Reel Affirmations: Last News

Overall Rating for this Program: ★★★★☆, CRITIC’S PICKThis year’s “Transitions” program kicks off with a sweet, honest portrayal of young love in Daisy Friedman’s As You Are (★★★☆☆).Millie and Piper, an inter-abled lesbian couple played by Bri Scalesse and Estefanía Giraldo, navigate their expectations around spending the night together for the first time and must reckon with their own sexuality and vulnerability as so many couples do.Although the two have an early moment of tension around Millie’s use of a wheelchair, that tension reveals itself to be about a deeper insecurity on Piper’s part. In this way, Friedman takes a refreshing approach to depicting disability on film, making sure it is present and acknowledged, but taking care to tell a three-dimensional love story around it, too.Honey & Milk (★★★☆☆) drops us into the end of a mature relationship, following the story of a couple who has decided to end their partnership and must dismantle their lives.We are dropped into the final weekend of the relationship between Grayson, who has begun to transition, and Alice, who loves and supports her partner but struggles to grieve the impending loss.While there is little in the way of narrative payoff and the short seems uncertain of exactly what it wants to build towards, the chemistry between the two is believable, it nevertheless stands as a beautifully shot portrait of a love that outlasts a relationship that must end so one half can be free to thrive.The program takes a heartrending turn with Our Males & Females (★★★★☆), a brief, deeply affecting short from Jordan.

We often take advantage of our queer privilege in ways many spend their entire lives hoping for. In Iran, a place not known for its pro-LGBTQ attitudes, queerness is something you hide, and hope never comes out, but that doesn’t erase it.

Reel Affirmations features three days of live screenings, from Friday, Oct. 21 to Sunday, Oct. 22, at the centrally-located Eaton Hotel‘s intimate, state-of-the-art screening facility.The festival will continue on Monday, Oct.

Metro Weekly over the years.)During the pandemic, the Missouri native joined forces with producer Mauricio Pita and writer Eva von Schweinitz to devise the short film Safe Word. It screens Saturday, Oct. 21, at 11 p.m.

It’s easy to fall in love with Pennsylvania State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, the star of Timothy Harris’s Kenyatta: Do Not Wait Your Turn (★★★★☆, CRITIC’S PICK), a behind-the-scenes documentary chronicling some of the key moments from the Philadelphia Democrat’s 2022 U.S.

Young love is a well-trodden theme in LGBTQ cinema, but rarely is it depicted with such quiet assuredness as in this standout international feature.Norwegian Dream (★★★★★, CRITIC’S PICK) centers on 19-year-old Robert (a dazzling Hubert Milkowski), the latest Polish immigrant to land on the Norwegian island of Sotra and the newest worker at a fish factory already stuffed to the gills with Polish transplants.We’re offered little information as wide-eyed Robert is put into his uniform and assigned a mentor, Ivar (Karl Bekele Steinland), who gets him up to speed with the cutting and gutting.The film’s trajectory becomes clear when Robert’s Polish comrades, led by roommate Marek (Jakub Seirenberg), tease and make racist jokes about Ivar as he dances in the factory car park during a break.Robert hangs back, studying Ivar with barely concealed intrigue, a trend that continues into the group’s raucous night out after a long shift. Robert drinks and watches Ivar — a gaze that is returned when the alcohol takes over and Robert breaks out of his shell just enough to let loose on the dancefloor.You can probably guess where this is going, but don’t let the familiar “young love in a tough place” narrative fool you.

Plays Friday, Oct. 20, at 3 p.m. at The Eaton.The days of masks, distancing, and endlessly googling symptoms may be long gone for many, but not in Fábio Leal’s Follow the Protocol (★★★☆☆), set during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.The Brazilian filmmaker, who writes, directs, and stars as protagonist Francisco, opens on a familiar pandemic scene: the mind-numbing nothingness of being stuck indoors.