Miller, Tanya

1994

Another moving evocation from Tanya Miller, maker of last year’s stunning short, Basic Necessities.

Wan, Dawn

1994

Wan, Dawn

1994

Bezalel, Ronit

1994

Ronit Bezalel documents the amazing fifty-five-year friendship between two Jewish women in Montreal. Shirley, a Polish refugee, is straight; her friend Florence is a lesbian. These two remarkable women talk about Shirley's marriage to Florence's brother, about Florence's lover Sophie, and about the traditional Yiddish music they play together.

Frilot, Shari

1994

A gorgeuosly constructed musing from Shari Frilot. A dark comedic study of just about every rational and irrational emotion jilted lovers go through.

Massingale, Danielle

1994

Three dykes wander San Francisco to interview the average queer in the street and find out: What gets you off?

Aguirre, Valentin

1994

A raw and chatty celebration of the San Francisco’s lesbian and gay Chicano/Latino community.

Gaffney, Stuart

1994

No further information available.

Katsapetses, Nicholas

1994

A Gus Van Sant–style short about the comic difficulties of forming long-term relationships in a small town like San Francisco.

Reed, Peter

1994

Peter Reed's steamy contemporary drama about the reunion of two brothers (hunky Eric Swanson and Robert Kneeper) with their mother (the redoubtable Lee Grant) is reminiscent of (and possibly an homage to) all those live television dramas and Broadway plays of the ‘50s and ‘60s. You know the ones—about generational conflicts and repressed passions in the Midwest and South, usually of a heterosexual nature—but this time the gay subtexts and sensibilities that were off-stage, off-screen and between the lines are squarely, unapologetically in your face. In Under Heat, 36-year-old Dean (Swanson) comes to tell his family he has AIDS, but this is overshadowed by the neediness of his mother and older brother (not to mention the boy who cuts the grass, a Calvin Klein wet dream). In an effort to reconcile past and present issues—which include health, addiction, sexuality, and the father's suicide many years before—these characters begin a journey wherein they reveal themselves to each other. Ultimately, Dean's perspective on his own crisis evolves to the realization that death is the inescapable destiny each individual must face. With the inevitability of Greek tragedy, but sprinkled with dollops of wit and slathered with some very ripe melodrama, Under Heat traces an arc extending roughly from Eugene O'Neill to William Binge, with nods to Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Horton Foote, among others. Affording Lee Grant her biggest screen role in quite a spell, this is juicy fun indeed.