New England Transgender Film Festival
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=features&sc=newenglandtransgenderfilmfestivalProvincetown will serve as the host town for the unveiling of the First Annual New England Transgender Film Festival (www.NETFF.org) to be held on April 20 & 21, 2012. This dynamic weekend of activities represents a rare opportunity for transgender folks from across the region to come together in celebration of the unique role they play in our communities. Attendees may look forward to great social opportunities, making new contacts and gaining access to culturally relevant health care services.
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Photos Of Angie
by Kilian Melloy
Monday Apr 16, 2012
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=movies&sc2=reviews&sc3=features&id=126015After Allen Andrade killed Greeley, Colorado resident Angie Zapata by beating her to death with a fire extinguisher, he told officials that he "snapped" after discovering, to his shock, that the pretty 18-year-old had male genitalia.
Angie had been born Justin Zapata. But she never felt comfortable in a male body. When she began to assert her gender identity and live as a woman, she faced ridicule. But as the statistics for transwomen (and especially transwomen of color) show, ridicule and misunderstanding were not her greatest perils. Being attacked and murdered was. That's what happened to her at Andrade's hands in 2008.
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Gun Hill Road
by Kevin Langson
EDGE Contributor
Monday Apr 16, 2012
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=movies&sc2=reviews&sc3=features&id=118897"Like father, like son" certainly does not apply to the central characters of "Gun Hill Road", the emotionally astute Bronx-set drama that played Sundance this year.
As the film opens, typically machismo-laden Enrique (Esai Morales) returns from three years in prison to a son and wife with whom he has lost touch--and a guns-and-gambling street life, to which he seems to re-connect with much more easily.
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Gen Silent
by Kilian Melloy
Monday Apr 16, 2012
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=movies&sc2=reviews&sc3=features&id=105367Stu Maddux's documentary Gen Silent explores a problem that is only now coming to light--but it's a problem that won't simply go away. The GLBT leaders who faced down social prejudice in decades past are now reaching their elder years, and their needs--medical and social--are not being met. In order to survive a system in which health care workers might attempt to "cure" or "convert" them--or, worse, might harass and abuse them--gay senior citizens are faced with the prospect of returning to the closet.
It's a bitter dose to swallow. After all, as one longtime lesbian couple remarks, without the efforts of the trailblazers who came before, the current generation would not at all enjoy the relative freedoms that they do. It wasn't so long ago--and here the term "living memory" takes on a poignant urgency--that gays were treated in ways so deplorable that we can scarcely imagine it now.
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Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema
by J. Peter Bergman
EDGE Contributor
Monday Apr 16, 2012
http://www.edgeboston.com/entertainment/movies/features/46176/fabulous!_the_story_of_queer_cinemaWith one lurid exception Fabulous is a very good documentary on the history of Gays in movies: acting, writing, producing, directing them. From the perspective of the filmmakers interviewed and the directors Lisa Ades and Lesli Klainberg, the gay presence in movies only began in the early 1960s. Reality would show otherwise with a tolerant view of gay men and women stretching back to the earliest days in film. One young filmmaker interviewed actually cited as her first gay image on film a German movie from the 1930's entitled Maedchen in Uniform. That, however, is the only real reference to what came before the later American movies. Everything else is handled through a clever visual device, a running history of Gay filmdom which cited 1930 as the year the gay image was banned from movies. Were it true we'd have never had Franklin Pangborn, Judith Anderson, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Clifton Webb and a whole host of others in roles that are decidedly homosexual during those meagre years between the ban and Andy Warhol/John Waters independents.
Putting that aside the documentary is fascinating and does as much as possible in less than ninety minutes. Produced by the Independent Film Channel it does focus, primarily, on those films produced outside the mainstream studio efforts, although it has to, and does, touch on these as well, including Brokeback Mountain in its survey.
