Queer film fans in Los Angeles are feeling the summer void left by the beloved Outfest, which paused its programming last year amid financial issues and staff layoffs and has yet to resume. But a new film series, called Queer Rhapsody, looks to fill that crater across five venues July 19-28 — and with curation from the UCLA Film and Television Archive and one of Outfest’s former own. Even if they aren’t looking just to replace the 40-year-long legacy of L.A.’s oldest film festival. Plus, Queer Rhapsody is decidedly a series, not a festival.
With a focus on liberating narratives and a program of more than 50 narrative and documentary features and shorts, Queer Rhapsody opens at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater with Drew Denny’s “Second Nature.” Narrated by Elliot Page, the documentary follows trans trailblazer and evolutionary biologist Dr. Joan Roughgarden, who meets with scientists to explore the more than 1,500 animal species that engage in same-sex sexual behavior and same-sex families.
Other highlights include Jules Rosskam’s Sundance premiere “Desire Lines,” following the journey of an Iranian-American trans man searching for his place in history; Fawzia Mirza’s “The Queen of My Dreams,” about a queer Pakistani grad student in a Bollywood-inspired journey; and the adult film mashup “Ask Any Buddy”; Julia Fuhr Mann’s portrait of excluded queer athletes, “Life Is Not a Competition But I’m Winning”; and Silas Howard’s queer supernatural young adult comedy “Darby and the Dead,” followed by a queer prom at Eagle Rock’s recently resurrected Eagle Theatre at Vidiots.
IndieWire spoke with May Hong HaDuong, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Queer Rhapsody creative director and programmer Martine McDonald, about their ambitions for the series, whose venues also included the Egyptian Theatre, the Los Feliz 3, and Oculus Hall at The Broad Museum.
“We recognized a while ago that there was potentially a need to provide support for contemporary queer cinema in L.A.,” HaDuong said. They were “really thinking about access. Access to films is part of how we develop our identity. Seeing ourselves onscreen is how you can see others … [what was really so important] was keeping that lifeline on screen.”
With virtually all its staff laid off last year after many decided to unionize, Outfest is not returning to Los Angeles this year and has not announced plans to reinstate itself yet.
“What I saw was a need for spaces to be available for people to convene and for artists to be centered,” HaDunong said. “I’d be remiss not to say, of course looking months down the line, I saw, how can UCLA and other venues continue our commitment to queer cinema, do it collectively and thoughtfully without necessarily trying to say this is XYZ. What’s our North star here? It’s to make space for people to be around queer cinema.”
“I don’t think we are lacking spaces. A big thing May and I talked about in the beginning was cultural workers, and how there are folks that are curating and thinking about what our community needs in this moment,” McDonald, a former Outfest staffer, added. “If you want to go on a freeway or not, there’s some geographic or cultural reason to engage all of our venue partners.”
IndieWire also spoke to L.A.-based trans filmmaker Howard, whose 2022 “Darby and the Dead” was a 20th Century Studios production that premiered exclusively on Hulu. It’s no longer available to stream on the platform — you can still rent it from digital providers — which is part of why Howard was excited about the in-theater Vidiots screening of his diverse teen comedy.
And it’s a joyous moment for Howard, too, in terms of advancing trans storytelling: He is one of the first trans masculine filmmakers to direct a studio project, and after becoming the first trans director on the TV series “Transparent,” with other credits on “A League of Their Own” and “Quantum Leap.”
“Who knew there was a lack of shelf room on streaming?,” Howard said when asked about “Darby and the Dead” being pulled from Hulu. “You just thought it wouldn’t be, but residuals and the tax breaks, it seemed unfortunate. I felt lucky because we had a year that we were up, and then it was not too long after that it was available on Amazon and iTunes and all that. They really put a lot of care into it, but it seems like the people making those decisions, Disney and the accounting side of it, yanked the movie, and Hulu had just done their research, and it was one of the most diverse audiences they’d reach with any of their projects, and the youngest. I’ve heard worse cases, so I felt pretty lucky.”
Howard’s first film, the queer crime drama “By Hook or by Crook,” won a raft of unexpected (for the filmmakers) prizes at Outfest in 2021, so he’s feeling the pain, as many queer Los Angelenos do, of that festival’s ongoing absence. “It’s always been, for me, such an important festival because they’re in L.A., they offer connections to industry people. They’re going to come back. I don’t think it’s a permanent break, but it was a heartbreak. I love that festival. It’s a big part of why I moved here … People often say, ‘Is there still a need for LGBTQ film festivals?’ For me, for filmmakers that want to find an audience and watch their work with an audience, it’s so crucial.”
“Darby and the Dead” stars Riele Downs and “Moana” breakout Auliʻi Cravalho and centers on a girl gifted with the power to see dead people after a near-death experience of her own. “I do a lot of shows that aren’t specifically queer or trans, and ‘Darby’ was probably the first movie that was so genre-specific. I felt very supported. It was my first studio. It went really well,” Howard said. “They didn’t crush my soul. I had a really great time, and I was prepared for anything to happen.”
As for the film debuting as a streaming-only premiere, Howard said, “It’s a mix. It can be very stressful having theatrical, where you need to have the numbers do well. There was that relief I didn’t have to sweat out all those for months and months, and going into the life of the film and how you pay back investors. [20th Century] gave us double the budget we pitched, because they thought of it as a big movie. [But] streaming is definitely a thing in terms of getting lost in the shuffle of it all. I’m excited to see it in the theater again.”
A question surrounding many queer filmmakers is whether or not they should stick only to developing queer stories. “I’m so queer and trans that it’s definitely a lens that I bring, and to do something that’s so genre-specific, it’s really exciting to be helming that,” Howard said. “I never worry about being pigeonholed because I love telling queer stories. If I do anything too normcore, that stresses me out. With ‘Darby and the Dead,’ it was my music supervisor that was like, wait, where’s the queer kids in the movie? So we added [trans activist and actor] Nicole Maines, which the studio was really excited about. She plays one of the mean girl best friends.”
Next up, Howard directed two episodes of a Netflix series currently titled “The Corps” based on the memoir “Pink Marine” by Greg Cope White. It’s “about a young [gay] man going in the Marines in the early ’90s under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” he said. “We started it before the strike and a year later went back into it, and I’m grateful it didn’t get shelved like a lot of things did.”
Queer Rhapsody runs July 19-28 in Los Angeles. Find more details about the series via Queer Rhapsody’s official website here.
