Rochester Film Festivals

One of the things I enjoy about Rochester is it's obvious love of good cinema. Not only is it home to the George Eastman Archive of photography and film (one of the factors that motivated my decision to study here), but it also plays host to a couple of really solid film festivals. Sure, they're not the New York Film Festival or the Toronto Film Festival, but they do present some excellent film-going opportunities. Later this fall, there will be the High Falls Film Festival, which showcases exceptional work by women in film and video. Right now, the city is in the midst of Image Out, the Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival. So far, we've been to see Butterfly (Yan Yan Mak), a Hong Kong film, and Floored by Love (Desiree Lim), a film produced in Vancouver. I enjoyed Floored for what it is--a light-hearted, romantic comedy. It includes many endearing scenes that show mothers and fathers coming to terms with their children's sexual orientation. It insists that families can take diverse forms and still be productive, healthy and loving. It celebrates Canada's decision to protect the rights of its gay and lesbian citizens. How can you not like all that? Just don't expect the acting to be brilliant or the script to blow you away with its subtlety or originality.

Butterfly, on the other hand, was really quite stunning, with its beautiful cinematography, engaging characters, and strong acting, particularly by Josie Ho, who plays Flavia, and Eric Kot, who plays her husband. It's a narrative about a seemingly-happy married woman with a one-year old daughter, who falls in love with Yip, a woman she meets in the aisles of a grocery story. This new relationship revives memories of her college lover, the political-activist-turned-nun, Jin. And try as she might to surpress these memories, Flavia can't get Jin or Yip out of her mind. O. K. I'm going to stop right there because I've just made this rather lovely film sound like a cliched soap opera. What does that say about my purported skills as a film scholar? Mmmm. You'll have to either take my word for it when I say it's worth the price of admission, or better yet, go see the film for yourself. I'm quite certain you won't be disappointed. My only real criticism: it runs a bit long and would have benefited from tighter editing; some of the scenes from Flavia's childhood and her present-day encounters with her parents seemed superfluous and distracting.

Tonight, Aviva and I are heading to our third film, The Aggressives, a documentary that explores a New York City community of dykes who identify as "Aggressives," meaning they see themselves as women, want to remain women, but feel most comfortable when acting "like men." According to the festival program, The Aggressives is in the spirit of Paris is Burning, a 1990 film about the Harlem drag balls thrown by predominantly inner city black and Latino gay men in the mid-1980s, a movement that inspired Madonna's song, "vogue."