For Milwaukee cinema aficionados fall means film festivals. The Milwaukee Film Festival, formerly the Milwaukee International Film Festival, wrapped up its marathon session of hundreds of films just a week ago. And this week, the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival opens. It runs Oct. 15-25. Suitably, the festival makes history just in time for LGBT History Month: It celebrates an auspicious milestone, its 30th anniversary.
Three decades ago, community activist Carl Szatmary organized the first Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. He continued to direct it for the next five years. Held at the UW-Milwaukee Union, the weekend event screened just a handful of films. Szatmary’s available catalog of relevant films was limited. Most portrayed gay and lesbian characters from the pervading perspective of the era. The cast of sad, lonely and conflicted personalities usually wound up incarcerated, institutionalized or dead.
Then, bolder LGBT film producers and directors like John Waters, Andy Warhol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among an ever expanding host of American and foreign artists, chronicled our lives through a more objective lens. (Speaking of Waters, this year’s festival focuses on one of Waters’ stars, ’60s Hollywood heartthrob Tab Hunter!)
Coming-out films would address every LGBT person’s seminal moment of self-proclamation. Counter-cultural and confrontational genres would defy cinematic and social norms. They would expose not only the hypocrisy of the heteronormative world in its treatment of LGBTs but also help define our discrete identity and incite our burgeoning political resolve.
Local filmmakers emerged as well. Milwaukeean Sadie Benning began her film and video career in the 1980s, shooting with a toy camera. She went on to win numerous grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle Award. Bringing transgender issues to the screen, Ashley Altadonna made her shorts Whatever Suits You and Making the Cut. They’ve been screened locally and at San Francisco’s LGBT Film Festival, among many others. Lucien Jung debuted his short Coffee or Tea? in 2012 at the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center. It later played at regional film festivals and won an Audience Favorite Award at the Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival. Last year Project Q alumnus and film producer Michael Raisler’s Beasts of the Southern Wild was nominated for an Oscar!
Meanwhile, harnessing and presenting all this creative output, the LGBT Film/Video Festival remains one of Milwaukee’s longest-enduring and significant cultural assets. It won the prestigious PrideFest Medal in 2012. This year, its long-term director, UW-Milwaukee Film Department faculty member Carl Bogner, received the Shepherd Express LGBT Pioneer Award.
As for the man who set this all in motion, Szatmary’s legacy is three decades of LGBT film and video in Milwaukee. And he remains engaged, writing extensive previews and reviews of the festival’s annual offerings for QUEST, Wisconsin’s only LGBT entertainment magazine. He made particular note of this year’s opening feature, From This Day Forward, by filmmaker Sharon Shattuck. It recounts the story of the director’s father and his transition. Asked about the remaining 24 programs on the marquee, Szatmary offered one word, “sensational.”
