LA Weekly

In movie years great and mediocre, one thing remains true and fine about Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which turns 24 this week: It’s an event that queer people make for themselves. Straights are welcome, but not necessary, which perhaps accounts for why the lobbies of the Directors Guild and other festival venues fairly hum with happiness. Here, no one has to worry about whether Mom and Dad will be able to handle seeing Jake kiss Heath, because Outfest movies — despite the crossover dreams of their makers — aren’t intended for multiplex heteros, but for the men and women and transgendered beauties who fill Outfest’s theaters, and for their brethren. Outfest, in a sense, says to the larger world: “We want you to see and understand and enjoy these films we’ve made about our lives, but if you don’t come, we’ll survive, and even prosper. For these 12 days, we look to, and look after, ourselves first.”

Here are 15 films from this year’s festival that made us sit up straight (so to speak) in our seats. See ya in the lobby.



SONGBIRDS This third form-shattering “documentary musical” by British director Brian Hill (Feltham Sings, Pornography: The Musical) takes place inside the walls of a Sutton women’s correctional facility, where the inmates tell their woeful tales first in straightforward interview segments and then again in stylized production numbers that canvas a wide variety of musical genres. The gimmick doesn’t always work, but more often than not Songbirds exudes a strange fascination. Chances are that this is the only time you’ll ever find yourself tapping your toes to a rousing ditty about drug-muleing or a melancholy mea culpa by a woman who stabbed her neighbor to death for — of all things — playing music too loudly. (The Village at Ed Gould Plaza; Fri., July 7, 7 p.m.) (Scott Foundas)

AMNESIA: THE JAMES BRIGHTON ENIGMA (Canada) This moody French Canadian docudrama is drawn from a semifamous true story: In 1998, a young man (played here by Dusan Dukic) woke up naked in an alley in Montreal, unable to remember his name. He knew he was gay and eventually identified himself as James Brighton, a name that would later be proven false. Was Brighton a fake? Writer-director Denis Langlois approaches the question with near-clinical detachment, until the movie’s homestretch, when flashbacks reveal the filmmaker’s notion that Brighton is a man ruined by love. It’s a pain-filled theory, in a film that’s peculiar and slow and undeniably haunting. (Regent Showcase; Fri., July 7, 8 p.m.) (CW)

SAINT OF 9/11 (USA) It would be lovely if the Outfest folks could somehow run director Glenn Holsten’s magnificent documentary in a continuous loop throughout the festival, as tribute to its subject, Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan priest and New York Fire Department chaplain who died while tending to fallen firefighters at the World Trade Center’s North Tower. In a film that’s as much a tone poem to New York City as a biography, those who knew and loved and were changed by Judge conjure his life and extraordinary good works, while narrator Ian McKellen reads from the father’s speeches, sermons, interviews and journals. Judge’s words seem to send Holsten’s camera arching high above the city. The movie is full of sky. (DGA2; Fri., July 7, 8 p.m.) (CW)

METH (USA) Turning his camera on a sinfully neglected community crisis, director Todd Ahlberg (Hooked) interviews half a dozen men who speak frankly about “Tina,” the party drug that turned them into speed freaks whose quest for never-ending (never-safe) sex decimated their lives. One Phoenix man shoots up on camera, only to later listen as his unsuspecting mother sings his praises. He vows to change, but it’s clear from the faraway look in the eyes of Meth’s recovering addicts that Tina’s a temptress for whom a wounded man never stops pining. (DGA1; Sat., July 8, 1:30 p.m.) (CW)

THE RAILROAD ALL-STARS (Spain) Many outrages are breaking the hearts of the prostitutes in Guatemala City’s La Linea (railroad) district. They have to bribe the cops; they can’t get custody of their children; they get beaten and murdered. So they publicize their plight by forming an itinerant soccer team. In Chema Rodríguez’s documentary, we hear their stories of abuse and poverty. We see their lives and their lovers, male and female. We even meet a gay male streetwalker who dreams of being a designer. They all cry, fight and pray, and sometimes they laugh. The Railroad All-Stars aren’t great soccer players, but they’ve got guts. (Village at Ed Gould Plaza; Sat., July 8, 2:30 p.m.) (Greg Burk)

CAMP OUT (USA) The concept reeks of sensationalistic cable-reality programming, but thankfully directors Kirk Marcolina and Larry Grimaldi’s documentary about 10 Midwestern teens at a gay Christian camp is a subtle, affecting look at the difficult emotional intersection of religion, sexuality and puberty. Camp Out largely avoids Real World moments of forced drama between the campers, instead focusing on their poignant struggles to reconcile their sexual orientation with their relationship to God and His often narrow-minded church. Never painting their subjects as saints, the filmmakers effortlessly portray them as just your typically complicated everyday teenagers — hormones, aspirations and insecurities perfectly intact. (DGA1; Sat., July 8, 4:30 p.m.) (Tim Grierson)

COLMA: THE MUSICAL A giddy, unexpected pleasure: There is more wit, energy and imagination in any one frame of director Richard Wong and writer-composer-star H.P. Mendoza’s original screen musical than in an entire decade’s worth of lame Hollywood attempts to revivify the genre. Handsomely filmed in vibrant colors and peppy wide-screen compositions, it’s the story of three recently graduated high school friends — two guys (one gay, one straight) and a girl — contemplating their escapes from the titular San Francisco suburb, pining for somebody to love and, periodically, breaking out into infectious, up-temp pop ballads about everything from small-town anomie to crashing collegiate parties. My personal favorite: a barroom full of lonely singles bidding adieu (in song, of course) to fickle Cupid himself. (Regent Showcase; Sat., July 8, 6:30 p.m.) (SF)