One of the funny things about Palm Springs is the way gay people seem completely unfazed by the heat of summer. They come in droves, by car or plane, to party, relax and hang out in the sun. I suppose the triple-digit heat makes all those clothing-optional resorts seem so, well, sensible. Part of the annual summer fun is the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, playing at the Camelot Theater from August 24 to 30.
This Palm Springs event is the premiere American venue for short films, with over 325 films screening in this year's festivities. Anita Monga, the former programmer for San Francisco's Castro Theater. is the new Programming Director, and Monga has assembled six special programs of particular interest to lesbian/gay audiences. A few films will be familiar to those who attended the Fun in Boy's Shorts or Fun in Girl's Shorts programs at Frameline's 2006 Lesbian/Gay Film Festival in San Francisco. But because the Palm Springs Festival focuses only on short films, it can offer a larger number and greater variety of shorts of special interest to the gay community.
Standouts in this year's festival include Nick Oceano's sweet, wistful tale of aborted romance, Dog Tags, where a closeted Los Angeles Latino almost hooks up with a hunky Marine headed for Iraq. In Marmor's Visit, writer/director Casper Andreas treads lightly through family bonds when a young man's grandmother from Sweden arrives on his Harlem doorstep unannounced, just as he's romping in bed with his hunky black boyfriend. The Betsy Wetsy Time Bomb, written and directed by Bryan McHenry, employs wonderful 1960s Doris Day production values to tell the campy tale of a 50ish Chicago queen, Alistair, who decides he wants to co-parent with his partner — if they can just figure out what to do with Alistair's dying mom.
Other films stand out for their provocative portrayals of young women. Writer/director Andrea Janakas, an American Film Institute intern, delivers Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, a wistful and enigmatic portrait of two bored, young teenaged girls in 1979 upstate New York. And writer/director Jen Kao's post-apocalyptic fantasy Outside is remarkable for the filmmaker's ability to work in metaphor, recalling the work of the late Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski. Beautifully photographed and edited, Outside is a tale of a young woman trapped in a bunker and isolated from the outside world. Few lesbian or gay viewers will fail to recognize the similarities between the bunker and a closet.
In a general interest program entitled What's a Boy to Do?, cineastes will discover the disturbing Sugar Mountain. Writer/director Aaron Himelstein's film uses a colorful, bucolic, suburban milieu as a counterpoint for the tragic tale of a young intersexed adolescent turning 18. It is a film that is both heartbreaking and thought-provoking.
But for full-tilt, jaw-dropping outrageousness, no one is going to beat writer/director Carter Smith's Bugcrush . The setting is small-town America, where Ben (Josh Caras), a sweet-faced, sexually naive student, is attracted to Grant (Donald Cumming), the new goth bad boy at their high school. Cumming, who recalls Eric Balfour from Six Feet Under, is the perfect embodiment of slacker malevolence. While Ben surreptitiously watches the naked Grant showering alone at school, he notices a large black bug hanging from a chain around Grant's neck. Tensions mount and the mystery deepens when Grant finally invites Ben to his house one evening, along with two other goth chums. Carter Smith saves his conflation of sex and bugs for the movie's spectacularly creepy denouement; the result is a film twice as engrossing as The Blair Witch Project and just as scary. Bugcrush is not to be missed.
The two programs at the Palm Springs Festival of particular interest to lesbians are Women on the Verge and What Girls Want. The four programs assembled for the gay male audience are Out and About, Out in the Family, Queer with a Twist, and Boy Meets Boy. Specific times and content for these screenings can be found by clicking on the link to the Palms Springs International Festival of Short Films found on the website, www.psfilmfest.org. Tickets for all programs are now available online at the website, or they may be purchased at the Camelot Theater, 2300 E. Baristo Road, Palm Springs; telephone: (800) 898-7256.