What's Happening

Until May 4, 2008

Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

Miami, FL

At first it might appear like some fabulous gay dream: balmy beach weather, models wearing very little clothing, fierce drag queens holding fruity cocktails, a Prada outlet, and a queer film festival. Too good to be true? Not if you live in Miami. On April 25, the 10th Annual Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival kicked off a ten-day festival, with a four-day (May 1 to 4) added fest from in Fort Lauderdale. Festival Director Carol Combes remembers that "during our inaugural festival in July of 1999, we showcased 24 feature length and short films from five different countries, with 10 visiting filmmakers in attendance." This year, there are 95 films from 22 different countries with at 100 filmmakers slated to attend. Among those enjoying Miami's luxe hospitality will be director Laurie Lynd with his opening night film, the gay family comedy Breakfast with Scot, director Thomas Gustafson (and his cast) from the closing night coming-of-age film Were The World Mine, producer Christine Vachon (who'll be receiving the festival's Career Achievement Award and is here with Savage Grace), and finally Project Runway star Jay McCarroll, who will not only be here with his film, Eleven Minutes, but will also be putting together a fashion show for those who are in and those who are "out." In addition, tomorrow's LGBT filmmaker will be previewed as part of the 9th Annual PlanetOut Short Movie Awards. Among the other highlights are a revival of Derek Jarman's art portrait Caravaggio, a loving memory of writer Christopher Isherwood and painter Don Bachardy Chris and Don: A Love Story, and The Secrets, a drama of lesbian love in orthodox Judaism.

Until June 30, 2008

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson

New York, NY

Danish artist Olafur Eliasson creates works that rethink the very nature of nature. He uses the basic elements of nature — light, water, steam, earth — to create small, intimate universes. In his project for the Venice Biennale, "Your Black Horizon," Eliasson created a kinetic lit horizon in a vast black pavilion, a line of light whose luminosity mirrored that of our own horizon. At London's Tate Modern, Eliasson filled the museum's huge main hall with an immense glowing sun of his own making. The current show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, showcases 15 years of the artist's work. From huge gallery installations to smaller models and plans, the exhibition — which takes place at MoMA main space and its alternative space PS 1 — rearranges our assumptions about the most basic elements of the world around us. The museum also offers an online experience for those unable to visit.

May 3 to June 29, 2008

Unburied Treasures: Classic Films Preserved By UCLA Film & Television Archive

Los Angeles, CA

Following on from their excellent season of Pre-Code cinema earlier this year, the UCLA Film and Television Archive present another series of cinematic delicacies from their collection, Unburied Treasures. In this case, it's films which they have preserved over the past quarter of a century, and, in the words of the program notes, they "are all — if not world-famous classics — well-crafted, entertaining, and sometimes challenging pictures by reputable filmmakers." That group of filmmakers is indeed formidable: Josef von Sternberg, André De Toth, Budd Boetticher, William Dieterle, George Cukor, Mitchell Leisen, Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. In addition to films like von Sternberg's An American Tragedy (which was remade by George Stevens as A Raisin in the Sun), the 1921 German romantic melodrama Sappho starring Pola Negri, and Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's saga of the Barrymore clan, The Royal Family of Broadway, there are newsreels and shorts featuring Hollywood figures as diverse as Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman and Betty Boop.

Until May 4, 2008

Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival

Portland, OR

The Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival started in 2001 as a logical extension of the efforts of Peripheral Produce, the Portland screening series and video label that has fostered filmmakers with idiosyncratic visions in the Rose City for over a decade. The festival, which is essentially a year's worth of regular Peripheral Produce screenings squeezed into 5 busy days, kicks off with Matt Wolf's acclaimed documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, about the late visionary musician. Another non-fiction highlight is Linas Phillips' innovative take on homelessness, Great Speeches From a Dying World. On the experimental side there is a retrospective of short works by Stephanie Barber and Experimental Filmmaker Karaoke Throwdown, a karaoke session where singers perform in front of re-imagined, experimental music videos for the songs they have chosen. The festival closes with a sneak preview of Craig Baldwin's new opus, Mock Up On Mu, a collision of fact and fiction that blends the genre tropes of espionage films, science fiction movies and Westerns in telling the stories of Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron and L. Ron Hubbard.

Until May 18, 2008

Friedlander

San Francisco, CA

When Lee Friedlander moved to New York City in 1956, his initial photographs were of jazz musicians who he snapped for record covers. His style, however, was influenced by socially-oriented photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank (whose seminal book The Americans came out two years after Friedlander's arrival in NYC), and in 1960 Friedlander was given a Guggenheim grant in order to allow him to focus on his work. In the nearly 50 years since then, Friedlander has grown into one of this country's most vital and important visual artists, whose black-and-white photographs of urban scenes haven taken on iconic status. When arthritis and knee replacement surgery made him housebound recently, he responded by photographing his surroundings and producing Stems, a series of photographs of plant stems, which he found redolent of his own limbs. San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art now presents Friedlander , a major retrospective of over 40 years of Friendlander's images ranging from his early album covers to sepia cityscapes right up to his latest work, which views fashion shoots from a skewed perspective.