Film reviews: 3 thought-provoking movies to check out at the Queer Film Festival
Caer gives voice to Latinx trans community, Well Rounded fights fat phobia, and Cured gives historical fight its due
Caer
Well Rounded
The Queer Film Festival streams online from August 12 to 22., with a few small in-person events. Well Rounded streams August 19 to 22.
Caer (Caught)
Directed by Nicola Mai
Caer takes a fresh approach to filmmaking, positing new, collaborative ways to tell stories—and the result is engaging and empathetic.
To craft the film—which is a documentary-fiction hybrid—director Nicola Mai works closely with Queens, New York’s TRANSgrediendio Intercultural Collective, a grassroots group that advocates for the rights of trans Latinx migrant women.
On one level, it tells the semi-fictional story of Rosa and Paloma, two trans Latinx sex workers faced with increasing police harassment and arrest amid a rise in xenophobia. Those scenes are played off members of the collective watching and responding to what they’re seeing portrayed (often by themselves and their friends) onscreen. (In one sequence, when Paloma’s boyfriend orders her out of the house to pick him up some KFC, then rips her off and runs for it when she’s arrested, a viewer screening the film says she’d hit him over the head with a frying pan.)
Mai’s approach allows her to get closer to these trans women’s “truths”. The intersplicing of acted scenes and audience feedback allows for fuller discussion and shading of the perspectives on screen, and a deeper understanding of complex issues like sex work versus human trafficking. Mai contrasts the experiences of Rosa and Paloma onscreen: while Rosa cops to enjoying sex work, Paloma reveals a moving story of violence and discrimination that drove her from Mexico, forcing her to risk an illegal border-crossing, only to live in a series train-station bathrooms in the U.S., eventually having to work the street for a boyfriend. But when Rosa watches the film, she elaborates that the same kinds of hate drove her into work that she’s learned to embrace.
The film’s biggest strength, though, may be the way it offers an intimate view into the warm makeshift families that the Latinx trans women form—with an older “trans mamma” who watches over and mentors them, and a sisterhood that’s as flamboyant and fun as it is supportive in the face of racism and transphobia.
Well Rounded
Directed by Shana Myara
There’s plenty of style and substance to this energetic and rawly honest documentary from director Shana Myara.
Using a playful array of bright colours, hand-drawn animation, and bold intertitles, the filmmaker takes on fat shaming, particularly as it applies to the queer community. The diverse array of interviewees retrace the factors that fed their body image as children, the stigma they’ve faced outside and inside their community, and the way they’ve come to embrace their curves.
There are plenty of laughs along the way, especially with comedians Candy Palmater and Joanne Tsung on hand. But you’ll be moved by how vulnerable and candid the stories are here, whether they’re describing cringe-inducing derision from doctors or waxing on the benefits of abundance in bed.
Experts like psychologist Dr. Janet Tomiyama and historian Dr. Jenny Ellison back it all up with insights on the pointlessness of equating dieting with health and the way politics has fed our postwar obsession with thinness (note the clip of JFK criticizing “our growing softness”). That authority mixed with authentic experience, TV and advertising clips, and artful animation make for an enjoyable but deeply thought-provoking, and frankly empowering, ride.
Cured
Directed by Bennett Singer and Patrick Sammon
(Reprinted from February 2021)
It’s a moment so bizarre it would be absurdly funny if you didn’t understand the tragic context: in archival photos of the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in 1972, a man under the pseudonym Dr. H. Anonymous appears in a rubber Halloween mask and wig to address the convention of mainly white old men. Using a voice-altering microphone, he makes a historic firsthand account as a gay psychiatrist, arguing homosexuality is not a mental illness. Because he is so likely to lose his job as a result, he has to wear the disguise.
“This is our greatest loss: our honest humanity,” he says in his riveting speech, which survives on an audio tape of the presentation.
It’s just one of the little-known milestones brought to light in Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer’s compelling new documentary Cured. While most people know that gay rights came as a result of Stonewall and people taking to the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that battle could never truly succeed until someone took on the medical establishment, whose Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders listed homosexuality at the top of its “sexual deviations” list. In chronicling that struggle, Cured ends up not only ranking as one of the most in-depth film contextualizations of gay liberation out there, but creates an almost courtroom-drama-like tension.
The meticulously researched film opens with deeply disturbing accounts of barbaric conversion therapies inflicted in the name of “curing” homosexuality throughout the 1950s and ‘60s. They include shock treatments, chemical castration, and even lobotomies. This is harrowing stuff. In archival footage from the 1970s, a young gay man describes in excruciating detail what it was like waiting and watching the clock for his next electroshock treatment, hoping against hope that his turn wouldn’t come.
The film’s biggest impact derives from the bravery of gay-liberation pioneers, and appreciating how far we’ve come in five decades. Still, Cured’s closing credits push us to do more—conversion therapy is still legal in many places, for instance. The documentary also reminds us at a pertinent moment of social activism that change often doesn’t happen overnight—that it takes decades of unrelenting work and, most of all, discussion.
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