Fresh Perspectives: Pride at the Pictures

We take a look at the pleasingly eclectic film programme at this year's Liverpool Pride festival

Preview by Jamie Dunn | 29 Jul 2014

“You don’t even sound like the ones on Bravo,” says a blonde prom queen to a recently outed gay student, whom she's grooming to be her ‘gay best friend.’ It’s a line from G.B.F. (31 Jul, FACT), a candy-coloured high-school movie that smartly sends up gay stereotypes from movies and magazines that still hold water for many.

G.B.F. kicks off Pride at the Pictures, Liverpool Pride’s annual celebration of queer film, and, like this slyly subversive teen comedy, this year’s programme doesn’t simply deliver clichés of LGBTQ cinema. Its films’ stories and themes look outward; their focus isn't the shopworn tropes of tortured repression or coming-out struggles.

Take for example festival hit Lilting (5 Aug; The Light, New Brighton). It concerns the rarely explored dynamics between a gay man and his long-term boyfriend’s mother, whose relationship forms once the man who connects them dies. What makes this relationship all the more precarious is that the mother was unaware her son was gay, and the dead man's lover and mother share neither a language nor a culture – he (played by Ben Whishaw) is English, she (played by Cheng Pei-pei) is Cambodian. It’s a quiet, delicate chamber drama of mood and atmosphere, and a fine-grained examination of complex human interactions.

You could probably guess from its title, but Who's Afraid of Vagina Wolf? (7 Aug, FACT) doesn’t quite have the same restraint. It follows a once successful filmmaker who now finds herself living in her friend’s garage and making a living by performing while dressed as a life-sized vagina in a girl group called the Vaginettes. She finds filmmaking inspiration, however, in the form of a beautiful young fan whom she casts in a post-feminist, all-female remake of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? As with any filmmaking endeavour so self-serious and pretentious, the resulting film-within-a-film is a riot.

The laughs continue in Gerontophilia (21 Aug, FACT), a surprisingly sweet rom-com from Bruce LaBruce. While it doesn’t contain the kinky sex and gross-out violence of his previous films, LaBruce arguably tackles his most controversial subject yet: an inter-generational sexual relationship. In our youth-obsessed culture, it might be the ultimate taboo.

The subtitle given to this year’s Pride at the Pictures is ‘A Fairytale Feast of Films,’ and this moniker is most applicable to two movies in the programme with their protagonists’ names in the title: Jack and Diane (28 Aug, FACT) and Bruno & Earlene Go to Vegas (2 Sep; The Light, New Brighton). The former is a lesbian teen romance that takes on elements of horror in the form of a werewolf allegory and some gooey stop-motion imagery courtesy of celebrated animators the Quay Brothers. The latter is a dreamy road movie, in which a pair of misfits travel across Nevada and meet a quixotic array of desert dwellers, including a sexually confused carjacker, a pair of Scottish ex-strippers and a tap-dancing drag queen, along the way.

Pride at the Pictures runs 31 Jul-2 Sep. See website for full details

http://www.liverpoolpride.co.uk