DiLullo, Mary

1998

Drama centering around two female cousins, their relationship and a power struggle within their family.

Some families are a little too close – as any 30-year-old single woman who finds herself living back home with her Italian American family can tell you. Dollface centers on Theresa Marcucci (Anastasia Martino) and her life-long best friend and cousin Ronnie (Wendy Bell), as they try to renew their friendship in the midst of a family power struggle. No easy task as Theresa, a struggling writer more interested in alcohol than her career, finds Ronnie has married Joe, a violent neighborhood brute the girls went to high school with. While encouraging Ronnie to dump the cretin, Theresa can’t seem to find a suitable man of her own – as hard as her mother tries. She finds companionship with Michael, her catty gay friend, and a stiff drink at their favorite bar. The bartender (Karen Finley of NEA Four fame) has always had a crush on Theresa and is more than willing to listen, among other things. The feature debut of director Mary DiLullo and writing partner Toni Shanahan, Dollface never misses an opportunity to poke fun at the "old country" values the Marcucci elders are so determined to ingrain in their children. Woven together through hilarious and chaotic holiday gatherings, a genuine and realistic story unfolds of a family that loves each other so much, it’s painful.

MacPherson, Erika

1998

A visually lush journey of a mother on the lam, who moves far beyond the confines of home, heterosexuality and the physical world. Not heeding her three-year-old son's warning, she becomes infatuated with an operatic Valkyrie, and in punishment arrested, interned, kidnapped by pirates, x-rated by a bull-dyke, and more.

Salazar, Wayne
Hoffman, Philip

1998

A journey into memory, AIDS, cancer, death and family ties.

Wayne Salazar and Phil Hoffman turn a painterly eye onto the Canadian landscape in Destroying Angel, a highly personal film exploring memory, illness, loss, and love. By dwelling on the textures, shapes, and colors of a boyhood environment, Salazar and Harman make this film something more than just another gay male take on AIDS and paternal relations. They construct instead a visual geography of emotions that translates a particular story into a universal meditation of the human condition.

Wam, Svend

1998

A story about three men trying to live up to the masculine myths. Three men on a journey within themselves, experiencing new sides of their friendship and their own most private emotions

Scheirl, Hans

1998

A fluid-gendered multiple-persona cyborg zooms through time to collect h-selves to fight a genealogically obsessed super-mother.

To paraphrase B. Ruby Rich, Hans Scheirl's Dandy Dust is a film J. G. Ballard might make if he were a fabulously cool young European FTM with an art school background – so don't say you haven't been warned. If you liked Scheirl's 1992 debut feature Flaming Ears, you'll appreciate the further refinement of his aesthetic sensibilities evident in Dandy Dust._x000B_ This visually lush transgender/transgenre phantasmagoria draws inspiration from such diverse sources as cyberpunk, animé, splatter films, Hong Kong action flicks, feminist theory, and experimental dyke cinema, and converts a near total lack of budget into a bona fide stylistic asset. Set in a virtual altiverse where the genealogy-obsessed Cyniborg traipses through time and space in her Mothership to collect ancestors for genetic engineering experiments, the plot revolves around her son Dandy's trip from the Planet of White Dust, where Western war cultures perpetually wage their historic battles, to the Planet of Blood and Swelling, where the veins zigzagging across the sky are the veins in Dandy's father's anus. Confused? Don't worry – just let the stunning images change the way you experience reality.

Mead, Wrik

1998

Cupid gets beaten at his own game, while Fruit Machine tells the story of Dr. F.R. Wake, who was hired by the Canadian government to devise a series of tests to detect homosexuals.

Chong, Christopher

1998

A punk boy spied out the window occasions a brief obsession.

Lau, Mishann

1998

Have you ever been turned on, put off, felt up, let down, pucked up and left alone, all in one night? Then you haven't met Randy.

Evans, Rodney

1998

A film about my brother and myself and what it has meant to grow up black and gay in a homophobic Jamaican culture. Close To Home presents a Jamaican gay man’s funny and painful coming-of-age. story.

Carlson, Karen

1998

Team of 12 women (5 with breast cancer) prepare for and climb Alaska's Mt. McKinley to raise awareness of breast cancer.

Climb Against The Odds is a moving documentary about the courage of women and the struggle to bring global attention to the crisis of breast cancer. Narrated by Olympia Dukakis, it tells the story of twelve women – some survivors of breast cancer, some cancer free – and their attempt to climb Mt. McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, and one of the most treacherous climbs in the world. Filmed over the final year of a two-and-a-half year training period, this exhilarating tale delves into the intimate stories of the survivors and the struggles they endure with training, the climb and the disease itself. Their climb takes place during the worst weather on Mt. McKinley in over a decade, and the film holds nothing back as the women struggle to overcome horrible weather, emotional strain and numerous physical ailments. A truly inspirational and stirring film, Climb Against The Odds reveals the heart, spirit and true heroism of these twelve women, and sheds light on a disease that affects not only one woman every minute, but each and every one of us at some point in our lives.