Tag Archives: Outfest 2019

OUTFEST 2019 ENCORE — LABEL ME

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In LABEL ME, Waseem (Renato Schuch)—a gay-for-pay hustler from Syria—hooks up with German bourgeois Lars (Nikolaus Benda) in the latter’s Cologne apartment. The sex is good, but Lars is after a deeper connection, attempting to purchase through disclosure the one thing Waseem cannot afford to offer—his vulnerability.

This weekend, OUTFEST 2019 presents an encore screening of this immersive debut by Kai Kreuser.

LABEL ME

Sunday, July 28, at 3 pm.

Chinese 6

6801 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Label Me, from top: Renato Schuch; Schuch (left) and Nikolaus Benda; Benda; Schuch. Images courtesy and © the director, the performers, Outfest, and the International Film School, Cologne.

OUTFEST 2019 — VITA & VIRGINIA

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Among other anticipated titles, the closing weekend of OUTFEST 2019 brings the Los Angeles premiere of VITA & VIRGINIA, directed by Chanya Button and co-written by Button and Eileen Atkins.

The great Elizabeth Debicki (The Night Manager, Widows, the forthcoming Burnt Orange Heresy) would seem born to play Virginia Woolf, London modernist and author of the the sex-and-gender-switching novel Orlando (1928).

The inspiration for Orlando was Vita Sackville-West (portrayed by Gemma Arterton in the film), the British poet and aristocrat who contrived to seduce Woolf, an arrangement that threatened Vita’s marriage to bisexual diplomat Harold Nicolson slightly more than Virginia’s to publisher Leonard Woolf—open marriages more common than not among their Bloomsbury set.

VITA & VIRGINIA

Saturday, July 27, at 8:30 pm.

Chinese 6

6801 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

From top: Elizabeth Debicki (left) and Gemma Arterton in Vita & Virginia (2); Protagonist Pictures poster; Isabella Rossellini (left) as Lady Sackville, Vita’s mother and Debicki; Debicki and Arterton.

OUTFEST 2019 — THIS IS NOT BERLIN

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A month before the start of its commercial engagement at the Nuart, OUTFEST presents the Los Angeles premiere of THIS IS NOT BERLIN, writer-director Hari Sama’s loosely autobiographical take on the Mexico City of his youth.

The year is 1986, and Mexico is riding a wave a conformist nationalism leading up to the World Cup. But after one night at the Azteca—the capital’s underground hive of sexual and artistic liberation—best friends Carlos and Gera (Xabiani Ponce de León and José Antonio Toledano) are determined to go against the grain.

THIS IS NOT BERLIN / ESTO NO ES BERLÍN

Wednesday, July 24, at 7 pm.

Chinese 6

6801 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles.

From top: Xabiani Ponce de León in This is Not Berlin / Esto es no Berlín; Mauro Sanchez Navarro (left) and David Montalvo; Ximena Romo Mercado; Ponce de León; Ponce de León and José Antonio Toledano. Images courtesy and © the filmmaker, the performers, the photographers, and Samuel Goldwyn Films.

OUTFEST 2019 — BARBARA HAMMER

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TENDER FICTIONS—the late, great Barbara Hammer’s follow-up to Nitrate Kisses—traces the filmmaker’s evolution from would-be child-star of the fifties to heterosexual “earth mother” of the sixties to the lesbian artist and activist of her last decades.

As part of The Legacy Project—a partnership between OUTFEST and UCLA—TENDER FICTIONS (1996) will screen this weekend as part of the festival.

TENDER FICTIONS

Sunday, July 21, at noon.

MOCA Grand Avenue

250 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

See A. L. Steiner on Hammer.

From top: Barbara Hammer, Tender Fictions; Barbara Hammer, On the Road, Big Sur, California, 1975, 2017, gelatin silver print; Barbara Hammer, Sappho Production Meeting, Los Angeles, 1978; Hammer. Images courtesy and © the artist’s estate.