingly low. Chalk it up to Japanese modesty and circumspection, perhaps. Even public displays of heterosexual affection are reasonably rare. People tend to be quite private and undemonstrative. So while there are lots of gay personalities on TV (Ikko, Akihiro Miwa, and others) and an increasing number of out celebrities in music and film (singer Hirai Ken being one of the most visible), you nonetheless get the sense the average Japanese person wouldn’t know who in their midst is gay unless we walked up and kissed them! So, this low level of queer visibility presents a particular challenge when trying to (quite publicly) promote a queer film festival.

For the most part, the informal system of promotion through cinemas works well, and many cinemas – large and small – have been happy to support us in years past. This year is no different, and you’ll see the small posters and flyers that we accepted from them, in grateful reciprocity, on display at the festival. But there were a few, even small art-house cinemas, that politely declined to display our (really, very sober-looking!) brochure. It’s a small reminder that there is still some distance to go before being queer is just an accepted part of daily life, even in as otherwise tolerant and safe a country as Japan.

It’s also a reminder of why something like TIL&GFF is so necessary. It’s not only a chance for the queer community to gather, socialize, and celebrate our stories at the cinemas, but also a chance for those with a little curiosity to come and find out a bit more about what queer life – not just in Japan, but around the world – is all about. I’m sure there will be more than a few surprising encounters between friends, coworkers, and perfect strangers who didn’t realize they both shared an interest in same-sex fun and frivolity!

‘What’s your orientation?’ ‘Volunteer.’

2008-07-07T05:17:00.000-07:00

On what felt like the first real day of summer (Saturday July 5th), with hair-dryer-like heat and locker-room humidity, about 100 bright and beaming faces gathered at the Tokyo Women’s Plaza in Omote-Sando for our annual volunteer orientation. Was it the joy of seeing old friends for the first time in almost a year (‘hisashiburi ne?’), the anticipation of catching a sexy flick at the festival with their free volunteer pass, or was it just the glistening sweat that was lighting up their faces? Probably all three!

Funako-san, the fetching red-and-white capped veteran of the festival, put us through our paces as volunteer coordinator and kept us laughing as we hunkered down for the first and last big volunteer meeting before the festival starts. Volunteers divided themselves into five teams, to keep the festival running smoothly, out front and behind the scenes.

The people you will see at the door, in the lobby, at the Ticketing / Reception Desk, the Bar Counter, and the Stage Staff, will be making sure you’ve got the right ticket for the right show, that you can see and hear clearly, that your thirst is adequately quenched (and your attempt to hit on that cute guy or girl next to you adequately lubricated with alcohol), and that you can make it to the washroom in case of… well, any emergency that might arise!

The people you won’t see, in subtitle operation and behind the stage, will be making sure your ignorance of Taiwanese, German, French, Chinese, Korean, Italian (or, heck, Japanese – and maybe English too!), will not interfere with your ability to enjoy the film, and that the guests you are eagerly waiting to see are just as fresh and ready to talk as you are eager to listen and ask those scintillating questions, like…

‘What was your favorite part of working with Tori Spelling?’
(Kiss the Bride)

‘If Shakespeare were gay, which of your lead actors do you think he’d rather have slept with?’ (Were the World Mine)

‘What advice do you have for people who want to keep their marriage ‘gay’?’
(Out at the Wedding)

Nandemo ii. (Anything is okay!)

The meeting was a great success, thanks not just to the dozens of new volunteers, but to our veteran team-leaders, whose calm exteriors spoke not just to the depth of their past experience, but also the desire to look good in front of all those cute new recruits! They can be forgiven – can’t they? – if they put on a little extra make-up, plucked their eyebrows a little more thoroughly, or pressed their shirts to look just so… after all, the chance to meet this many new (and hopefully eligible) strangers only comes around once a year!

5 Days to Go...

2008-07-07T05:12:00.000-07:00

The 17th Annual Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival begins in a mere five days. The opening and closing films (‘Were The World Mine’ and ‘Out at the Wedding’), as well as the hotly anticipated Thai film ‘Bangkok Love Story’, are already sold out. This is crunch time for the small group of dedicated volunteers – no one’s getting paid for this! – that has been bringing the festival to queer Nihonjin (Japanese folk), their friends, families, and allies – and whoever else in Japan is starving for images and stories of queer life – for the past 16 years. This year, we are screening more than 40 films and hosting more than 20 guests (filmmakers, actors, writers, and activists) from around the world. For these eight days, Tokyo will be a very queer place indeed!

For those unable to attend due to the misfortune of not living in Japan(!), and those seeking information in English about the day-to-day goings-on of the festival, I will be your host – Guy Coco (from the Japanese ‘gaikoku’ meaning ‘foreign country’). As my nom-de-plume suggests, I am a white, English-speaking foreigner living and (big surprise!) teaching English in the greater Tokyo area. So far I am the only hakujin (whitey!) involved with the festival as a volunteer, but that doesn’t mean I am the only foreigner. Much of Japan’s diversity is, of course, invisible to people like me, since Chinese and Koreans (many of whom are not foreigners but have been living here for generations) are the largest minority groups in Japan. But then, as queer people, we know what it’s like to represent an often invisible form of cultural diversity!

I’ve been working with the festival for the last month and a half, mostly helping them get their English-language materials ready (so if you find any errors, you have my sloppy proofreading to blame!). It’s a very international group, since most of the core staff have lived and/or worked abroad (in America, Britain, even places like Pakistan, and elsewhere) and speak excellent English. Thus, this blog will offer both an insider and an outsider’s perspective. I’m an insider to the festival, and a temporary resident of Japan, but ‘boku no nihongo wa amari yokunai desu’ (‘My Japanese is not very good!’). So I will be depending on our great English-speaking staffers, and the help of translators at our special events, to bring you as much of the action, the flavor and texture of the festival as possible.

If you are an English-speaking visitor to the festival, I want to know what your impressions are too. So watch out – I may approach you, pen in hand, questions at the ready. So brush your teeth, powder your nose, and get ready to shine!