Henry Gambles
The 30th Annual Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival will offer 33 features, documentaries and collections of shorts in 11 consecutive days from Oct. 15-25. Most are at the UW-Milwaukee Union Cinema; the Oct. 15 opening night and Oct. 21 centerpiece film will be at the Oriental Theatre.
“The festival is mostly about visibility,” says its longstanding director Carl Bogner. “We want to show as diverse an array of representations of the LGBT community as possible. We look for films that tell a story that we haven’t had the opportunity to show before or that tell their stories in a new way.” An example is the historical epic The Girl King, (Saturday, Oct. 24), a 2015 rendering of Sweden’s 17th-century monarch Queen Kristina, played with a different spelling by Greta Garbo in the 1933.
Bogner’s personal favorites include Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (Sunday, Oct. 25). Henry is 17 and “questioning to what degree he wants his sexuality to be a public part of his identity,” Bogner says. “It’s set in a Christian household and engages many characters who are negotiating their public self. There are different types of closets. The boy is very contemporary; dealing with his identity is not associated with trauma of any sort. He just gets very healthy in the time he takes to consider how he wants to be.
“I think our most beautiful film is The Summer of Sangailé,
