Size Queens: Manhood

Daniel Lombroso’s Manhood begins on a solemn note, set to an operatic score, with a Franz Kafka quote: “I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.” It’s an apt opening for this profound, openhearted portrait of male frailty and vulnerability in a consumerist society that profits from shame — which admittedly, is not what one might expect from a documentary centered on the penis-enlargement business.

To read the rest visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.

“Time Is Not a Story”: Grace Harper Brighouse Talks Family Archives and Upending Addiction Narratives With Her Personal Doc, ‘Dependence’

World-premiering at this year’s Camden International Film Festival, Grace Harper Brighouse’s Dependence is an astonishing feature debut from a British filmmaker who has been behind the camera since she was a child, documenting her close-knit family, whether they were celebrating a birthday or taking a car ride. Indeed, it’s through 30 years’ worth of her own home movies that Brighouse sifts, searching for clues in every frame. She’s on a Sisyphean mission to unravel the mystery that is her somewhat estranged father, a high-functioning addict whose substance abuse emotionally ravaged her entire family, the effects of which are still being felt as she picks up her camera and points it at him.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

No Money No Honey

World-premiering at this year’s Camden International Film Festival, and next screening NYC’s NewFest on October 24th, Nicole Costa’s No Money No Honey opens with a playful sequence set to disco music accompanied by voiceover from the doc’s fabulous star Máxima Mauricio. Sounding like the host of a Spanish-language drag competition, the nonbinary Latinx protagonist narrates the credit roll, which consists of a series of well-worn dolls (including a pig called the Shenshual Shwine) and also a piece of cookware (“Get-You-Hot Pot presents...”). It’s an arresting and amusing start to an unusual film about an Argentina-born sex worker in NYC who Costa actually met while working on her previous doc about a Chilean-born sex worker in NYC. (2019’s The Journey of Monalisa centers on Costa’s fellow countryman/woman Iván Monalisa Ojeda, who the director knew from drama school back in Santiago.)

To read the rest and subscribe for free visit Beyond Nonfiction on Substack.

No Money No Honey Faces Harsh Truths

No Money No Honey, which celebrated its world premiere on September 19th at the Camden International Film Festival in coastal Maine, is the sophomore feature documentary of Chilean-born, New York-based filmmaker Nicole Costa. Like this latest collaborative project, her acclaimed debut The Journey of Monalisa (El viaje de Monalisa) centers on a South American-born, nonbinary sex worker in New York City, using their own autobiographical material as a basis. For that 2019 film, it was the 2016 book Never, Ever Ever, Coming Down by Iván Monalisa Ojeda, an undocumented Chilean whom Costa knew from their barely post-Pinochet drama school days in the early 1990s. (Costa also helped get the writing published.) Monalisa’s fierce trans sister Máxima Mauricio, the no-holds-barred star of No Money No Honey whom Costa first encountered in The Journey of Monalisa, was the source of the evocative archival video for both films.

To read my interview with the director and collaborator-star visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.

By Hook or by Crook, 25 Years Later

“I didn’t know if I was a total loser or just totally lost,” admits Shy (Silas Howard) at the beginning of 2001’s By Hook or by Crook, a trailblazing “trans and butch buddy film” that’s equally revolutionary for refusing to broach the subject of gender at all. Co-directed by real-life buddies Harry Dodge and Silas Howard (who also teamed up in 1992 to found the iconic San Francisco performance space Red Dora’s Bearded Lady), the micro-budget movie follows a couple of down-on-their-luck “freaky grifters” who refreshingly don’t even acknowledge, let alone comport with, hetero-cis society’s norms. The film centers on the transmasculine Shy, who, reeling from the death of his father, decides to leave his small town to pursue a criminal lifestyle in the big city. Once there, however, the low-key drifter gets caught up with Val (Dodge), a vibrantly eccentric bulldagger on a Sisyphean search for her birth mother. Unsurprisingly, drama soon ensues for this unlikely duo.

To read my interview with the director-screenwriter-actor-producers visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.

A Conversation With Josh Fox (THE WELCOME TABLE)

Impressively ambitious in scope, Josh Fox’s humbly titled The Welcome Table finds the environmental activist-filmmaker-writer-musician on a globetrotting journey across six continents, spotlighting the stories of climate refugees. The Oscar-nominated multihyphenate (2010’s Gasland) then brings this multicultural bunch together around a thousand-foot-long table erected on the New Orleans levee that broke post-Katrina. Accompanied by performances from a slew of New Orleans musicians — including John Boutté who acts as a guiding narrator along with Fox — they’ve gathered not only to share their individual experiences, but to shape a more hopeful future narrative for all. Soon after The Welcome Table’s US debut on HBO, Hammer to Nail reached out to Fox, who is also the producing artistic director of the socially conscious International WOW Company, which he founded back in 1996, to learn all about the counterintuitively uplifting project and its existential message: that mankind has already migrated to a new dangerously heated planet. Indeed, we’re all climate refugees now.

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens: Ecosexuals

Since 2002, multimedia artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been exploring love, sex, and queer ecologies through filmmaking, performance, art exhibitions, activism, a book (Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover), and even walking rituals. It’s an unusual œuvre for a rather unlikely duo. Stephens has been a professor and two-time chair of the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz for more than thirty years. Sprinkle comes from a much different world that’s given her a higher profile. Starting in the ’70s, she was a sex worker and porn star for more than two decades, as well as a feminist performance artist and “pleasure activist.” (She also holds a PhD in human sexuality and has been inducted into all four adult film Halls of Fame.) The co-creators’ latest film Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is billed as “a joyous ecosexual documentary born from the ashes of California’s devastating fires.” It’s an apt if brain-twisting description of this conclusion to Stephens and Sprinkle’s trilogy of queer environmental docs, beginning with 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (the first queer environmental feature documentary, according to Susan Stryker), which was followed by 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure.

To read my interview visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.