Transcripts

SPEAKER 1: Film in the Cities last year did a one-week Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. And this year, we've expanded the festival. We're collaborating with Kaufman Union's Lavender Images series. It's a series that's been done for four years of gay and lesbian film. And we've put our resources together this year to expand the festival into two weeks. So we have more money, we can show more films, and it's two full weeks of screenings. It's a very large festival. It rivals Chicago or New York.

SPEAKER 2: Is this going to give the public some glimpse of the gay and lesbian community that they might not otherwise have available to them?

SPEAKER 1: Well, I hope so, that is our intention in doing this festival.

SPEAKER 2: What glimpse will the public take away from this festival that will give them a better understanding of the gay and lesbian community.

SPEAKER 1: I would hope people would come away understanding maybe something that they didn't understand before.

SPEAKER 2: In what way?

SPEAKER 1: Well, I guess, they would be exposed to something maybe they hadn't known about before. In the regular mainstream world of cinema, there isn't a lot of gay or lesbian film out. Things come up once in a while. And so with this festival, we're underlining and highlighting that work, which isn't normally seen.

SPEAKER 2: Within the gay and lesbian community, there's a high degree of artistic creativity.

SPEAKER 1: Mmh.

SPEAKER 2: And it's been clearly demonstrated throughout the United States. And I guess the, the concern that I have, or the interest that I have, is whether or not that creativity comes through, or if these films deal, particularly with what might be called lifestyle issues.

SPEAKER 1: Well, not necessarily. I mean, there are some films we're showing that a casual viewer may not even read as an explicitly gay or lesbian film. It may completely go over their head. For example, our opening night film, which is Crocodiles in Amsterdam, there's a relationship between two women in it. The relationship is not identified explicitly as a lesbian relationship, but it's a subtext in the film.

SPEAKER 2: You hear concern expressed about gay and lesbian subjects, topics. It's become an issue at the National Endowment for the Arts. Is this Film Festival an attempt to try to put down those issues, or put to rest those issues, say that those issues that were brought up in the whole debate over Mapplethorpe, for example, really are issues that no longer are valid or that no longer bear critical review?

SPEAKER 1: I guess it's definitely a response to those issues, and an affirmation of the right to show lesbian and gay related work.

SPEAKER 2: Do you think that debate has died down? I mean, there was real stir over Mapplethorpe.

SPEAKER 1: No. There's a new one that started this week. There's a film called Poison, a new film by young director Todd Haynes. And the Reverend Donald Wildmon is starting a campaign against it because the money received, partial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, It contains some homosexual imagery. Not explicit imagery, but subject matter. And so it's starting again.