WINNERS OF THE 2022 OUTFEST FILM FESTIVAL

The 40th edition of Outfest L.A. has come to an end and there were prizes that were handed out. "Please Baby Please", Amanda Kramer's avant-garde, queer journey that explores gender, obsession and lust, received the top prize from the Grand Jury for Outstanding Narrative Feature.

 
Here is a partial list of winners from the 2022 OutFest L.A. Film Festival:

Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding North American Narrative Feature: "Please Baby Please"
Honorable Mention for North American Narrative Feature: "Youtopia"
Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Screenplay in a North American Narrative Feature: Juan Pablo González, Ana Isabel Fernández and Ilana Coleman, "Dos Estaciones"
Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Performance in a North American Narrative Feature: Matthew Jeffers, "Unidentified Objects"
Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding International Narrative Feature: "Mars One"
Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Screenplay in a International Narrative Feature: Mariano Biasin, "Sublime"



Honorable Mention for Screenplay in a International Narrative Feature: Gabriel Bier Gislason, "Attachment"
Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Performance in a International Narrative Feature: Aamu Milonoff, "Girl Picture"



Honorable Mention for Performance in a International Narrative Feature: Raphaëlle Perez, "My Emptiness and I"
Paul D. Lerner and Stephen Reis Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Documentary Feature: "Sirens"



Honorable Mention for Documentary Feature: "Jeannette"
Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding U.S. Narrative Short: "Work"
Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding International Narrative Short: "Warsha"
Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Documentary Short: "Love, Barbara D"
Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature: "Unidentified Objects"
Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature: "Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story"
Audience Award for Best Narrative Short: "Troy"
Audience Award for Best Documentary Short: "CANS Can’t Stand"

SPECIAL PROGRAMMING AWARDS:

Emerging Talent: Yusuf Shadeed Nasir, "Regret To Inform You"
Freedom: "UÝRA: The Rising Forest"
Artistic Achievement: Mohammad Shawky Hassan, "Shall I Compare You To A Summer's Day?"

Now for some movies I saw at the fest. "Crissy Judy" is a fierce dark comedy from Todd Flaherty who wrote, directed, edited and stars in his debut feature film. Judy (Flaherty) is part of NYC drag act with his best friend, Crissy (Wyatt Fenner). Referring to themselves by their performer names, even out of drag, they do everything together but one day, Crissy announces that the man he has been dating has gotten serious and plans on moving to Philadelphia to live with him. Lost and devastated, Judy tries to carry on with the act and life on his own, struggling every step of the way. With stunning, crisp black & white photography by Flaherty's brother, Brendan, "Chrissy Judy" brings to mind the mid-career era of Woody Allen's comedy-dramas with Flaherty's Crissy even feeling like a variation of Holly (played by Dianne Wiest) in Allen's "Hannah and her Sisters", a person struggling to make a creative career happen but whose life is a mess, abusing alcohol and making bad choices, particularly regarding men. But Flaherty has made a delightfully charming film that displays his own distinctive style and rhythm with well-developed characters, deeply felt drama and hilarious comedy.

For young gay men growing up in the '80's and '90's, the International Male mail-order catalogue, with it's pages filled with impossibly handsome men modeling fashion-forward clothing (and much less), helped open the door to explore and fantasize privately at home at a time when there were not many outlets for them to do this. And the fascinating documentary, "All Male: The International Male Story" from directors, Bryan Darling and Jesse Finlay Reed does a deep-dive into the history of the company started by Gene Burkard in 1974. After leaving the military, a closeted Burkard from the Midwest headed to San Diego where he found a chance to live openly and an opportunity to start a business. Creating a variation of the jock strap and calling it "jock sock", Burkard put an ad in adult magazines to purchase by mail and the product exploded almost immediately, evolving into mail order business with fashions for men with the catalogue created to evoke a worldly, lifestyle magazine. With narration by Matt Boner, the film interviews Burkard (who passed away in 2020), several former employees, celebrity fans and some of the models who describe their struggles with trying to look comfortable in the more extreme looks they were given to wear. My only minor issue with the film is that even at eighty-three minutes, "All Male" feels padded, with a hour probably being plenty of time to effectively tell the International Male story. What I found really interesting was Burkard's insistence that gay men were not the target audience for International Male. I still find this hard to believe yet he did prove that there was an awareness for his clothing outside of the community, successfully luring women into selecting items for their men to wear, many who certainly would never have purchased on their own. This catalogue came to a sad demise in 2007 but International Male will always be remembered for helping to redefine masculinity and open up how men could creatively express themselves through their clothing.



And while "Please Baby Please" was selected the Outstanding Narrative Feature, I was not a fan of this convoluted drama. Set in 1950's New York (but looking more like the 1980's), British actors Andrea Riseborough and Harry Melling play a newly married American couple, Suze and Arthur who witness a street gang brutalizing an innocent victim. Although they are both terrified, this act of violence also opens up for each a desire to explore their gender identities. Demi Moore and Karl Glusman make appearances as an odd neighbor and the gang's sexy leader who Arthur is obsessed with. It is clear that the director Kramer had found inspiration from David Lynch and other offbeat filmmakers yet unlike Lynch's mysterious, erotically-charged journeys into highly stylized otherworlds, Kramer's film feels tedious and incomprehensible, with a sense of trying too hard to just be weird. The script does not help with the characters having a lot to say but their ramblings are all meaningless, devoid of actual sentiment. "Please Baby Please" is an empty exercise into the avant-garde, never succeeding in creating a compelling, dreamlike adventure.