Reeder, J.

1995

The Devil Inside features Sadie Benning as the butch friend of white trash girl Cherry: a woman who bashes back with a vengeance.

Wright, Annie

1995

In Death’s Angel, Barbie portrays Beverly Allitt, a real-life pediactric nurse now serving a prison sentence for killing several children in her care.

Russell, Pamela August

1995

A lesbian comedy about the hardships of writing fiction and keeping your characters in check.

Millan, Lorri

1995

The story of a big bones butcher who finds passion and purpose.

Kelly, Paula
DeVanik, Maureen

1995

Donaghy, Tom

1995

A young man makes a futile attempt to come out and disclose his partner's HIV status to his elderly father in Michael Stremel's The Dadshuttle.

The first West African feature film to deal with homosexuality, Dakan begins with the most sexually explicit opening scene in African cinema. Rather than showing a rural landscape or an urban panorama, locating the characters in a recognizable social context, the camera focuses instead on an isolated couple locked in a clandestine embrace in a sports car at night. The shot becomes even more transgressive when we realize the couple is two young men. When one of them later tells his mother he’s attracted to another man, she replies, “Since time began, it’s never happened. Boys don’t do that. That’s all there is to it.” Dakan is the story of two men who, by coming out, disappear and become invisible to their families and society, because their society has no language which recognizes their love. Sori and Manga are well-to-do schoolmates in urban Guinea, deeply in love and remarkably open about their feelings. Both are the only children of single parents who have invested their whole emotional lives in their sons. Each parent takes steps to end what they see as a doomed relationship which threatens their families' futures, and for a while the children attempt to go along with their parents’ wishes. Trying to forget Sori, Manga even attempts a sexual relationship with a young white woman. But in the end the young men cannot change, and must accept their love as destiny, even though their future is uncertain. While coming out may have become primetime fare in the US, this film had to be filmed clandestinely in the director’s native Guinea. Because Dakan both challenges the idea that there is a universal gay culture and debunks the notion that homosexuality is non-existent or foreign to African societies, this moving and thoughtful film has provoked controversial discussions at several international film festivals. But beyond its taboo topic, Dakan is a contemporary reinterpretation of the age-old Romeo and Juliet conflict between love and social convention. In director Mohamed Camara’s words: “I made this film to pay tribute to those who express their love in whatever way they feel it, despite society’s efforts to repress it.”

1995

Lefkovitz, Karen

1995

Yerkes, Jamie

1995

Jesus returns to earth as a Black Lesbian Cowboy and all hell breaks loose.

Balletbò-Coll, Marta

1995

Catalonia's Marta Balletbò-Coll is a multi-talented force who both directs and acts in Costa Brava, a sweetly melancholic love story rife with cheery, Annie Hall-ish eccentricity. Resembling an out-of-the-closet Rosie O'Donnell (imagine that), Balletbò-Coll is Anna, a monologuist and Barcelona tour guide who ricochets through the movie dropping sardonic asides and juicy bon mots. Then she meets Montserrat (San Francisco's fabulous Desi del Valle), a visiting scientist with a knack for seismic analysis and, naturally, the earth moves. What's special about the picture is its understatement, its comic timing, its savvy framing. Indeed, Costa Brava is almost avant-garde in execution; the camera cuts away, jarringly, just before each caress, and captures the fabled city of Barcelona through fractured glimpses of balconies and rooftops. Winner of the 1995 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival Audience Award for Best Feature.(E.P.)