A Fall of Film Festivals

Lots happening on the movie scene this Fall.

The Downtown Dayton LGBT Film Festival

LGBT means Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgendered. And it starts tomorrow. A mix of feature indy flicks, culminating in a anthology of short subjects on Sunday afternoon, which should be pretty interesting.


There's been a GLBT festival on and off for a few years now, under different sponsorhips. I was at one of the early ones and saw some fairly entertaining movies, including an excellent Australian film The Sum of Us, starring a young Russell Crowe and Jack Thompson (who later played the Georgia Bulldogs fan lawyer in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil)
There's quite a bit of LesBiGay movie-making out there, including The New Queer Cinema, part of the explosion of activism coming out of the AIDs movement and Queer Nation, but in the indy cinema scene.

What's cool about this Dayton festival is that it's cosponsored by the Downtown Priorty Board. Maybe a recognition that downtown Dayton is the metropolitan areas' gay neighborhood. Even if we may not live there we go there, and go there a lot. Downtown is queer safe space and, unlike most other people, a place we are not afraid to visit.

Visit the GLBT Film Festivals' MySpace page.


ScreenPeace Film Festival

Hosted by the Dayton Peace Museum, this film festival extends over most of October and into early November showing some well-know films, including the old French favorite King of Hearts, one of the great anti-war movies.



What makes ScreenPeace special is the grand finale, a student filmmakers/videographers contest. One has to applaud this attempt to foster and feature creativity by people just starting out in this art form. There have been student film festivals here before, like Wright State's "Big Lens" fest of years past, but this is the first not associated with a college:


For more on ScreenPeace, visit their website.