By: Joseph R. Castel
The Long Beach Q Film Festival will kick off its 33rd year on Thursday, Sept. 17th inside The Honda Pacific Visions Theater at The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, with a gala reception starting at 6:30 pm.
The festival’s opening feature film “Give Me the Ball” is about tennis icon Billy Jean King. Screenings for the rest of the festival will then move to its regular venue at the historic Art Theatre in Long Beach on Friday through Sunday.
“This year has been challenging for our entire queer community,” said Robert Cano, the Founder and Programmer of the Long Beach Q Film Festival. “But when we show up for one another and lift up our fellow community members in solidarity, we can make lasting progress.”
This year’s roster of LGBTQ line up promises to be one of the best for audiences with two award-winning Latino films, On the Road and Maspalomas.
On the Road received 13 Ariel nominations (Mexican Oscars) and premiered at the Venice International Film festival, winning the Queer Lion award. Actor Victor Prieto Simental plays Venemo, a quiet hustler on the run from a gang of vengeful murderers. When Venemo cons a ride out of Muneco, a no nonsense, straight acting truck driver, with a drug problem, the two become intimately involved as they motor down the road to nowhere. Their friendship is tested when Venemo’s past shows up with guns on a mission to kill them both. Simental, who plays Venemo, is brilliant as the brooding, quiet, handsome streetwise, good boy gone bad with a tragic past. The chemistry between the two masculine characters is sensual intoxication as they cling to one another to stay afloat from drowning in past regrets.
Maspalomas is a touching story about getting old and being gay in Spain during the Covid-19 pandemic. Not exactly an uplifting theme, but the reality of queer obsessed youth culture is a reality for aging gay men. This story focuses on Vicente, who’s still sexually active in his late 60s, but his cruising escapades come to a crushing halt when he has a stroke while trying to engage in a threesome at a sex club. When Vicente’s sent to a nursing home to recuperate, he’s reacquainted with his estranged daughter whom he abandoned in childhood. Vicente left his family to be with his longtime companion who is now out of the picture – Vicente was dumped for a younger guy. Vicente is forced to revisit his familial past and he makes the odd choice of going back into the closet while recuperating at this progressive nursing home. Has the stroke made him straight? It’s an intriguing concept that’s not fully developed, but plays with the idea, “What if?” I highly recommend this poignant story of regret and hope.
The festival’s closing night film will be Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders, by Emmy-winning director, Jeffrey Schwarz. Mineshaft tells the untold story behind the controversial film, Cruising (1980) starring Al Pacino. Cruising triggered fierce protests from the LGBTQ community in 1980 for its sensational portrayal of a New York City serial killer who targets gay men frequenting leather bars. Director William Friedkin (The Exorcist) got the idea about a serial gay killer from the true-life brutal murder of “Variety” reporter Addison Verrill in 1977.
What’s even weirder is that Friedkin had an ominous connection with the real-life killer he bases his movie on. Addison Verrill was killed by Paul Bateson, who was an extra in Friedkin’s film, The Exorcist (1973). In The Exorcist, Bateson plays the medical technician who’s performing a cerebral angiography on Regan (Linda Blair), the possessed girl, to figure out what’s going on inside her brain and why she’s acting like a demonic lunatic. Clearly, it was Bateson who needed a cerebral angiography. Friedkin even interviews Bateson in prison in order to get additional background material for his script, Cruising.
Friedkin took major artistic liberties with the story by meshing Verrill’s murder with the true-life killings of several other gay men who were dumped in the East River, all hacked up, and all wearing pieces of leather attire. Bateson also was the prime suspect of those grisly murders, but never convicted for lack of evidence.
In Cruising, Pacino plays the undercover cop who’s looking for the killer by posing as a leather daddy. Pacino’s performance as a closeted homosexual officer is provocative, but the sordid violence is deeply disturbing and it’s no wonder the gay community was up in arms over the exploitive portrayal of the leather scene during the 1970s as being oversexed and depraved.
Documentary filmmaker Schwarz is a master class director who’s made some of the best biographies on queer icons, including I Am Divine, The Fabulous Allan Carr, and Tab Hunter Confidential, all of which can be seen on Amazon Prime. Regardless of how one feels about the controversial depiction of the gay community in Cruising, documentarian Schwarz will set the record straight by putting it all into a cultural and historical lavender perspective.
For Q Film Festival tickets and screening information visit: https://www.qfilmslongbeach.com