aGLIFF

Getting Organized for Local Film Fests with B-Side

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Fantastic Fest 2007

The next three film festivals in Austin -- aGLIFF, Fantastic Fest and Austin Film Festival -- all use B-Side's web application for their scheduling. If you're attending any of these festivals, you'll want to take full advantage of the B-Side Festival Guide to build a schedule, rate a film, and see what other people are watching and rating.

Just one account will work to build schedules for all festivals that utlilize B-Side, and there are many, all around the country. The B-Side scheduler includes lots of nifty features, from creating personal schedules to running the Festival Genius, which can help optimize your schedule. 

The B-Side application is integrated into each festival's website; you can access it directly from the festival site, see when and where each film is playing, and add the films to your calendar. Each film has a page with a synopsis, date(s), venue(s), photos, trailers, category, notes about whether anyone involved in the film will attend, and statistics.

aGLIFF Daily Dispatch #1: Opening Night

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I Can't Think StraightThe Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival (aGLIFF) opened Monday with Shamim Sarif's directorial debut, I Can't Think Straight. The romantic comedy based on Sarif's eponymous book plays surprisingly light despite potentially heavy subject matter. When a mutual friend introduces introverted Leyla (Sheetal Sheth) and outspoken Tala (Lisa Ray), sparks fly.

Muslim Indian Leyla has been dating Ali for years, while Tala, a Christian Palestinian dividing her time between London and Jordan, is on her fourth engagement.  As the two women get to know each other, it's clear it's more than a friendship forming, but both women are reluctant to admit their attraction and follow their hearts in more ways than one. 

The film stays firmly in the realm of rom-com, with occassional teases into erotica, but never really crosses that particular border. Even the family conflict stay light, with somewhat understanding if perplexed fathers, and caricature mothers. Sheth and Ray have sparkling chemistry, which makes the film a sweet confection, instead of a heavy drama.

There's a musical quality, hinting at Bollywood, and with an ultimate happy ending, which makes the film an excellent choice for the start of aGLIFF.

Movies This Week: Extract, aGLIFF and More

Humpday

Is it fall, yet? It certainly feels cooler, and just in time for the final holiday of the season.  This Labor Day weekend, there aren't a whole lot of new movies coming out in town, but that doesn't mean there aren't options. 

Opening this Week

Extract is Mike Judge's companion film to Office Space, only this time the sane guy is the boss, with some loveable but unruly wokers.  Just like Office Space, you will recognize most of these people, especially David Koechner as the most annoying neighbor in the world.  Check out my review and interview with Mike Judge later today on Slackerwood, and Jette's interview and review on Cinematical. 

Humpday is Lynn Shelton's latest is the bromance fave from SXSW 2009.  Starring former Austinite Mark Duplass and Houstonite Joshua Leonard as two friends who take their competitive tendencies to the limit when they decide to make porn for a film competition.  This isn't mumblecore; slow at times, but the chemistry is great, and it's worth it just for the, eh, climactic scene.

aGLIFF Shines in its Twenty-Second Year

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aGLIFFThe Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival (aGLIFF) lineup is now available on their website for their 22nd annual fest.

While aGLIFF doesn't have the extensive, all-day screenings of some of Austin's other festivals, it has a diverse lineup of 108 films, including 11 narrative and 13 documentary features, and nine reels of short films. Their schedule is also friendly to those who have to work for a living, so unless you're attending the parties, you needn't miss the films.

Some highlights of this year's lineup:

  • I Can't Think Straight, the Opening Night film, a feature about two women, cultural taboos, and the battle between family expectations and the heart's desire.
  • A Place to Live: The Story of Triangle Square, a documentary about LGBT seniors trying to secure affordable housing.
  • Antique, the Centerpiece film, a feature based on Japanese Manga, and focuses on a playboy who hires his schoolboy crush to work in his new bakery.
  • For My Wife... chronicles the tale of Charlene Strong, whose story helped spur the passing of the Domestic Partnership bill in Washington state.
  • The Big Gay Musical, the Closing Night film, is, well, about a big, gay musical which mirrors the life of the people playing the characters.

What makes me really happy is that aGLIFF is using B-Side to help with schedules, reviews and buzz. The fest is also using B-Side's very nifty Festival Genius feature, which can help optimize your schedule. Now, Festg, as it's known on Twitter, may not have as much to optimize as it does with an extensive, multi-fest extravaganza as SXSW, but it's still a nice feature. Using the rating and review features are a big help to filmmakers and the festival organizers.

This year aGLIFF moves to Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar, a more central location with faster access to the parties. The fest originated at Dobie, moved to the Arbor for many years, and was at Alamo Ritz in 2008.

Online ticket sales will be available through the Alamo Drafthouse website approximately one week prior to the film festival, or at the theater 30 minutes prior to the screening. Individual movie tickets are $10. Festival badges are free with aGLIFF membership, with different levels of access (films, priority seating, parties and plus-ones). 

aGLIFF runs September 8-13. More information is available at the AGLIFF website, as well as their Twitter, Facebook and MySpace pages.

This Weekend at aGLIFF: "My Gay Movie" Shorts, "Poltergay"

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AGLIFF rolls on at the Regal Arbor theater this week and through Saturday, with a couple of can't-miss screenings (at least from my perspective on the closing afternoon/evening).

First up at noon on Saturday it's the "My Gay Movie" program, the results of a competition that challenged filmmakers to create a 10-minute short with a "queer sensibility." The top ten shorts are on display here and several of the directors are in attendance. Particularly curiosity-piquing titles include Potato/Potata (Jude Potato is a 2-year-old's toy, but dreams of being a celebrated Austin DRAG KING) and Gaydar (a man with "gaydar" contemplates the benefits for him, if everyone had it, to the obvious degree he has it).

At 6:30 pm the festival presents Poltergay, a horror comedy that actually promises a few laughs. As a rule horror comedies tend to flub one half of the equation or the other, and from the looks of the trailer I'd have to say that Poltergay is probably a little light on the creepy, but one can probably trust the French to make jokes about homosexual ghosts from the '70s without pulling any punches.

View the entire aGLIFF schedule for the rest of the week here.

Fall Festival Roundup

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If you're a film geek, September and October are pretty great months to live in Austin. Within the space of five weeks there will be nearly five hundred different features and shorts on display, many of them well outside the mainstream and which won't be screening again in Austin for months -- if ever. Here's a quick guide to the three big festivals of the Fall in the capital of Texas.


Fantastic Fest (Sept. 20-27)

In their words: "Fantastic Fest is a week-long festival featuring the best in new science-fiction, fantasy, horror, animation, crime, Asian, and all around badass cinema."

What they play: Fantastic Fest has tighter focus than its cousins and (potentially) more bang for the buck if you're into genre film. Fantastic Fest is the place to see the weird, the wonderful, the what-the-eff-was-that movies of the yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Claim to fame: Organized by Tim and Karrie League of the Alamo Drafthouse and programmed by such guiding lights as Matt Dentler (SxSW), Lars Nilsen (Weird Wednesday), and Harry Knowles (Ain't It Cool News), Fantastic Fest has geek cred coming out the wazoo. The Leagues pull out all the stops to get the festival's filmmakers into town for the show. If the names Bruce Campbell and Shusuke Kaneko aren't familiar, however, you might not care about the celebrity-types wandering the Alamo halls during this festival. Though I guess Mel Gibson did pull a surprise appearance last year, so who knows?

Visit the Fantastic Fest website.

aGLIFF Wants Your Trailers

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The Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival (aGLIFF) is offering filmmakers a chance to get some work seen by a whole lot of people in town. You can enter the festival's Movie Trailer Competition by submitting a short of three minutes or less that embodies this year's festival theme: "We Speak Film." The deadline for submitting trailers to aGLIFF for the competition is August 15.

If you've been to aGLIFF or any other film festival, you know the type of short film needed -- the "in-house" trailer that promotes the festival as a whole. There's always one shown before every film, although aGLIFF rotates several in-house trailers so you don't get sick of seeing that same one over and over (just typing this has stuck an annoying tune used by a repetitive trailer at a certain local film fest in my head ... arrrrgh). If your trailer is selected, aGLIFF will show it in rotation before festival films this year, and you also get a film festival pass. 

Finally, a quick congrats to the brand-new staff at aGLIFF this year: Lucas Schaefer is the festival's Executive Director, and Lisa Kaselak is the new Programming Director. aGLIFF takes place this year from Sept. 28 through Oct. 6.

aGLIFF is hiring

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Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival (aGLIFF) is in need of a new Executive Director and a Programming Director. I'm not sure how they're going to find anyone as good as Lonny and Mo, but the festival board is certainly trying. I've seen ads posted for both these positions on Craigslist multiple times. Paid film festival positions in Austin? I'm surprised there isn't a stampede. If you're interested in either position, full job descriptions are available on the aGLIFF website.

I did some volunteer work for aGLIFF last year while I was between full-time jobs, and enjoyed the overall atmosphere as well as the board members and other volunteers I worked with. It's the most social film festival I've attended in Austin -- you've got to love a festival where before every movie, someone stands up in front to tell you about all the after-parties. The deadlines aren't posted for these jobs, so apply now if you're thinking about it.

AGLIFF Presents "Tupperware" and the "My Gay Movie" Challenge

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Coupla news bites from the Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival . . .

First up, aGLIFF presents the documentary Tupperware! at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown on December 10th, complete with a demo of the latest and greatest from Tupperware presented by a local T-ware rep. For a synopsis and more info check the Tupperware page on AGLIFF's site.

aGLIFF also presents the "My Gay Movie" (MGM) challenge, which not only throws down the gauntlet to filmmakers with a "queer sensibility," but also provides inexpensive "filmmaking workshops and access to cameras, computers, and editing software" in order to do so. There's no word (yet) on their site about what they're offering in the way of prizes, but even just the bragging rights are worth entering, especially if you already have a short produced. See the MGM Challenge page.

Terror Thursday: Raw Force! and October film festivals

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Raw ForceIf anyone ever asks you what's so special about the Austin film community, take them to one of the free midnight screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown. Terror Thursday is a good choice for horror fans, though Weird Wednesday is usually a better choice for those looking for the cinematically absurd as a form of entertainment. This week's Terror Thursday, however, was pure gold: Raw Force is a tour de force that combines cannibalism, the undead, kung-fu, and the '80s sex comedy in a way that can't help but delight. You can read my full review over at Blue Glow.

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