LGBTQ Highlights from Sundance

Here's Ren Jender filing her final report from Sundance 2020...

Tabitha Jackson and Kirsten JohnsonSundance didn't have a big queer film this year, as they have in many previous years (most recently in 2018, when director Desiree Akhavan's The Miseducation of Cameron Post won the Grand Jury Dramatic Prize) but with this year's awards came the news that a black, queer woman, Tabitha Jackson, would take over from outgoing, longtime Sundance Film Festival Director John Cooper. Jackson also made news on the first day of the festival when she married documentary director Kirsten Johnson (Johnson's Dick Johnson is Dead, was a favorite among many critics and audiences at Sundance this year), and they jointly announced that Johnson would no longer be submitting her films to the festival during her spouse's tenure. 

Sam Feder's Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen premiered on Monday. The film is a documentary in the tradition of The Celluloid Closet, which included clips of queer characters in films and commentary on those characters by writers, actors and filmmakers...

 Disclosure has clips of trans characters along with interviews with trans people (like Laverne Cox, also an executive producer on this film) who are filmmakers, performers and writers commenting on the clips, some of which date back to the earliest silent films. Disclosure brings up some great points, like the movie and TV representation of trans women as cis men in dresses may very well be responsible for the violence against trans women offscreen, but could have used more commentary from trans film and TV critics. For example, one argument against casting cross-dressed cis people in trans roles, which the film covers at length, is verisimilitude, which the film doesn't much touch on. As film critic Willow Maclay has pointed out," Trans women aren't built like cis men and Trans men aren't built like cis women." Disclosure also doesn't examine porn tropes (porn tells a lot about a culture!) that films like The Danish Girl echo as writer Rani Baker wrote when the film was released.  

A more lively discussion about trans and queer representation in films and TV took place at Outfest House, which devoted a full day and a dedicated space to the LGBTQ filmmaking community. During the "The Full Rainbow: Centering Underrepresented Queer Voices" panel, actor Wilson Cruz (My So-Called Life) stated:

"Just because we have Pose doesn't mean we have to stop. I feel like there's an element in the industry of, 'Why do we need another show of trans people when we have this one.'"

Marquise Vilson, an actor who is also in Disclosure answered an audience question about passing, saying, "I want to be thoughtful about that language. 'Passing' implies many of us are trying to intentionally do something. I didn't intend to pass. I just intended to live authentically and what happened was what happened."

Another panel that included a lot of queer, accumulated wisdom was sponsored by Free the Work, an organization for women filmmakers. Producer Christine Vachon (Zola, Carol) and writer-director Angela Robinson (Professor Marston and the Wonder Women) talked about their experiences at Sundance and their trepidation about the future. Robinson cautioned filmmakers relying on Netflix for distribution, "I fear being a tile among other tiles that an algorithm is boosting to somebody. There used to be the mini-majors (film distributors) and they'd make a queer film, like one or two, and then (queer cable channels) Logo and Here were like 'We're going to have a channel,' and we're like, 'Yay!' The mini majors then said, 'Well you have a place to go, so we don't need to make those movies anymore.' So Here and Logo had no money to make the things. And then there were no things." 

Vachon said of the post-Weinstein movie landscape, "I think the optics are getting better. I'm not saying that's not something. But I do think we absolutely cannot get even a little, teeny bit complacent. You go into that last room to get your movie greenlit, your television show, what have you, those people, the ultimate decision-makers are still exactly who they have been. Until those people change and the ones who control the narratives start to look like us, it's not going to change. We've got to dismantle it all and start all over again."   

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