QDoc 2015

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“I keep my game face on, before and after the game.” So speaks Terrence Clemens, one of two extraordinarily courageous athletes who are followed by filmmaker Michiel Thomas as they navigate the delicate process of coming out within their respective sports.

Terrence is a young, ambitious and talented college basketball player, with a somewhat troubled past. Fallon Fox is trans, lesbian and a formidable and well-known Mixed Martial Arts competitor. Both realize that coming out will be necessary for their own sense of integrity and peace of mind, but the lack of a clear roadmap and the unpredictable consequences instill understandable anxiety and caution. Both Fallon and Terrence generously share their inner selves, their strengths and their vulnerabilities, and welcome us into their struggles.

Filmmaker Thomas has been trusted with incredibly intimate access into the subjects’ lives. Filming inside locker rooms, strategy meetings and training sessions, Thomas manages to capture friends, colleagues, family and the crackling energy of the competitive sports world without blowing the cover of these athletes as they are trying, not quite successfully, to maintain control of their emergence. Thomas captures the complex camaraderie of Terrence’s team and coach, of the bond between Fallon and her trainers, and Fallon’s beautiful relationship with a loving and supportive daughter.

Thomas’s first feature film, Game Face is beautifully shot and sensitively and intelligently constructed. Exciting, moving and inspiring, it is a magnificent achievement.
Community Partner:  PFLAG Portland Black Chapter

What kind of world would we live in if people didn’t open old trunks found in attics? Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Jane Anderson made it her mission to recover and bring to light the amazing artwork of her great aunt Edith Lake Wilkinson, long forgotten in such a trunk.

Committed to an insane asylum in 1924, most likely because she was a lesbian, Wilkinson was conveniently forgotten by the male-dominated art world. Anderson, along with her partner, Tess Ayers, take us on their journey as they uncover family secrets, social repression and secret loves. Right before her commitment, Wilkinson was at the height of her creativity, living among the legendary arts community of early 1900s Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Director Michelle Boyaner’s Packed in a Trunk is beautifully shot and shows Provincetown at its best. The town comes together to celebrate Aunt Edith’s work in a newly mounted show at the same gallery where her work had originally hung. It slowly becomes clear that she may have been the originator of a well-known “white line” wood block technique that would have placed her firmly in the art history books. Anderson makes it her mission to ensure her aunt’s legacy will be preserved, leaving no chance that it will ever end up in a trunk again.
—Jennifer Morris

“We all had a common goal—and that was to sweat our asses off.”

That’s the unofficial mission statement of Starlite Lounge, which held a proud distinction as the “oldest black-owned, nondiscriminating bar/club in the heart of Brooklyn.” A pre – Stonewall landmark in the rapidly changing Crown Heights neighborhood, Starlite boasted patrons, performers and proprietors who formed a tight-knit family, creating community connection for a population that often had nowhere else they could feel so welcomed.

But despite surviving the devastation of the AIDS crisis and rampant street violence, Starlite was confronted with a tidal wave of gentrification. After a half-century in business, they were given a 30-day eviction notice to vacate the premises.

In We Came to Sweat, filmmakers Kate Kunath and Sasha Wortzel introduce us to the club’s devoted habitues (including house mother Mama Dot and resident performer Lady Jasmin) while documenting the passionate campaign to save Starlite against all odds. “When we lose historical institutions like the Starlite Lounge,” an activist shouts through a megaphone, “we lose a part of our history, we lose a part of our culture and we lose a part of ourselves.”

Despite formidable obstacles, supporters remain resolute, vowing to keep the Starlite spirit alive: “We’re going to be bigger and we’re going to be stronger. Nothing is going to hold the Starlite down.”
—Jimmy Radosta

Director Jeffrey Schwarz (Vito and I Am Divine) returns to QDoc for the third time with this loving portrait of one the great Hollywood heartthrobs of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Tab Hunter was a household name, the epitome of the 1950s all-American boy. Told mostly through Hunter’s own words, the movie also features interviews with John Waters, Debbie Reynolds, George Takei and Clint Eastwood.

Teenager Art Kelm’s jaw-dropping good looks caused so much disruption among the girls in high school that he dropped out and joined the Coast Guard. His face (and physique) soon caught the eye of Hollywood. Renamed Tab Hunter, he debuted with a performance so bad even his mother told him, “You were lousy.” But a string of hit movies followed, along with a singing career that instantly scored a No. 1 hit (knocking Elvis to second place).

Even the revelation (in notorious Confidential magazine) that America’s teen heartthrob had been arrested at a “limp-wristed pajama party” didn’t stop Tab’s skyrocketing career. Nor did his well-disguised love affair with fellow movie star Tony Perkins. But when Tab bucked the studio system, a rocky road lay ahead—leading to an unlikely career comeback starring opposite drag superstar Divine in Polyester and Lust in the Dust.

In charting Hunter’s giddy highs and grueling lows, Tab Hunter Confidential is a meditation on the quicksilver nature of fame —and the story of one gay man’s path to inner peace.
—Steven Saylor

“I want people to like me; to fall in love with me, simply because it makes me feel better. I’m always searching for the thing that will make me feel better, and so often, that thing is a girl.”

Archivist, historian, filmmaker, film lover and eminent butch, Jenni Olson has brought her passions together in this utterly original and experimental essay film. Fresh from its world premiere at Sundance, The Royal Road weaves the disparate threads of California’s Spanish colonial history, the Mexican-American War, unrequited loves and plots from revered Hollywood movies into a cinematic masterwork on nostalgia, identity and impermanence.

Like the disembodied monologues from her favorite Hollywood melodramas, Olson’s wry, self-deprecating narration effortlessly travels through personal stories of unobtainable romance, pre-Gold Rush-era California and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, among other themes. Accompanied by sumptuous cinematography of static, unpopulated urban landscapes, the journey up and down El Camino Real (The Royal Road) penetrates deeply with a poetic vision, and is a film unlike any you have seen.

As much as the film reminisces on the Golden Age of Hollywood and the golden state of California, Olson presents a profound case for a golden state of mind in which we accept that history continues with or without us and memory serves to illuminate the present, exposing a journey of self-discovery and the beauty of the everyday

In 1975, something extraordinary happened and you may know nothing about it.

That year, in Boulder, Colorado, a courageous county clerk began issuing marriage licenses to same -sex couples after realizing there was no legal basis not to. Upon hearing this, Filipino -American Richard Adams and his Australian partner, Anthony Sullivan, hoped they had found a way to stay together. They flew to Boulder and became one of the first samesex couples in the world to legally marry.

After the wedding, Richard filed for a green card for Tony, based on their legal marriage. Soon after, however, the couple received an ugly denial letter from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Outraged by the language and politics of this letter— and in an effort to avoid Tony’s deportation—Richard and Tony sued the U.S. government. This was the first federal lawsuit seeking equal recognition for same-sex marriage in the history of the United States.

Director Thomas G. Miller’s film masterfully and comprehensively chronicles more than 40 years of the struggle for marriage equality and immigration reform in the United States through the very personal lens of Richard and Tony’s long-standing love and commitment to each other. Their hitherto unknown efforts have helped pave the way to the more equal world we live in today.