After two years of virtual screenings due to theater closures during the pandemic, Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBT Film Festival is back—or at least partly back. The long-running and much-beloved festival will celebrate its 38th year April 7–17 with a mix of in-person and virtual screenings. It’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario designed to ensure a “safe and sane festival experience,” says Shawn Cotter, Wicked Queer’s executive director.
“We are all dying to get back to having an audience,” Cotter says. At the same time, Wicked Queer’s all-virtual 2020 and 2021editions expanded the festival’s outreach to audiences who might not come to the Wicked Queer festival, Cotter says.
This year’s event will offer a mix of live and virtual shows. In a welcome return to form, opening night will take place at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge with additional in-person screenings at the Emerson Paramount Center Bright Family Screening Room and at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
“Hybrid makes the most sense,” says Cotter, noting that all three cinemas are operating at 70-percent capacity to ensure safety of patrons. Even though the number of films presented in the festival is less than in years past, the quality of the shorts programs, features and documentaries remains high. Despite the challenges of the past two years, Wicked Queer’s 2022 lineup is rich with diverse queer voices.
“There are great films out there and we want to make sure they get an audience,” Cotter says.
Among the highlights of this year’s program is a co-presentation of “Sirens” with the award-winning film and discussion series The DocYard series April 11 at the Brattle Theater. A hit at the recent Sundance Film Festival, director Rita Baghdadi’s crowed-pleasing documentary follows a Beirut, Lebanon-based heavy metal band, Slave to Sirens, led by Lilas and Shery, co-founders and guitarists. With echoes of Nida Manzoor’s popular Peacock comedy “We Are Lady Parts,” the documentary centers on the vital creative partnership between Lilas and Shery that’s complicated by their previous romance.
Another high-profile documentary fresh out of Sundance is “Framing Agnes,” directed by Chase Joynt, whose “No Ordinary Man” about jazz musician Billy Tipton screened in the Wicked Queer festival last year. Joynt’s newest film is about a young trans woman named Agnes who in 1958 entered a study about sex disorders at UCLA to get the gender-affirming care she needed. Her story was long considered to be exceptional until 2017 when long-buried case files of other patients emerged. Featuring a cast of transgender artists and actors, the film uses reenactment and genre-blurring storytelling techniques to tell a compelling tale about little-known gender pioneers.
One of the most intriguingly scripted films in the festival is “Firebird,” a romantic war drama set in the Soviet Union Air Force during the Cold War. The debut feature from director and co-writer Peeter Rebane stars Tom Prior (who also co-wrote and co-produced), Oleg Zagorodnii and Diana Pozharskaya in the true story of forbidden love between a private and a fighter pilot.
“Gemmel and Tim,” which had its world premiere at Outfest Los Angeles, is about the explosive aftermath of the deaths of two gay Black sex workers, Gemmel “Juelz” Moore and Timothy “Tim” Dean. In 2017 and 2019, respectively, the men died of a methamphetamine overdose at the now-infamous Laurel Street apartment of Ed Buck, a once influential businessman and LGBTQ political activist. The film examines how the deaths shocked Los Angeles’s LGBTQ community, especially in West Hollywood.
Cotter is particularly enthused for audiences to see the award-winning “My Emptiness and I” from Spain. It’s the third feature from Adrián Silvestre, director of “The Objects of Love” and the documentary “Sediments,” set in Barcelona’s trans community. Silvestre revisits that community for “My Emptiness and I,” but this time as a fictional story centered on lead actress Raphäelle Perez who recounts her real-life experiences as she searches for her identity and begins a gender transition. Perez wrote the screenplay with Silvestre and Carlos Marqués-Marcet.
Wicked Queer also teams with the Boston Underground Film Festival and the Boston Women’s Film Festival to present a free screening of “Rebel Dykes,” directed by Harri Shanahan and Siân A. Williams on April 14 at the Bright Lights series at Arts Emerson. The film is described as a “rabble-rousing documentary set in 1980s post-punk London” that focuses on “the unheard story of a community of dykes who met doing art, music, politics and sex, and how they went on to change their world.”
Since access to filmmakers is such an important part of the festival experience, every live and virtual program in this year’s Wicked Queer will be followed by question-and-answer sessions with filmmakers or subjects via Skype or Zoom.
More: wickedqueer.org
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