The Q Cinema festival has been going since 1998, and it’s a measure of just how much has changed since then that this year’s festival has an entire program of short films dedicated to the subject of gay marriage. Our nation’s president would undoubtedly approve.
Of course, that’s hardly the only attraction here. Feature films include Robert L. Camina’s Raid of the Rainbow Lounge. If you missed the March premiere, this is a great chance to see this valuable documentary on a historic event in local gay history. Adam Adolfo’s Vito is a documentary profile of Vito Russo, a co-founder of ACT UP and GLAAD and an important film scholar on top of that. For fiction, Jonathan Lisecki’s Gayby is about a gay man/straight woman pair of best friends who make good on a childhood promise to have a child, and Alexandra-Therese Keining’s Kiss Me is a Swedish lesbian romance that includes a new Robyn song on the soundtrack. (Worth noting: Robyn’s first hit song in America was the title track of one of the all-time great lesbian romantic films, Show Me Love.)
The festival’s short films have come in from as far afield as Ireland, Australia, Brazil, and Slovenia, and the lesbian-themed shorts include Andrea Savage’s Republicans, Get in My Vagina!, in which Kate Beckinsale and Judy Greer urge our male friends on the right wing to take over their rights to their bodies. That entry doesn’t actually have much to do with lesbians, but it’s funny all the same.
