[The story appears in the May/June 2021 issue of Boston Spirit magazine.]
If ever there was a sign that life as we know it is starting to return, it’s the Provincetown International Film Festival unspooling June 16–25.
One of the region’s most popular and highly regarded film festivals, PIFF this season will be a hybrid, mixing virtual and live, reduced capacity screenings at the Waters Edge cinema. Outdoor screening venues include the lawn of the newly remodeled Mary Heaton Vorse House in the town’s East End and one of Cape Cod’s treasures that’s also ideal for socially distanced moviegoing: the Wellfleet Drive-In.
Like so many arts events in 2020, PIFF had to scuttle last year’s festival because of COVID-19. This year, PIFF’s artistic director Lisa Viola has already assembled an impressive slate of features, documentaries and shorts geared to the town’s eclectic community of LGBTQ residents and visitors, artists and townies.
The festival opens June 16 at the Wellfleet Drive-in with the much anticipated “In the Heights,” the movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2007 Tony-winning musical. Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) directs a cast that include Miranda, Anthony Ramos, Leslie Grace, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Jimmy Smits in the lively musical set over three days in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights as various characters deal with changes on their block.
As usual, PIFF offers a rich and diverse selection of LGBTQ-themed films. The documentary “My Name is Pauli Murray,” directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen who helmed the 2018 doc “RBG,” introduces audiences to a vital but little-known LGBTQ historical figure who died in 1985 at the age of 74. Murray, who was queer, Black and identified as nonbinary/trans long before terms for gender identity were commonplace, was a lawyer, poet, feminist, activist, scholar and priest. Using a mix of archival footage, interviews and Murray’s own voice recordings, the film brings this unique and extraordinary trailblazer into full focus.
The one-of-a-kind “Potato Dreams of America” is gay writer-director Wes Hurley’s autobiographical coming-of-age comedy about a gay Russian boy, Vasili (played by three different actors at various stages of his life) called “Potato,” and his single mother Lena (Sera Barbieri). Determined to start a new life in 1980s America, Lena becomes a mail order bride. Hurley shoots the early scenes in Russia like a dour Russian movie. The film changes in tone and visual style once the family emigrates to Seattle and Vasili, with movies as his compass, begins his coming out journey. A hit at this year’s SXSW, the film co-stars legendary comic and Provincetown’s own Lea DeLaria.
Who can resist a drag slapstick called “Shit & Champagne”? San Francisco drag queen extraordinaire D’Arcy Drollinger’s first feature is a wacky, campy send-up of ’70s sexploitation movies. Adapted from Drollinger’s successful stage show, “Shit & Champagne” stars Drollinger as Champagne Horowitz Jones Dickerson White, a stripper who finds herself in danger after her fiancé and half-sister are both murdered. When the cops refuse to investigate, Champagne takes matters into her own hands in a whodunit that features a supporting cast of all-star drag talent, including “Alaska Thunderfuck of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
If you missed “Sublet,” from acclaimed Israeli director Eytan Fox, the creator of the gay cinema classics “Yossi & Jagger” (2002) and “Walk on Water” (2004), when it played the Boston Jewish Film Festival, PIFF hosts a screening of the dramedy starring John Benjamin Hickey as Michael, a gay journalist visiting Tel Aviv. He sublets an apartment from Tomer (Niv Nissim), a young, free-spirited film student. The men form an unexpected connection as Tomer introduces Michael to the city’s youth-centered scene.
The bonding of men from different worlds is also the theme of “Give or Take,” a dramedy set on Cape Cod and shot in Orleans. Directed by Paul Riccio and written by Jamie Effros who also stars as Martin, a New Yorker who returns to Cape Cod for the funeral of his estranged father. He has an awkward reunion with his dad’s live-in boyfriend Ted (Norbert Leo Butz), a sensitive but goofy, nonstereotypical gay man who fishes and guzzles beer.
Beneath Martin’s subtle homophobia is resentment for what Ted, a landscaper, shared with Ken, a man that Martin didn’t really know. “Give or Take” has a memorable scene at the drive-in so it’s fitting that the PIFF screening will be at the Wellfleet Drive-In.
“David’s Friend” is the film version of the acclaimed one woman show from actress and Cambridge native Nora Burns. It’s a funny, poignant and celebratory recounting of Burns’s relationship with her best friend David, beginning when they met as teenagers in 1979 on the dance floor of Boston’s gay club the 1270 to their move to New York City at the height of the disco era to David’s death from AIDS in 1993. Burns, a member of the comic troupes Unitard and the Nellie Olesons, brought the stage version of “David’s Friend” to Provincetown several years ago as part of the annual Afterglow Festival. The film version features popular Provincetown musician Billy Hough, who appeared as a DJ in the stage show.
From Finland comes “Tove,” a biopic of Tove Jansson, the renowned artist who created the mid-20th-century comic strip trolls called the Moomins. Alma Poysti plays the unconventional, bisexual Jansson as the film charts her development as an artist from just before the end of World War II to the 1950s and her romantic entanglements with both men and women.
Another unique feature in the PIFF is writer-director Tracey Deer’s gritty coming-of-age drama. “Beans” is based on her experience surviving the Oka Crisis, a 78-day armed standoff between Mohawk protestors and the Canadian government in 1990. “Beans” tells its painful powerful story through the eyes of a 12-year-old Mohawk girl called “Beans” as she struggles to find her identity within her navigating community while dealing with discrimination and social upheaval.
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