By Xenia Shin

Outfest's first queer-eyed multi-ethnic festival.

As audience members clapped for the closing credits of Nguyen Tan Hoang's short Pirated!, a woman seated behind me expressed something to the effect of "why are people applauding?" Incredulous, she stated "That was the worst film I have ever seen."

Pirated! screened Sunday at Fusion, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered People of Color Film Festival, which included African American, Latino, and Asian work from a queer prospective in every program. A discernible moment of hesitancy preceded the applause, which might have prompted the director to note that his film was very different in its approach from the rest on the program during the Q&A.

The film starts from an autobiographical anecdote: Nguyen escaped from Vietnam in 1978 on a boat with his parents. The boat was actually attacked by Vietnamese pirates, and the passengers were rescued by German soldiers. Text (in what I remember as a horrible magenta font) over the images begins to describe this tale of a "perilous journey" from the first-person perspective. I cringed at the awkward use of language, the correlating bad jump cuts in the visuals, until I realized the cringing placed me at a certain point in my own history: growing up as an Asian American, with the heightened sensitivity of having to speak the language correctly.

The film then glides into a transition into, for lack of  better word, a kind of kitsch overload of homoerotic images of pirates from the golden screen. What's really wonderful about this transition is that there is a kind of borderline it brings attention to. On the one hand, it can still be seen in terms of the cringe factor, a barbaric use of icons from someone unfamiliar with a certain speech genre. On the other hand, it's kitsch, a distanced, ironic use of images of someone who has mastered the speech dialect. In this "deterritorialized" scape of the sea, a young boy begins to dream of the men who rescued him.

The film takes another turning point when the narrator, Nguyen, "problematizes the return to the homeland," and moves from autobiography to multiple viewpoints. The narrator becomes one of several Vietnamese people expressing their differing reactions to returning to the homeland.

Pirated! made an interesting counterpart to two other films in the Welcome to America program, namely Hindustan (David Dasarath Kala/Gita Reddy, 1995) and Back to Bataan Beach (Ernesto Foronda, 1995). The latter two films subvert American stereotypes, but with a clear, masterful indication of irony, as opposed to Nguyen's indiscernability. Hindustan features a South Asian guy and gal, singing the lyrics of a Bing Crosby/Rosemary Clooney classic to each other, but then dancing with their queer counterpart. Back to Bataan Beach features a seamless take on '50s beach blanket bingo antics, set in the Phillipines. As the inanities pile on (pies in the face included), the seamlessness starts to deteriorate, as though the lack of content has made the form of
Americana cave in.

* * *

My main criticism is that works from the last three years was unevenly distributed. Young Blood, a program focusing on stories of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood featured the most recent work (from 2001-2003), while the rest of the three programs from the Opening Gala, Bodies Beautiful, and America, featured work from the nineties more heavily. While I appreciated the featured films by Marlon Riggs (Anthem, Affirmation), whose works reached out sharp and poignant a decade later, most of the other film selections didn't hold up so well, and were not hard hitting enough politically for my taste (queer, but still bourg----). While it's something, just to have queer experiences make it to the screen, it's not enough to fill the claim of "groundbreaking, community-based, activist films and videos."

It's good to see how queer activist agendas have changed over the last fifteen years (but I would argue that this probably wasn't the best way to reflect that). It all came down to the presentation. Unfortunately, since the festival was organized thematically, rather than chronologically, I felt for example, on the opening night, the shared sense of anticipation in the audience somewhat deflated to have the most recent work derive from 2002. It just begs the question, is there a lack of recent work from minorities?

But really, I'm glad some of these works have been able to come together in this context, in order to see the commonalities and differences of such a wide, wide range of filmmakers (LGBT and... colored! it's downright hectic). And I think this quote from Marlon Riggs is an interesting lens through which to see the festival:

"With the quickening approach of the twenty-first century, greater numbers of us are giving testament to this inescapable fact, challenging the cozy myths by which America has been ritually defined. Who are we? Who are we becoming? Who and what have we been? In the next century, can we even continue to speak (could we ever?) of a collective "we"? For the longest time, of course, these questions had simple answers..." -Marlon Riggs

http://www.outfest.org/fusion.frame.html

Published: Friday, February 6, 2004