Wexner Center Hosts Second Annual Out @ Wex Festival Devoted to New Queer Cinema

Three-Day Festival Includes Premieres, Parties, and Visting Filmmakers

The Wexner Center presents the second annual Out @ Wex film festival Thursday–Saturday, March 6–8. A cinematic celebration of innovative queer filmmaking, this three–day, five- film festival includes visiting filmmakers, a celebration party, a post-screening party, and a screening of Tom Kalin’s latest film Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore and introduced here by Kalin. The festival also includes screenings of a star-studded documentary about designer Karl Lagerfeld and a short film by Massilon, Ohio native William E. Jones that is one of the highlights of this year’s Whitney Biennial. A complete schedule is below.

Notes Dave Filipi, a curator in the Wexner Center’s media arts department: “While the Wexner Center screens GLBT-related films throughout the year, Out @ Wex is an opportunity to focus attention on the best and the brightest of this vibrant film scene. It’s also one of the biggest events of its type in the city.”

Tickets for each screening (some are during the day) are $7 general public; $5 members, students, and senior citizens; except for the Savage Grace screening, which is $10 general public and $8 members, students, and senior citizens. Patrons also have the option of becoming a new Wexner Center member and receiving a 15% discount on membership price along with two free tickets to an Out @ Wex film or two free film passes. All films will be screened in the center’s state-of-the-art Film/Video Theater, 1871 N. High St. More information: 614 292-3535 or www.wexarts.org.

Convenient parking is available in Ohio State’s Ohio Union Garage and Arps Garage, both with entrances from North High Street and College Road. Parking is also available nearby at the South Campus Gateway Garage, located one block east of North Street between 9th and 11th Avenues.

OUT @ WEX SCHEDULE

Thursday, March 6

INTRODUCED BY TOM KALIN

7 pm: Savage Grace (Tom Kalin, 2007). 89 mins.

Director Tom Kalin burst onto the national scene with his debut feature, Swoon, one of the most dazzling works within the new queer cinema of the early 1990s. His latest, Savage Grace, is an equally subversive take on the true-crime genre. Based on a best-selling account of the rich and dissolute heirs to the Bakelite plastics fortune, Savage Grace stars Julianne Moore as a desperately insecure social climber with an unnaturally close bond to her handsome gay son (Eddie Redmayne), a viperish disdain for her husband (Stephan Dillane), and a taste for all the excess that a stylish 1950s jet-setter could grab. Drugs, sex, and incest tell the rest of the story, in Kalin’s remarkably evocative rendition of this grabbed-from-the-tabloids anti-morality tale.

Friday, March 7

7 pm: Water by No Lillies Bikini (Celine (Claudia Sciamma, 2007).

preceded by No Bikini (Claudia Morgado Escanilla, 2007) 8 mins.

After party at 10 pm at Union Bar + Food, 782 N. High St.

Set in the suburbs of Paris, Water Lilies has charmed audiences internationally with its achingly acute depiction of teenage girls wrestling with friendship, heterosexual and same-sex crushes, and the ordinary cruelty of adolescents, as played out by a trio of girls hanging out at the municipal swimming pool one fateful summer. Preceded by No Bikini, a touching short from Canada, as much about gender discovery as about finding inner strength. After the screening, Union Bar + Food (782 North High St.) will be hosting a party begins at 10 pm.

Saturday, March 8

Starting at noon and screening continuously throughout the day in The Box video space

Tearoom (William E. Jones, 1962/2007). Silent. 56 mins. (admission is free / suggested for mature audiences)

Book signing: 6 pm

A highlight of this spring’s Whitney Biennial exhibition, filmmaker William E. Jones's Tearoom is a revelatory visual document of footage captured by a hidden police camera in a public men’s room in Mansfield, Ohio in 1962, an elaborate entrapment devised to catch men of various races and classes meeting to have sex with other men. Through extensive research, Jones located the unedited original footage, which he presents with virtually no intervention on his part—a radical example of film presented “as found” for the purpose of circulating pre-Stonewall gay images that have otherwise been suppressed. The Mansfield tearoom bust was a considerable scandal in its day, with the lives dozens of men effectively ruined through the entrapment, and Jones’s re-play of the footage is an act of notable restoration.

A native of Massillon, OH, and now living in Los Angeles, Jones recieved post-production support for Tearoom from the Wexner’s Art & Technology residency program, and his book-length background study to the film will be available in the Center’s Bookshop.

3:30 pm:

Before I Forget (Jacques Nolot, 2007). 109 mins.

 Included on the top 10 film list of no less than John Waters, Before I Forget is a disarmingly matter-of-fact look at the life of an aging French hustler named Pierre, played with conviction by Jacques Nolot, who also happens to be the film’s writer and director. Having lived for over 20 years with HIV, Pierre finds himself at a crossroads after the death of the man who’s supported him for years and he’s forced to face the passing of his youth.

7 pm:

Lagerfield Confidential (Rodolphe Marconi, 2007) 89 mins.

Celebration Party 8–10 pm

“Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous, and unfair." – Karl Lagerfeld. Thus speaks the international  fashion icon in Lagerfeld Confidential, an unprecedented look at the designer working in his studio and directing photo shoots, while maintaining a surprisingly (but not entirely) candid conversation about his life with the film’s director. Shot over two years, and studded with appearances from the likes of Nicole Kidman, Anna Wintour and Baz Luhrmann, it delivers a startling look at how unthinkable luxury can coexist with unthinkable isolation.

9:30 pm:

Itty Bitty Titty Committee (Jamie Babbit, 2007) video, 87 mins.

From Jamie Babbit, the director of But I’m a Cheerleader, comes the equally uproarious and affirming Itty Bitty Titty Committee, following the evolution of Anna from a lesbian wallflower to a member of the CIA (Clits in Action), a radical dyke art group based on The Guerrilla Girls. The cast includes Melonie Diaz, Daniela Sea, Guinevere Turner, Jenny Shimizu, Clea Duvall and Melanie Lynskey With music by Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.

Calendar Information for Out @ Wex: A three-day, five-fil m celebration of new queer filmmaking. Tickets for each evening are $7 general public; $5 members, students, and senior citizens; except for the opening night film Savage Grace, which is $10 public and $8 members, students, and senior citizens. Wexner Center Film/Video Theater, 1871 N. High St. Tel: (614) 292-3535.

SEASON AND EVENT SUPPORT

Support for Out @ Wex is generously provided by Michael Council. Promotional support for the Out @ Wex film festival is provided by Outlook Weekly and Out in Columbus. Community partners for the Out @ Wex film festival are BRAVO, Human Rights Campaign, and Stonewall Columbus. Major support for the Wexner Center’s 2007–08 film/video season is generously provided by Abercrombie & Fitch. Significant contributions are also made by the Rohauer Collection Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members.