Thursday be
gins the 23rd annual Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival with its opening night film Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls. Festival Director Carl Bogner is one of my local heroes. I’ve mentioned him in my blog before, but he’s so extra noteworthy that all the gushing bears repeating. Carl knows more about experimental film than anyone I’ve ever met, and he consistently works with UWM, MAM, and the Milwaukee Film festival to bring quality screenings to the area. I’m always curious to see what he brings in for the LGBT festival, and with the new format this year, he may have programmed his most solid lineup yet.
All of the nuts-and-bolts information about the festival has already been explicated, so I’ll skip to the films. Like nearly everyone else writing about the festival, I’m excited to see opening night film Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls. This documentary follows the lives of the singing, yodeling, twin comediennes Lynda and Jools Topp from their childhood on a dairy farm to their more recent struggle with Jools’ breast cancer. The film won a People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it’s sure to be exactly the kind of joyous crowd-pleaser opening night films should be.
I mentioned to Carl that I’m excited about I Killed My Mother, another award-winning festival film, to which Carl said it’s “most worthy” of my time. Honestly, it looks like a hot mess of a film in that the director, Xavier Dolan, was 19 when he made it, used 
various art techniques to mimic (perhaps mock) his mother’s worldview, and, from the sounds of it, emoted like crazy narratively and visually. Reviews imply that the rawness of emotion coupled with the unbridled ambitions of someone so young make for an intensely watchable and debatable film. It screens Saturday at 5 pm.
Carl additionally recommended Eyes Wide Open, which screens Sunday at 3 pm. This Israeli film, about a forbidden yet burgeoning love between two Orthodox Jewish men in Jerusalem, has garnered the critical acclaim of reputable film critics worldwide for its impeccable acting and measured style. Carl says the film is “pretty great, maybe surprisingly great” for a story that sounds somewhat formulaic in print.
The film Undertow, a Peruvian ghost story where, basically, a ghost outs his boyfriend to his boyfriend’s pregnant wife, was the first film to catch my attention. As if the premise isn’t reason enough to attend, the film 
also stars the super hot Manolo Cardona. (Google him. Seriously. You won’t be disappointed.) Undertow screens Friday at 7 pm. Madchen in Uniform is the other film I would prioritize. This reemerging 1958 classic film, based on the 1931 classic film of the same name, is “captivatingly gorgeous and emotionally wrenching.” It tells the tale of a teenage girl who falls for her teacher. In the 1950s. Emotional repression ensues. Since this free screening occurs Saturday afternoon at 1 pm, you might want to couple it with a lunch of tuna-potato chip casserole and a clandestine Manhattan. (Tangent: I just Googled 1950s foods. Did you know Campbell’s tried to market “soup shakes” in the 1950s? Cream of celery/mushroom/chicken soup plus milk. Um, gross!)
Films obviously are the main reason people attend film festivals. However, this year we have seen an obscene about of violence against gay and lesbian people—particularly teenagers—in the U.S. Any harassment is needless and too much, but the rash of beatings and bullying lately has made clear just how necessary this kind of festival is. Milwaukee’s LGBT Film/Video Festival is the only one of its kind in our state, and while we should be proud to host it, its singularity reflects a need for more, perhaps many more. I see the aims of a festival like this to be at least threefold: to screen underrepresented and undistributed films, to provide images of LGBT people for LGBT people, and to widen the representation of and understanding about LGBT people in general. Attending for me this year will serve a dual purpose. More importantly than seeing a film, it will be a political act signifying that straight people support LGBT people and have their backs. I would love to see this year’s festival attendance skyrocket as a means of enacting support for our LGBT community.
