new orleans film festival

NOFF 2025: Ground Report

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In my previous dispatch covering this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, I previewed a few selections from the program before they premiered in-person, primarily focusing on documentaries about niche pop culture relics: the 80s house music scene in Chicago, the recurring 90s SNL character Pat!, and the bare-all story of the noise-rock circus act Butthole Surfers. Now that the festival’s in-person portion has concluded (with Virtual Cinema selections streaming online through Sunday, 11/2), I’m here to log some on-the-ground reporting to cover selections I caught on the big screen. The five titles reviewed below are all narrative features that screened during NOFF at various venues throughout the city (namely, The CAC, The Prytania, and The Broad) — some to ecstatic crowds, others to little fanfare. They’re loosely ranked from my personal favorites to my least favorites, but all are worth checking out if you have any interest in their reported style or subject. There will be one final dispatch covering this year’s NOFF in the form of a post-fest podcast with local critic Bill Arceneaux once the virtual portion has concluded in early November, and then the film festival department of the Swampflix newsroom will be furloughed until French Film Fest returns to The Prytania in the Spring, same as ever year.

The Plague

As NOFF coincides with my annual Halloween Season horror bingeing, I always find myself scanning the program for titles that fit both needs. This year, there were more horror-adjacent titles on offer than usual, including a few straight-up horror comedies about sex curses (see below), sexy zombies (see further below), and sex-obsessed Nice Guy puppets (Your Own Flavor). The scariest movie I’ve seen all month, however, was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a middle school-age water polo camp. I don’t know that Charlie Polinger’s debut feature The Plague fully qualifies as a proper Horror Film, but it neatly fits into a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. At the very least, it’s itchy & squirmy enough to register as a psychological thriller, and its lengthy scenes of slow-motion underwater cinematography offer it an otherworldly, nightmarish beauty that verges on the supernatural — a welcome break from the all-too-real dramatizations of school age bullying. A near-guaranteed moneymaker genre in recent years, horror offers up-and-coming directors the chance to take stylish risks audiences won’t sign on for otherwise, so it’s not especially surprising to learn that Polinger’s next project is going to be an adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” for A24, starring Mikey Madison (which was previously adapted by Roger Corman into what is comfortably one of the greatest horror films of all time).

The closest The Plague comes to having “a star” is Joel Edgerton in a supporting role as the water polo camp’s whistle-blowing sad sack coach, who’s scarcely present to supervise. The rest of the main cast are preteen boys who’ve been largely left alone to establish their own social hierarchy, with newcomer Everett Blunck playing Ben, the latest, gangliest addition to the crew. The title refers to a hazing ritual the boys have invented in which the most awkward kid among them has been socially diagnosed with a vaguely defined plague that manifests as a skin-shredding rash, banishing him from any direct interaction with the rest of the class. Ben is unsure how much he wants to participate in this ritual at first, but he’s ultimately willing to punch down as long as it means he’s not the lowest rung on the social ladder. That status doesn’t last forever, though, and the gradual, subtle ways he gets “infected” by the plague are horrifically familiar to anyone who remembers having an “awkward phase” at that age. The Plague hits especially hard for Millennials who suffered their worst social nightmares in the early 2000s, since its 2003 setting is consistently anchored by eerily accurate cultural markers like endless repetitions of the “Okayyy” Lil Jon punchlines from Chappelle’s Show, a forgotten mating call from the time. It’s remarkably well observed in depicting the gendered bullying that boys suffer at that age (with the neighboring girls synchronized-swimming camp being quarantined to a walled-off realm worthy of its own sister movie), with only the otherworld liminality of swimming underwater to offer any sense of relief. It’s an nerve-racking film about how all children are monsters, one that’ll make you glad you never have to be one again.

Fucktoys

The Plague will enjoy a Prestige Season theatrical rollout in hopes of landing on a few High Profile critics’ Best of the Year Lists, boosting its public profile. The future of Annapurna Sriram’s campy sex comedy Fucktoys is much hazier in the film-distro crystal ball, partly due to the expletive in its title (and the 100 minutes of depravity that ensues). Sriram herself stars as down-on-her-luck sex worker who learns in the opening scene that the reason she’s been going through it lately is that she’s been struck with a curse. When she asks her most trusted psychic (local legend Big Freedia, in a scene-stealing role) how this could’ve happened, the psychic shrugs it off with the explanation that sometimes “It be like that.” After consulting several other psychics around town for a second opinion the way cancer patients will desperately bounce from doctor to doctor, she quickly accepts that the curse is real, and starts working overtime to earn the money for a lamb-sacrificing ritual that will lift said curse, freeing her from the string of heartbreaks & rotten luck that has been derailing her life. Of course, this premise is mostly an excuse for Sriram to travel around town from john to john on her vintage moped as she gets her cash in order, providing the plot structure needed to justify flooding the screen with quirky side characters and one-off sex gags. Then, things get genuinely horrific as the threat shifts from vague supernatural curse magic to real-life john with drug & ego issues, consciously souring the mood in frank acknowledgement of the dangerous risks that come with regular sex work (i.e., men).

For a low-budget sex comedy filmed mostly on the industrial backroads of rural Louisiana, Fucktoys has an impressively stylish look to it. Shot on film and decorated with a self-driven dedication to Swinging 60s psychedelia, it looks like a dusty Polaroid found locked away in a box of antique sex toys. Sriram sets the film in a fictional, fantastic setting she calls Trashworld, made entirely out of what appears to be hand-built sets and thrifted vintage clothing. That setting and the over-the-top character work will likely earn Fucktoys a lot of convenient comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously bratty & garish. The film certainly has a lot of harsh political messaging behind its flippantly slutty comedic antics, constantly calling attention to how the wealthy live by different rules than the rest of us, putting the servant class at constant risk. Sriram just works hard to make sure she’s not portraying the sex-worker lifestyle as a nonstop misery parade, seeking out the pleasure & humor in every scenario where money & hexes aren’t ruining the vibe. It’s the kind of bongripping comedy where the protagonist owns a full Doug Funny wardrobe of the same uniform outfit in multiple copies, and if someone writes down a phone number in lipstick, it’s almost certain to be 555-666-0420.

Queens of the Dead

The joke-to-laugh ratio in Tina Romero’s debut zomcom Queens of the Dead is not nearly as successful as Fucktoys‘, but it’s got a similar, admirable sense of political flippancy. George Romero’s daughter builds off her family name here by staging a standard zombie siege picture in the exact style pioneered by her father; the location under siege by the zombie horde just happens to be a drag club. A queer cast of misfit characters (played by the likes of Love Lies Bleeding‘s Katy O’Brian, I Saw the TV Glow‘s Jack Haven, Drag Race‘s Nina West, Pose‘s Dominique Jackson, and comedy legend Margaret Cho) hole up in a Brooklyn gay bar during a cookie-cutter zombie breakout, with one straight-guy straight man on hand to play their comic foil (Quincy Dunn-Baker). All the crew has to do is survive long enough to ride a Pride Parade float out of town at dawn without turning on each other under the pressure of the nonstop zombie invasion. Petty grievances about past professional betrayals, disrespected identity markers, and refusal to adapt to the new rules of drag bubble to the surface as they pass time at the nightclub’s open bar, but they repeatedly revert to the assertion that they’re Family, and all they have is each other in a world that would gladly tear them apart.

Queens of the Dead is heavy on jokes and light on gore. Sure, a character might suffer a nasty rat bite or axe wound here or there, but Romero never goes for the obligatory horde-hands disemboweling spectacle of the Living Dead series, tastefully choosing to keep her characters’ organs on the insides of their bodies. Instead, she nods to her father’s legacy with winking one liners like “When there’s no more room in Hell . . . there’s an app for that.” To that end, it’s amusing that much of the undead ghouls the central Family has to protect themselves from are the drag-enthusiast public, who continue to scroll & post for Insta clout well after they’re infected by the zombie plague. You’d think they’d be fighting off undead MAGA instead, but I suppose that supply would be short in Brooklyn. The overall effect is less gnarly or politically savvy than it is, simply, cute. I don’t know that it would’ve been made or widely distributed (soon, through Shudder) without the director’s connection to the larger Romero legacy, but it’s got a good heart and it easily passes the Mark Kermode-patented Six Laughs Test for determining whether a comedy qualifies for a passing grade.

The Testament of Ann Lee

The only film on this list that isn’t a debut feature is, thus, the one that bears the greatest weight of expectation, so I suspect it’s one I might’ve ranked higher had I been totally blindsided by it. Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee arrived at the festival with pre-packaged Awards Season prestige, complete with its own security guards scanning the audiences for smartphone pirates who might dare to leak a camrip before the film’s official late-December release. Fastvold is most prominently discussed on the prestige cinema scene right now in the context of her careerlong professional collaboration with husband Brady Corbet (with whom she co-wrote last year’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist, as well as this immediate follow-up), but it’s her 2020 period drama The World to Come that most had me excited to see her back in the director’s chair. A historical lesbian romance with an unusually deep bleak streak, The World to Come set an expectation for dramatic heartbreak that The Testament of Ann Lee never comes close to achieving, despite the severity of its own story. Instead, Fastvold indulges in the stylistic experiment of making a deeply bleak movie musical, finding more fascination than resonation with her titular historical subject: the enigmatic founder of the American religious sect The Shakers. The most the two films have in common, really, is their casting’s assertion that Christopher Abbott would make a terrible husband.

In a way, The Shakers make perfect sense as the subject for a musical, given that their worship practices involve rhythmic dancing & chanting that could inspire captivating filmic spectacle. Think of the communal breathing/grieving ritual in Midsommar, repeated at feature length. The problem is that the Shaker hymns composer Daniel Blumberg extrapolates into full musical numbers don’t really go anywhere. When Shaker founder Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is imprisoned for her heretical beliefs, she sings repetitions of the phrase, “I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst” with no lyrical variation for minutes on end, to the point where the audience is more exhausted than the character. It’s her belief system itself that saves the film from total tedium, though. Ann Lee was persecuted for daring to ask whether society would be better off if we all agreed to sing & dance instead of having sex, ever. It turns out the answer depends on how bad the sex you’re having is (i.e., whether you’re married to Hollywood hunk Christopher Abbott). The Testament of Ann Lee is most impressive in how it works as both a sincere depiction of its subject’s religious ecstasy and as a harsh criticism of religion as a mechanism for making one person’s sexual hang-ups everyone else’s problem. I have a feeling that if Blumberg’s songs were better realized and if Fastvold’s name didn’t carry so much weight from previous projects, I’d be singing its praises instead of downplaying its successes. As is, it’s a memorably strange anomaly, an indulgence I suppose Fastvold has well earned by working on knockout titles like The World to Come, The Childhood of a Leader, The Brutalist, and my beloved Vox Lux.

Mad Bills to Pay

A more reasonable person wouldn’t have any pre-screening expectations for The Testament of Ann Lee, but I have been made unreasonable by the year-long attention I pay to movie podcasts with the budget & access to send critics to international film festivals. Maybe the Oscar Buzz generators of Awards Season podcasts like Prestige Junkie & The Big Picture that put movies like Ann Lee on the radar for large audiences are a reasonable thing to listen to; I dunno. What’s really shameful is the close attention I pay to festival-coverage episodes of the NYC cinephile podcasts Film Comment & The Last Thing I Saw, which often get me hyped up for microbudget oddities that have no name recognition outside a small circle of obscurity-obsessed pundits who trade deep-cut titles as a form of social currency half a country away from where I live. Sometimes, my nerdy notetaking during those conversations pays off wonderfully, as it prompted me to catch The Plague as soon as it was available, one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences I’ve had all year — festival or no. Often, it’ll lure me into making time for the kinds of underplayed, subtle-to-a-fault indie dramas I have no personal interest in beyond their value to The Discourse. Again, I acknowledge that it is shameful. I’ll also acknowledge that I had no business watching Mad Bills to Pay in particular, which seems to have spoken to that NYC cinephile crowd specifically because it’s set in The Bronx, a lesser-filmed borough of the city (as opposed to the more often-seen Brooklyn & Manhattan).

Mad Bills to Pay is a summer-bummer indie drama about ill-prepared parents-to-be in The Bronx. It’s a very quiet movie about very loud people, a paradox from the Sean Baker School of Character Studies. Newcomer Juan Collado stars as the 19-year-old Rico, who sells home-mixed cocktails called “Nutcrackers” to people partying on the beach, drawing attention with the constant sales pitch, “Nutties, nutties, nutties, nutties!” A macho brat in a domestic world entirely populated by women, most of his non-“nutties” vocabulary consists of variations of “Babe, babe, babe,” and “Bro, bro, bro” as he whines like a toddler who’s not getting enough attention (or, more often, not getting his way). After getting accustomed to Rico’s daily rounds of video games, bong rips, junk food, and public displays of alcoholism, we’re confronted with the out-of-nowhere revelation that he’s going to be a father, having impregnated the 16-year-old Destiny (fellow first-time actor Destiny Checho). The two children are very obviously not ready to have children of their own, which inspires endless shouting matches as they struggle & fail to assert their maturity to mothers who know better. Those frequent top-volume arguments are in direct contrast with the docudrama filmmaking style, framed with the cold, impartial distance of a security camera. Every single scene is another indication that the parents-to-be should seriously consider adoption or abortion instead of introducing a baby into their volatile relationship, all the way to the very end when it’s far too late. Meanwhile, a seemingly authentic portrait of Dominican American communal life in The Bronx is sketched out in background detail. First-time director Joel Alfonso Vargas delivers a confident, competent version of a kind of festival-circuit movie I always struggle to personally connect with, as my tastes tend to drift towards the more abstracted, dreamlike end of the medium. Since I’ve also failed to connect with recent years’ other festival darlings like Past Lives, Janet Planet, and Aftersun, I’m willing to chalk this one up to the go-to critical quality markers like Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint just not being my thing. Your own mileage may vary, especially if you have any affinity for day-drinking in The Bronx.

-Brandon Ledet

2025 New Orleans Film Festival Preview

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The 36th annual New Orleans Film Festival will be staged all across the city next week, hitting local venues like The CAC, The Broad, and both locations of The Prytania from October 23rd through the 27th (with virtual selections streaming through November 2nd). Usually, I recap highlights from the festival after it’s already concluded, but this year I’ve got a preview of a few selections from the program before they screen in person. The five titles listed below are movies worth seeking out during the festival, especially if you’re interested in catching smaller releases that won’t get the same wide theatrical distribution as NOFF’s flashier local premieres for new films by Rian Johnson, Bradley Cooper, Nia DaCosta, Noah Baumbach, and the like. It’s a rare chance to see them on a big screen with a packed, lively audience, which is the beauty of the local film fest experience.

I hope to catch more of what the festival has to offer in-person myself next week, with more reviews to come. I’ll also be joined by frequent podcast guest Bill Arceneaux for our annual festival recap once it’s all over, so there’s plenty more NOFF coverage to look forward to. In the meantime, here are a few select titles worth your time & attention, along with the corresponding venues & showtimes for their screenings. See you there!

We Are Pat

You might not expect that a three-decade old SNL sketch would be worthy of its own feature-length documentary, but the Julia Sweeney character Pat! proves to be a surprisingly rich cinematic subject precisely because it’s out of step with modern culture. Rowan Haber makes their directorial feature debut picking at the complicated legacy of vintage It’s Pat! sketches, in which the titular recurring character baffles everyone they meet by not conforming to an easily definable gender identity. Pat is more gender ambiguous than gender nonbinary, but they still offered some shred of representation for that specific queer community on mainstream television at a time when few others could be found anywhere in the wider public sphere. At the same time, the sketches’ punchlines often rely on a point-and-laugh derision of Pat as a freak of nature because they cannot be immediately categorized as a single gender based on traditional cultural markers, driving everyone in their immediate vicinity insane. A nonbinary artist who works almost exclusively in a community of trans collaborators, Haber uses this project as an opportunity to dwell in the tension between a childhood fascination with Pat as a mirror to their own burgeoning identity and an adult understanding of Pat as a public act of transphobic bullying. It’s the kind of movie that will admit in a single breath that, yes, Pat is a transphobic joke and, yes, Pat can also be very funny.

We Are Pat shamelessly commits a couple major modern-doc filmmaking sins (mainly, dragging the director and social media posts onscreen instead of sticking to the subject at hand), but it mostly gets away with it out of discourse-hijacking chutzpah. Haber assembles an impressive range of talking-head commentators on the Pat! phenomenon, ranging from gender-nonconforming indie musician JD Samson (who has no direct association with SNL or the larger comedy scene) to recent nonbinary SNL cast member Molly Kearney to Julia Sweeney herself, who extrapolates on how Pat helped her express frustrations with the social limitations of her own public gender expression. More importantly, they also assemble a writer’s room of trans & nonbinary comedians to write new, politically savvy Pat sketches that undo the harm of It’s Pat!‘s most egregious punchlines. The resulting sketch comedy that’s staged after those writing sessions is not especially funny, but the roundtable discussions of how to modernize Pat for a more expansive understanding of gender leads to fruitful discussions that help save the movie from becoming a simple I Love the 90s-style nostalgia fest. We Are Pat doesn’t attempt to reclaim Pat! as a gender-nonconforming queer icon so much as it uses Pat as an excuse to open a huge can of pop-culture worms just to watch them squirm. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 5:15pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)

Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt

Speaking of cultural relics that peaked in the 90s, NOFF will also include a screening of a new Butthole Surfers documentary, adorably subtitled The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt. The hole truth be told, I never really got the Butthole Surfers outside their one alt-radio hit “Pepper,” which is an undeniable Gen-X earworm. The musicianship on their records is impressive in an athletic sense, with complicated guitar riffs and punishing tribal drum patterns formulating a new kind of abrasive noise rock in a time when most underground music was a more simplistic, sped-up version of hardcore punk. I just could never find an in as a fan, an album that could be enjoyed from start to end. That is, until I saw them perform in a tent at Voodoo Fest sometime in the aughts, where their nonstop aural assault was matched with the bad-acid-trip visuals of film projectors, go-go-dancers, and clashing strobes. I finally understood the band’s appeal as a kind of circus side show after that performance, and this new documentary explains how that stage craft was constructed one component at a time. Butthole Surfers started as a few bored teenagers in Texan suburbia, naming themselves after an off-the-cuff quip that their brand of abrasive noise rock “sounds like surf music;” “Yeah, butthole surf music.” As they gradually added more musicians, light show technicians, and drugged-out stage performers, they toured the globe and crossed paths with people as famous as Richard Linklater, Johnny Depp, RuPaul, and their one-sided nemeses R.E.M., each of whom are featured in their own standalone anecdotes among testimony about their musical greatness from bands who I do regularly listen to: Fugazi, Melvins, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, etc.

Freaked! co-director Tom Stern breaks up the visual monotony of these talking-head testimonials by matching the band’s multimedia approach in his filmmaking style. The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt is a playful mishmash of stop-motion, crude zine animation, Crank Yankers-reminiscent puppetry, and warped VHS psychedelia, illustrating the band’s wilder, druggier exploits from the days before they could be captured on cellphone video. Like most party bands who continue nihilistic drug use past their early 20s, the vibe among members sours the longer the Butthole Surfers soldier on, and much of the back half of their story is mired in the hurt feelings between core contributors Gibby Haynes & Paul Leary, giving them room to grieve what’s been lost in their once-vibrant friendship. That getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings section of the third act might surprise longtime Butthole Surfers fans who fell in love with the band for mixing overly complicated noise rock with pre-recorded farts & burps, but hey, being a perpetually stoned, sarcastic prankster gets tiring after a while. Speaking of which, this film completes the unofficial trilogy of this year’s documentaries on the gods of sarcastic rock ‘n’ roll, after similar treatments for Pavement & DEVO. It’s time to place bets on whether the next one will be about Ween, The Dead Milkmen, or dark-horse choice (and apparently former Butthole Surfers collaborators) Bongwater. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 6:45pm @ The Broad Theater

Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

For a documentary profile of a less scatological pop music phenomenon, check out Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, which presents an oral history of the early house music scene in 1980s Chicago. Much like with Butthole Surfers, I’ve always found house to be an especially difficult musical avenue to fully explore, since it’s a movement mostly built off DJ sets and mixtapes instead of a canon of must-listen albums. Move Ya Body doesn’t offer much of an explainer on the core texts to seek out when first getting into house, outside of its focus on the DJs signed to the Chicago-based D.I.Y. label Trax Records. Instead of getting nerdy about cataloging every notable track & DJ in the scene, it mostly digs into the cultural context of the racist & homophobic era that birthed the movement as a flashpoint of Black, queer political opposition. That story starts with the Disco Sucks! phenomenon, which peaked at a “Disco Demolition Night” rally in which a mostly white rock ‘n’ roll audience smashed & burned disco records on a Chicago baseball field before being dispersed by the cops, effectively turning into a race riot in the streets outside. The story eventually ends with the disco offshoot of house music becoming internationally popular due to the appropriation of the sound by major-label artists like Madonna, leading to the same white audiences joining in on the fun once it proved profitable. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least a tale as old as America.

Move Ya Body features some stock footage and dramatic recreations of nightclub life in 1980s Chicago, but it’s overall much more of a sit-down interview presentation than the Pat! or Butthole Surfers docs. The entire point of the picture is to offer the sidelined DJs of Trax’s early days to tell their side of the story after being overshadowed by major-label artists like Madonna & Beyoncé in the global exportation of house. It’s a story with clear heroes & villains too, not just a vague gesture toward the broad concept of Black queer joy as a form of political resistance. At the very least, the looming figure of Screamin’ Rachael emerges as a perfectly loathsome heel, self-proclaiming herself to be The Queen of House despite only being included in early recordings as a hired hand. It would be like if Deborah Harry continually claimed to be the Queen of Hip-Hop for her vocals on “Rapture.” She’s part of the story but miles from the center of it, and so her shameless self-aggrandizing as a white woman who happened to be invited to the party crosses a line that affords the movie some genuine dramatic tension (despite its images mostly being restricted to people sitting in chairs). Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 8:45pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center

Your Own Flavor

One of the highlight shorts blocks featured at this year’s NOFF is titled “Body Horror Shorts: Picking Scabs”, commemorating the festival’s proximity to Halloween. Within that collection, I found a subcategory of short films about the bodily embarrassments of sex & dating, which play more like comedy sketches about the follies of hookup culture than genuine body horror. The animated shorts Caries and Mambo No.2 fixate on the embarrassments of inopportune bowel movements and the stink of oral bacteria when would-be lovers are trying to get into the mood, and the standout short of the bunch, Your Own Flavor, goes a step further to make the acting of hooking up itself to be a source of grotesque horror. After being stood up on a date, a young twentysomething is lured into buying ice cream from a rolling-cart vendor in a public park. That vendor is Chompers, a magical hand puppet who owns & operates Ice Guys ice cream. Chompers uses some of his vaguely defined puppet magic to cheer up the jilted lover with a song & dance routine about how she will one day prove to be someone’s favorite flavor of ice cream, making the temporary embarrassments of online dating worthwhile. Then, Chompers’s demeanor takes a nasty turn, as all (n)ice guys’ temperaments inevitably do. In short, it’s a Wonder Showzen update for the Tinder era.

The brief runtime of a 10-minute short film typically demands a simple set-up and punchline structure, which Your Own Flavor satisfies by making sure its punchline hits hard and hits funny. It’s got a bright, cartoonish visual panache to it as well, especially in its follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong sequence, set against a handmade, 2D cardboard ice cream factory backdrop. Not all of the shorts included in that “Body Horror” block satisfy the “horror” portion of the descriptor, but they consistently deliver on the gross-out gags associated with the genre, appealing to audiences who miss getting stoned after midnight to peak-era Adult Swim. Within that gross-out alt-comedy context, Your Own Flavor is a standout. Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 9:00pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)

West of Greatness: The Story of the Weswego Muscle Boys

Of course, one of the major advantages of going to a local film festival is getting to see local films, so it’s my duty to recommend at least one selection from the program’s “Made in Louisiana” category. The narrative feature West of Greatness: The Story of the Westwego Muscle Boys is hyper local New Orleans cinéma verité, as if someone hired Sean Baker to direct a TV spot for a Westwego gym. It’s the story of two scrawny West Bankers who enter a bodybuilding competition despite their cartoonishly nerdy physiques. One is an aspiring actor who hopes the prize money will fund an escape from LA for a brighter future in L.A., while the other hopes it will pay to move out of his abusive home with his sibling in tow. Both are followed by a fictional documentary crew, and they become unlikely friends in the months leading up to the competition, mostly because they’re the only rail-thin nerds training in a gym packed to the walls with legitimate muscle boys.

West of Greatness is endearing enough as a hopeless underdog sports story, but its real achievement is in its verisimilitude. Director Jared LaRue and crew staged a real-life local bodybuilding competition to stand in for the fictional Greatest Gains competition of the narrative, so that all periphery players afford the low-budget production some impressive authenticity. The mise-en-scène’s gym rituals, protein shakes, posing coaches, and baby-faced bros bulk up the credibility of the documentary format and open the story up to larger themes of Alpha Male cultural trends outside the tiny lives of its scrawny leads. There’s also a semi-documentary aspect to those actors’ physical progress, pulling some solid sports-movie pathos out of the transformations of their bodies from string beans to disconcertingly jacked string beans. It’s a remarkably ambitious project given the obvious limitations of its budget, especially in its tension between manufactured drama and documented reality. Screening Fri, Oct 24th, 7:45pm @ Prytania Theatre & Mon, Oct 27th, 8:00pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)

Check out more details about the upcoming festival here.

-Brandon Ledet

New Orleans Film Fest 2024: Documentary Round-Up

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Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their lineup.  This year, I only caught a couple narrative films in-person at the festival: the Zambian funeral drama On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and the Australian stop-motion comedy Memoir of a Snail.  Most of my NOFF selections were filed under the “Documentary Feature” tab instead, and I watched them at home.  All of the documentaries I caught at the festival were intimate portraits of on-the-fringe artists – most empowering, one eerily alienating.  They’re also all still currently available to stream on the festival’s Virtual Cinema portal through the end of this weekend.

So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary features I watched during the 35th annual New Orleans Film Festival.  It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years (and maybe about getting out of the house to see them in-person).

Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story

The Jackie Shane whose story is told in the Canadian-streamer documentary Any Other Way was a popular R&B singer turned agoraphobic recluse – the kind of life-changing discovery you always hope to find whenever you dig through dusty record crates.  Shane was a transgender woman who performed in 1950s & 60s nightclubs in a “flamboyant” boymode persona, a younger contemporary and friend of the similarly styled Little Richard (to the point where early concert posters listed her as “Little Jackie”).  Her early notoriety as a stage act was earned through singing raucous vocals while playing drums in a standing position, which upped the rock ‘n roll theatricality of her shows.  Later, she leaned into the gender-nonconformity of her stage persona by introducing more women’s clothes into her onstage wardrobe, moving from Nashville to Toronto to mitigate the policing of her race & gender.  Her work got increasingly personal, culminating in a confessional live-recording LP that the movie cites as her magnum opus.  Then, she suddenly disappeared from public life, moving again to California and, eventually, back to Tennessee to fully embody her transgender identity, giving up fame for personal authenticity.  It’s both a shame that she was pressured into sacrificing one for the other and a shame that she didn’t live long enough to fully actualize the career resurgence that she was on the precipice of enjoying in the 2010s, when her trans identity was less of a professional liability than a basic fact.

The other shame about Jackie Shane is that there isn’t much video of her performing her music, with the exception of a single televised performance that was almost lost to archival neglect.  She did a wonderful job acting as her own archivist, though.  There’s a wealth of audio, still photographs, journals, costumes, and other artifacts that Any Other Way transforms into an art gallery installation in Shane’s honor.  Some Loving Vincent-style rotoscope animation helps fill in the gaps, with two actresses hired to portray Shane as both a young stage performer and an older shut-in who only communicated with her documentarians by phone in lengthy, candid interviews.  Those actresses are also interviewed about how Shane’s story resonates with their own relationships with transgender identity, which adds another layer of context & thematic depth to the usual talking-head style interviews with the music-historian nerds who most appreciate her as a stage act. Jackie Shane is recreated as a lip-synced watercolor in motion, living on in anecdotes about the time she headlined a popular Toronto nightclub for 10 weeks straight or the time she upstaged Etta James (and, according to some photographs, stole her wig).  It’s a loving tribute to an incredible artist who’s in danger of continuing to slip into obscurity without it, since there’s so little reference material in the world outside of Shane’s storage unit & surviving acquaintances.

Eponymous

In a way, Eponymous is also a portrait of an obscure artist, but it’s more of an exorcism than a tribute.  Hiram Percy is most legendary for his invention of the gun silencer, having already been born into wealth as the son of Hiram Maxim, inventor of the fully automatic machine gun.  Less notably, he was also an amateur filmmaking enthusiast in the early years of the medium, experimenting with the techniques & uses of cinematography in the early 20th century.  This is a complicated legacy for Caroline Rumley, an experimental filmmaker married to a descendent of Hiram Maxim, who shares his ancestors’ name.  Eponymous is an essay film in which Rumley voices her discomforts marrying into a family best known for inventing new, efficient ways to kill human beings in the arts of war & murder.  She struggles with that in-law familial history through hushed narration, imposed onto footage shot by Hiram Percy Maxim in his independent-artist days as an early filmmaking pioneer (with particular attention paid to the double meaning of the word “shot” in filmmaking and weaponry).  Diaristic notes from Percy detail the evolution of amateur, at-home filmmaking from simple portraiture to travel documentation to magic tricks to visual poetry.  Meanwhile, Rumley reaches for the next evolution in the medium, now that it’s aged into a century-old artform: cursed windows into the past.

There are a lot of personal essay films out there illustrated by menacing home video footage, but usually that footage isn’t over a hundred years old, which gives this one a genuinely haunted feeling . . . Well, that and all the talk of machine gun deaths.  The clips are often short, due to the physical and financial limitations of the home-movies medium in the early days of motion picture cameras.  The way Rumley loops, reverses, and teases out those images in close-up study illustrates her fall down an especially dark family-history rabbit hole in obsessive detail.  Some of her choices in presentation can be a little difficult to parse—including a bold white line that often bifurcates the frame—but the intense intimacy of the film suggests that it wasn’t made with an audience in mind outside her of own head anyway.  On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was the best film I saw at the festival about a familial legacy of violence buried just beneath a cheery surface of social niceties, but Eponymous was the one with the more fascinating visual textures – the one that fixated on the art of the moving image.

I Love You, AllWays

A more recent document of D.I.Y. art history can be found in Stuart Sox’s I Love You, AllWays, a loving tribute to the dive-bar cabaret that hosts most of New Orleans’s best drag & burlesque shows.  A spiritual sequel to Sox’s Decadence-weekend hustle doc To Decadence, With Love, this temporal check-in on the local drag scene mostly focuses on the first couple years of COVID, when the venue barely squeezed by to survive.  Even though it’s still recent history, it’s an emotionally tough time to revisit, dragging the audience back to an era when virus variants & vaccination dodgers prolonged a never-ending social lockdown, made doubly devastating by the local impact of Hurricane Ida just as things were headed in a positive direction.  That framing hit me hard, since I used to regularly attend shows at The AllWays until the pandemic, when I abruptly lost the momentum.  There’s even a shot of the calendar from the month they had to close in 2020, and you can clearly see a listing for the Joni Michell drag night I went to right before doing absolutely nothing outside my house (besides work) for about two years.

While The AllWays’s function as a queer communal hub can lead to a lot of passionate interviews with its owner and regular performers, there is something a little silly about taking this subject so seriously.  After intense emotional stress about what New Orleans life & culture would be without the AllWays, the venue bounces back to host the exact kind of pantomimed sexual anarchy it’s been home to for years: curbside peep shows, a twerking-Jesus passion play, and a burlesque performer pegging a watermelon with a strap-on dildo like the modern, erotic equivalent of Gallagher.  I’d be lying if I said the film’s appeal to pathos didn’t work on me, though.  Its genuine, soul-deep love for The AllWays made me so warmly nostalgic for pre-COVID drag shows there that I consciously overlooked its anachronistic VHS tape-warp filters that aimed to induce that nostalgia the cheap way (considering how much less that aesthetic marker has to do with the era it’s recalling than its other visual devices, like its vertical-video smartphone footage or its hesitantly typed Facebook posts).  The good news is that there’s no need to be nostalgic at all, really.  From what I can tell passing by, The AllWays appears to be just as lively today as all the other live performance venues on that busy strip of St. Claude Ave; I just need to start showing up again to get back into the flow of things.

The Flamingo

I said that all four of these documentaries are portraits of artists, and I guess Mary “The Flamingo” Phillips is the one I’d most have to make a case for that to be true.  Defined in The Flamingo mostly as a late-blooming divorcee who became a 60-something dominatrix after being turned on by the Fifty Shades of Grey book series, Phillips functions more as a sex therapist than as an artist.  She does paint and pose for visual art outside of her dungeon space, though, and she has turned her domme persona as The Flamingo into a visual branding project, decorating her body and her living spaces with as much pink-flamingo iconography as they can accommodate.  The Flamingo is, of course, a kind of performance in itself, as alluded to by the terminology of her craft in words like “scene” and “play.”

As straightforward as The Flamingo is in documenting Phillips as she binds, spanks, swaddles, and dirty-talks her scene partners, the movie is admittedly less about the mechanics of her artistry than it is about the effect that artistry has on her plainclothes persona.  She’s found renewed confidence & self-worth in the kink & polyamory scenes, often stressing that her fulfilment in these activities has little to do with penetrative sex; she’s finding herself by becoming someone else.  That inward search makes for a calm, gentle, meditative portrait despite its often-salacious images & subject.  It’s the kind of unrushed doc that will linger on the rippling waves of pool water or the squawking birds of its title for a half-minute of stationary reflection before moving onto the next stop in Phillips’s daily rounds.  Even her interviews play like a casual chat over morning coffee rather than an all-important revelation in a moment of great personal upheaval.  It’s nice.

-Brandon Ledet

New Orleans Film Fest 2023: Documentary Round-Up

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Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their schedule.  This year, only the gross-out Juggalo road trip comedy Off Ramp grabbed my attention from that section of the program, and I look forward to reviewing that film with regular podcast guest Bill Arceneaux later this month.  Otherwise, the most exciting selections at this year’s NOFF were all documentaries, at least from what I could gather scrolling through blurbs & thumbnails on the festival’s website.  All of the movies I ventured out to see on my own this year happened to be documentaries; they also all happened to feature queer themes in their subjects – sometimes subtly, often confrontationally.  

So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary films I caught at the 34th annual New Orleans Film Festival.  It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Since not all documentaries can get away with pushing the boundaries of fact or form, the medium is often most useful at its most informative rather than its most innovative.  The Disappearance of Shere Hite feels like vital, vibrant documentary filmmaking without ever challenging the rules or structures of its medium; it’s simply an act of “Hey, were you aware this amazing person existed?” post-mortem publicity.  Personally, I was not aware of Shere Hite’s existence before this doc’s festival run (starting way back at Sundance this January), which is something the movie assumes of anyone who’s too young to have experienced first-wave Feminism first-hand half a century ago.  Shere Hite did not “disappear” in the Connie Converse sense; she only carries a similar air of mystique because the American media chose to forget her and willed her name recognition into cultural oblivion.  Once upon a time, she was an important sex researcher whose debut publication The Hite Report was just as essential to American sex & romance discourse as the more formalist work of researchers like Kinsey and Masters & Johnson.  That initial entry into the American sex chat was controversial in its time for reporting that most cisgender women orgasm through clitoral stimulation, not through vaginal penetration.  It’s something that now registers as common, everyday knowledge but in the 1970s was treated as a vicious attack on traditional marital relations.  In her most widely publicized follow-ups, she also dared to report that traditional masculine gender roles leave most men feeling dangerously lonely and that married women commit adultery just as often as married men.  By that third common-sense statement, she was ridiculed out of her field by macho mob justice, fleeing to Europe so she didn’t have to hear any more angry men react to the headlines she made without ever actually reading the books she published.

Shere Hite conducted her research through self-printed sex-questionnaire zines.  She was strikingly beautiful and dramatically eccentric in her fashion, making do as a nude model before reinventing herself as a D.I.Y. punk sex scientist.  Her performative Old Hollywood glamour makes her an innately cinematic subject, so that there are hundreds of hours of televised interview footage to supplement the text of her writing.  In a time when mainstream media was skeptically evaluating “the question of The Women’s Movement”, she devised a way to ask women what their private sexual lives were actually like in an intimately truthful approach, suggesting that there was obvious value to putting the tools of sex research in the hands of actual sex workers.  I only know these things because I watched a documentary about her, even though there was a time when I could have seen her interviewed out in the open by the likes of Oprah, Geraldo, and Larry King.  The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a politically sharp, oddly romantic documentary profile of an important figure the American media deliberately forgot because her challenges to traditional sex & gender dynamics were too uncomfortable to tolerate.  The only thing that doesn’t fully work about the movie is Dakota Johnson’s softly precious narration as “the voice of Shere Hite” while reading her unpublished diaries between interview clips.  It’s a performance that’s missing the Sandra Bernhard sass, Patricia Clarkson fierceness, and Susan Sarandon seduction of the real Shere Hite’s voice, which we often hear in direct contrast to Johnson’s.  Still, having a movie star’s name attached to a woman who’s been deliberately stripped of her own name recognition is probably for the best.  Anything that works towards undoing the Mandela Effect of a world without Shere Hite is worthwhile, so I can’t fault the movie (or Johnson) too much for it.

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

Speaking of Sundance selections about badass women who’ve fostered combative relationships with the American press, Going to Mars is a wonderful, kaleidoscopic portrait of poet-activist Nikki Giovanni.  Whereas The Disappearance of Shere Hite is formally straight-forward in its linear overview of its subject’s biography & professional record, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project attempts to at least partially match the inventive fervor of its subject’s art in its own impressionistic approach (and attempts to better match her tone in its own celebrity voiceover track, provided by Taraji P. Henson).  It weaves together threads of Giovanni’s current, relatively comfortable life as an aging academic with her radical past as a Civil Rights organizer and her romantic visions of a sci-fi future led by Black women.  The title refers to her assertion that no one is better prepared for space exploration than Black American women, whose ancestors were already forcibly transported to an alien planet and forced to mate with an alien species.  Recordings of her poetry performances are just as often paired with outer-space screensavers as they are with footage of Civil Rights protests of the 1960s & 70s.  Somewhere between those two distant worlds, there’s Giovanni’s current status as a peaceful, settled citizen of suburban America – still clear-eyed in her awareness of the nation’s ongoing racial atrocities but content to leave the fight for justice to future generations.  There’s great tension in the way the archival footage’s incendiary fury clashes with her current-day domestic comfort, but what’s really impressive is how sharply observed her poetry remains in both states.  She’s still one of America’s great thinkers; it’s just that her observations now sound closer to Wanda Sykes stand-up than Angela Davis activism.

There’s always great tension in Nikki Giovanni’s relation to the world, whether answering Q&A softballs from well-intentioned but intellectually inferior audiences or chain-smoking while verbally sparring with an equally thorny James Baldwin.  It would be inaccurate to say she has no fucks left to give in her old age, since she’s always been a no-fucks-given communicator in her art & public persona.  What Going to Mars offers is a chance to celebrate that combative candidness as a personality trait beyond its political utility; it celebrates her as a great, greatly difficult person.

Anima: My Father’s Dresses

Moving on to the festival’s Virtual Cinema program (which is still running through the end of this weekend), the German documentary Anima might be the most formally experimental documentary I saw in this year’s line-up.  It’s an epistolary film, functioning as a posthumous conversation between director Uli Decker and her deceased father, Helmut.  There aren’t many home movies or personal photographs to illustrate the details of that conversation, though, because it’s specifically about a family secret held while Helmut was alive and able to speak for himself.  So, Uli reads his words from personal diaries and sends her responses via voiceover narration, often deviating from conventional interview footage to instead indulge in roughly animated collage.  It’s an intimate family portrait personalized to look like a cut & paste sketchbook, staging a conversation that could have never happened in real time due to the Catholic conservatism of their family background.  The film is about the shocking death-bed reveal of a family secret, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the story it tells its audience (save for the bizarre, newsworthy circumstances of Helmut’s sudden death).  The project is not so much about telling a story as it is about offering Uli a sounding board where she can work out & express the feelings her guarded relationship with her father never made room for while he was alive.

The secret Helmut guarded was that he was a crossdresser in his private life.  The betrayal Uli feels about that secret being kept from her is mostly resentment that her own explorations of gender & sexuality were severely policed by her family in her youth, as a queer woman who grew up as an eccentric theatre kid.  Her father felt a close affinity to her as someone who felt constrained by traditional gender roles, but never expressed that affinity in any meaningful way while alive.  He hid it in journals, which she could only access after he passed.  To the audience, this is not especially groundbreaking subject matter.  Between the anarchic formal experimentation of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda? in the 1950s and the extensive visual documentation of vintage closeted-crossdresser culture in this year’s Casa Susanna, there have been plenty of more artistically & historically substantial works to seek out before making time for Anima.  Uli’s frustration with her family for playing the game of posing as a “normal” middle-class Catholic household that wouldn’t allow itself to be free & happy is the personal touch that can’t be found anywhere else, which makes it one of the few documentaries that can get away with this kind of shameless cornball navel-gazing (alongside Stories We Tell, Madame, Origin Story, etc.). I’m also a crossdresser who grew up struggling with Catholic shame, though, so maybe I’m just a hopeless sucker for this kind of material in general.

Chokehole: Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland

If you’re in need of an advertisement for the benefits of proud, public queerness (in opposition to self-imposed Catholic penance), NOFF also offered a short-form documentary on the local drag collective Chokehole.  It even took the drag-wrestling hybrid show on the road to Germany, where the much more somber Anima is also set.  I use the term “advertisement” deliberately, too, as Drag Wrestlers Do Deutschland feels like the exact kind of Tourism TV commercial filmmaking that’s only available on hotel room channels, prompting you to get out of your complimentary bathrobe and contribute some vodka-soda money to the local economy.  The first few Chokehole shows I attended were can’t-miss community events, the culmination of everything I love about Art: the absurdist exaggeration of gender performance in pro wrestling & dive bar drag, the half-cooked fever dream storytelling of vintage B-movies, the D.I.Y. construction of artificial worlds on no-budget sets, etc.  I had ascended to genre trash heaven.  By contrast, this documentary plays like an infomercial for a drag-themed amusement park.  Curiously, the movie it reminds me most of was fellow globetrotting queer travel guide Queer Japan, not the sister Altered Innocence doc made by its director Yony Leyser, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution.  

This aesthetic quibble isn’t a dealbreaker, exactly.  The Chokehole crew totally deserves the professional spotlight they’re afforded here.  I’m just hopeful this short is a proof-of-concept tease for a grander statement down the line, where the tongue-in-cheek psychedelic editing that goes into Chokehole’s live-show video packages will inform the cinema about those shows the same way The Disappearance of Shere Hite is informed by its subject’s sensual mystique, Going to Mars is informed by its subject’s combative poetry, and Anima is informed by its subject’s cloistered intimacy.

-Brandon Ledet

Last Dance (2022)

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It’s undeniable that the art of drag has changed drastically in the past decade, at least from what I can see in New Orleans.  The traditionalist dive-bar pageant drag that I grew up with in the city has been pushed out to the edges of the frame, found only in the annual Gay Easter parade in the Quarter or at spaghetti & mimosas brunches on the West Bank.  These days, most local drag acts are young cabaret weirdos who are much more interested in testing the boundaries of good taste than they are in looking pretty under a pound of pancake-batter makeup.  In most cities, drag’s recent shift towards the avant-garde might only be attributable to the popularity of television programs like Ru Paul’s Drag Race and its legion of international spinoffs.  Here, it’s more directly influenced by the New Orleans Drag Workshop, an intensive drag bootcamp that spawned most of the city’s most vital, exciting queens for the better half of the 2010s.  That’s the local legacy of drag mother Lady Vinsantos, who closed the New Orleans Drag Workshop just before the pandemic in 2019, leaving behind a glamorously mutated art scene that now sets the city apart from the Southern Pageant traditions I remember from Mardis Gras & Decadences past.

The French “dragumentary” Last Dance honors Vinsantos for recontouring the New Orleans drag scene into the vibrant freak show it is today, so it was wonderful to see it presented with ceremonial prestige at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival.  As the older, stuffier crowd attending the local premiere of the Louis Armstrong documentary Black & Blues spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of The Prytania, the drunken reprobates waiting for the Vinsantos doc rushed in, ready to cheer on & heckle the projection of their friends’ faces onto the century-old silver screen.  The movie asks, “Remember when Neon Burgundy had that gigantic beard?” as if it’s making nostalgic small talk between stage acts at The All-Ways.  It treats local drag performers like Franky, Tarah Cards, and Gayle King Kong as if they were the first wave of punk bands to perform onstage at CBGB’s, a much-deserved reverence you’ll only find in film-fest documentaries like this & To Decadence With Love.  Director Coline Albert may not be from New Orleans, but she does a great job of highlighting what makes the local drag scene special, and how much of a hand Vinsantos had in shaping that scene into what it is.

Besides, New Orleans is only one part of Vinsantos’s story, as it’s told here.  This is a documentary of thirds, split between the closure & legacy of the New Orleans Drag Workshop, Vinsantos’s youthful run as a chaos queen in San Francisco, and the character’s official retirement show in Paris – a lifelong dream realized.  The writing & production of the Paris show helps establish a narrative momentum as Vinsantos reminisces about what he’s accomplished with his drag artistry in two distanced American cities, saving the movie from devolving into pure talking-heads tedium.  Even as someone who’s attended many shows populated entirely by Workshop “draguates” (as well as Vinsantos’s horror-host screening of the San Francisco cult film All About Evil), I’ve had little direct interaction with his own work, as he’s been gradually, consciously ceding the stage to younger talent.  Last Dance operates as a fly-on-the-wall portrait of Vinsantos as a self-doubting, frustrated artist with a chaotic stop-and-start creative process.  The Paris retirement show finale and clips from past triumphs also offer a decent sketch of what the Lady Vinsantos stage persona is like in action – a volatile combo of a Strait-Jacket era Joan Crawford and a Grande Dame revision of Freddy Kreuger.  The retirement of that persona is very much worth preserving here, even if she eventually rises from the grave to terrorize yet another city.

To Last Dance‘s credit, it doesn’t attempt to cover all of Vinsantos’s various art projects from throughout the decades.  His dollmaking, songwriting, and filmmaking efforts are only captured in glimpses, sometimes frustratingly so.  The archival fragments of the D.I.Y. drag-horror films he made as a prankish youth in San Francisco were the major highlight for me, since they have a vintage texture that can’t be matched by modern digital cameras.  Even just limiting itself to the dual retirement of the Drag Workshop and the Lady Vinsantos persona, though, the movie can still feel a little narratively unfocused, frantically plane-hopping between the three cities tethered to Vinsantos’s heart.  If it’s at all meandering or overlong, though, the indulgence is clearly earned.  If anything, we should have rolled out the red carpet and handed over a Key to the City to make the ceremony of this retirement documentary even more ostentatious.  As is, getting home from the post-screening Q&A after 1a.m. at least felt appropriate to the late-night freak scene Vinsantos helped establish here; the only thing the event was missing was a crowd-hyping MC and a two-drink minimum.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #173: Causeway (2022) & #NOFF2022

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Welcome to Episode #173 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Moviegoing with Bill‘s Bill Arceneaux to review the films they caught at the 33rd annual New Orleans Film Festival, starting with the locally-set Jennifer Lawrence drama Causeway.

00:00 #NOFF2022

14:44 Causeway

36:55 The Negro and the Cheese Knife
45:00 Signal and Noise
51:55 Really Good Friends
1:00:40 The Streets Tell a Story
1:03:03 Iron Sharpens Iron
1:15:15 Street Punx
1:17:37 In Search of … Pregame
1:26:30 Friday I’m in Love
1:29:50 Three Headed Beast
1:34:18 Last Dance
1:38:34 Nanny

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Quick Takes: Virtual Cinema at #NOFF2022

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I only attended two in-person screenings at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival: local premieres of the New Orleans drag scene documentary Last Dance and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning horror film Nanny.  Everything else I caught at this year’s festival was presented on its Virtual Cinema platform, streamed at home on my laptop & TV.  Logistical obstacles kept me from catching more titles in person, which is a shame, since one of the major joys of NOFF is being immersed in microbudget, niche-interest cinema alongside huge, enthusiastic audiences that those movies would not reach otherwise.  After a week of rushing from screening to screening trying to cram in as many personal, handcrafted pictures as I can before they disappear into the distribution ether, I tend to lose track of the textures & standards of professional, corporate filmmaking.  It’s a low-key, intimate headspace I never want to emerge from, and there’s something especially cool about dwelling there with the sizeable crowds that are missing from arthouse theaters every other week of the year.  I obviously couldn’t simulate that experience attending the festival’s Virtual Cinema at home, but I did still get to see some pretty great movies.

Last year, I wrote a quick-takes roundup of the higher-profile Spotlight Films I caught at NOFF, but this year I’m flipping it around.  Stay tuned for standalone reviews of Last Dance & Nanny, as well as an audio recap of the full #NOFF2022 experience on an upcoming episode of The Swampflix Podcast.  In the meantime, here’s a brief round-up of all the smaller, more esoteric NOFF titles I watched at home – the closest I could get to full immersion in indie-budget Festival Brain.

Three Headed Beast

The first film I watched on NOFF’s Virtual Cinema platform this year ended up being my clear favorite.  The intimate, largely dialogue free drama Three Headed Beast got me excited to spend a week watching nothing but microbudget indies with no commercial appeal, and I was surprised that each subsequent virtual “screening” was a case of diminishing returns.  A small, quiet dispatch from our sister city Austin (where one central Swampflix contributor currently dwells), it’s got an infectious D.I.Y. spirit that’ll convince you the only resources you need to make a great film is a few free friends & weekends and a halfway decent script.  It’s cute, it’s stylish, it’s sexy, and it’s a more emotionally involving drama than most Awards Season weepies with 1000x its budget.

In Three Headed Beast, a loving bisexual couple struggles with their open relationship when one of them catches feelings for a younger third.  The historical details of their relationship dynamic—how long they’ve been together, how long they’ve been open, who suggested the change, etc.—aren’t spelled out until late in the runtime, when the wordless montages of their various romantic trysts are put on pause for the film’s first lengthy exchange of dialogue.  It’s all clearly communicated in their body language before that late-in-the-game explainer, though, and a tryptic split screen editing technique helps pack as much of that visual information into the frame as possible in an intricate, exciting way.  The tension of who’s putting more logistical & theoretical work into their polyamory (through podcast & literature research) vs. who’s actually committing to that lifestyle with a full heart is complexly mapped out using very simple, straightforward tools of the editing room – pulling a great, low-key romance drama out of very limited resources.  Plus, it’s the only film I saw at this year’s festival that includes a tender act of analingus, which has got to count for something.

Friday I’m in Love

I’m embarrassed to admit that my two favorite selections at this proudly local film festival were both imports from Texas.  The pop culture documentary Friday I’m Love is a detailed hagiography of the locally infamous Numbers nightclub in Houston, which opened as a dinner-theatre cabaret before converting to an immensely popular gay disco, then mutating once again into a new wave & industrial music venue.  Decorated with the tape warp & pre-loaded fonts of a vintage home camcorder, the movie presents “Houston’s CBGBs” as a Totally 80s™ nostalgia pit, one filled to the brim with half-remembered anecdotes about counterculture legends as varied as Divine, Ministry, Grace Jones, Nine Inch Nails, and Siouxie Sioux.  The doc is primarily a time capsule record for people who happened to live near the gay Houston neighborhood Montrose when the club was its cultural epicenter, but anyone with a decent sense of taste in music would find something worthwhile in that hazy stroll down memory lane.

Friday I’m In Love commits the worst crimes of a low-budget pop culture doc.  It invites talking heads to endlessly daydream about the glory days; its director makes themself a part of the story for no particular reason; it could have easily been reduced to a short.  And yet it’s got so much great archival footage of the loveable freaks who ran wild in the pre-internet world that it easily transcends those petty quibbles.  It turns out I’m willing to overlook a lot of gruel & glut as long as you throw in some anecdotes about drag queens, goths, and Björk, and there’s something especially charming about seeing those beautiful freaks party in the Texas heat. It turns out I wasn’t the only one so easily charmed, either; the movie won this year’s Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Street Punx

While the one truly local film I caught on the Virtual Cinema platform wasn’t my favorite of the fest, it was maybe the best suited for the fest.  Street Punx is perfect NOFF programming in that it’s a flippant satire about the petty, logistical frustrations of making the exact kinds of movies that never make it past the film festival circuit.  You get to laugh at the ludicrous, aimless hipsters who don’t even know why they’re making art in the first place, then immediately dance with them at the afterparty.  It’s self-critical about the entire enterprise of making niche-interest, microbudget films about “the real world” instead of genuinely engaging with it, while also never taking that to-the-mirror indictment all that seriously.

In this low-key slacker comedy, a pair of directionless New Orleans filmmakers attempt to scrape together funds to make a movie about street punks in Myanmar.  Hiding behind moodboard comparisons to the unscripted No Wave influences of filmmakers like Jarmusch, they’re never straightforward to potential investors about why they want to make a movie in Myanmar, mostly because they don’t even know the reasons themselves.  The studded jackets and spiked mohawks of their potential subjects look great on camera, especially in contrast to the ceremonial Buddhist robes worn by local monks & nuns.  They’re not even really interested in those surface-level aesthetics, though; nor are they are interested in the violent military coups that give those punk-culture rebels a political purpose.  Their concerns are selfish & petty well past the point of parody (including the director using the potential location shoot as an excuse to bang her Myanmarese crush), and most of the movie is a comedy about attempts to justify the project as anything other than a grotesque personal indulgence.  It’s a funny joke too, even if Street Punx itself feels a little messy & aimless in the exact ways it’s critiquing its would-be film-within-a-film for being.

Wetiko

My least favorite film of my Virtual Cinema selections was also the one with the highest ambitions, one that has a much clearer political purpose than the fictional Myanmar punk culture film in Street Punx.  In Wetiko, an Indigenous youth gets tangled up in a spiritualist turf war between authentic Maya shamans and their phony Euro initiators in the Yucatan, since his family’s pet store supplies hallucinogenic toads needed for their rituals.  It’s sharply critical of druggy white colonizers coopting Maya shaman traditions for recreational & self-aggrandizing purposes, recalling the criticisms of ayahuasca tourism in the overlooked, underloved drama Icaros: A Vision.  Featuring performances in the English, Spanish, Mayan, Afrikaans, and (fictional) Empire of Love languages, it’s got an impressively broad scope for such a tiny production, and the New Orleans Film Festival should feel proud to have hosted its World Premiere.

I just couldn’t shake the feeling that Wetiko isn’t as great as it could have been.  It’s shot on film, so it’s automatically got a leg up over most modern festival programming in terms of texture, color, and warmth.  It’s a shame, then, that it loses some of that ground in its choppy, “trippy”, CG-laced editing techniques during its hallucination sequences, which often feel cliché when they need to feel darkly magical.  Thinking back to the way this year’s magnificent Neptune Frost updated its own ancient mystique with the string lights & glowsticks of modern urban living, it’s easy to find Wetiko lacking in comparison.  I still found plenty to enjoy about it though, from the eyeroll-worthy cult members of the Empire of Love Conscious Community Center’s awe for “the universal hum of connectedness” to their satisfying violent overthrow at the hands of true local shamans who actually know what they’re talking about.  If its stoney-baloney trip-outs had just looked a little more uniquely uncanny & nightmarish, it likely would’ve been my favorite screening on this list.  “Impressive but flawed” is far from the worst thing you could say about a film festival title, though, and it was cool to see one of these low-profile movies punch above its weight class.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #148 of The Swampflix Podcast: Shapeless (2021) & #NOFF2021

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Welcome to Episode #148 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by local film critic Bill Arceneaux to review the films they caught at the 32nd annual New Orleans Film Festival (which Bill also covered for The Bayou Brief), starting with the eating disorder-themed body horror Shapeless. Enjoy!

00:00 Welcome

10:45 Shapeless

26:40 17 Year Locust
38:04 Blue Country
46:30 100 Years from Mississippi
54:15 The Laughing Man

1:07:20 Socks on Fire
1:18:05 Homebody
1:23:40 Memoria
1:30:31 C’mon C’mon
1:40:33 Red Rocket

1:49:20 Best of 2021 homework

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Socks on Fire (2021)

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When I visited a close friend during post-Katrina exile in their home state of Alabama, one of their favorite ways to pass the time was listening to a swap meet radio show that negotiated a buy-sell-trade market of second-hand items among their audience.  It was a fascinating listen, not only for the absurdism & obscurity of the items being bartered, but also because of the eccentric personalities of the people who’d call in to haggle over them.  That memory flooded back to me watching the documentary/narrative hybrid film Socks on Fire, which disrupts its central drama with reenactments of that exact call-in swap meet show, deployed as Greek-chorus chapter breaks.  Even more so than its subjects/characters endlessly chanting “Roll tide!” and dressing in crimson red, that radio show device placed me in its Alabama setting with an uncanny specificity I never thought possible, considering it’s a state I’ve only visited a handful of times in my life.

As its title promises, Socks on Fire opens with flaming socks pinned to a backyard clothesline, with filmmaker-poet Bo McGuire narrating questions of what you’re supposed to do with a loved one’s leftover possessions after they pass away.  What to do with his deceased grandmother’s used socks has a clear-enough answer: burn ’em.  It’s much trickier for the family to decide what to do with her lifelong home, of which she did not leave a living will to assign possession to any of her surviving children or grandchildren.  The most obvious answer is to hand the empty house over to McGuire’s uncle, a near-destitute drag queen who doesn’t have another place to live.  McGuire’s fiercely homophobic aunt opposes that plan, despite her supposedly Christian values, and viciously fights to leave her brother homeless.  McGuire uses the documentary as an excuse to prod at how the siblings’ relationship got to be so poisoned in the first place, and how that friction distorts his own sense of place as a gay artist in his insular Alabama hometown.

I want to describe Socks on Fire as a Southern-fried revision of this year’s auto-documentary Madame, but that doesn’t quite capture the camp or sardonicism of its humor.  It operates more like an earnest version of the over-the-top Southern theatrics of Sordid Lives, played like a tell-all airing of a family’s dirty laundry instead of a sitcom.  Bo McGuire illustrates his sordid family history with a mixed-media approach, breaking from traditional documentary storytelling with photo album collages, home video tape distortions, fine art photography of suspended household objects, and poetic monologues that ominously refer to decades of conflicts that have gnarled his family tree.  It’s when his uncle & fellow queens start re-creating those conflicts in camped-up drag routines that the movie touches on something really special, though.  Turning his homophobic aunt into a drag character was an especially inspired choice, and it’s one that clues you into McGuire’s deliciously fucked up boundaries between humor & heartbreak.

I’m not entirely convinced that Socks on Fire is about the disputes over McGuire’s grandmother’s estate, so much as it’s about his own relationship with his isolated hometown.  The swap-meet radio show, the Steel Magnolias-style trips to the hair salon, and the awed references to Reba McEntire as a living god are all tied into his aunt & uncle’s battle over a home that only one of them needs, but they feel more personal to Bo McGuire as the narrator than they feel relevant to that story.  By the time he collects all the small-town women who shaped his life & persona for a single photoshoot, it’s clear that he’s mostly returning to that place of origin to uncover something about himself, not necessarily about his family.  It’s all hyper-specific, intensely intimate, and playfully experimental in its internal visual language, which is pretty much all I ever ask for out of a movie.  It’s a privilege to be invited into McGuire’s boozy Southern psyche like this, an old-fashioned flavor of Alabama hospitality.

-Brandon Ledet

Homebody (2021)

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Of the three low-budget, low-profile indies I caught as virtual selections from this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, I did not expect my favorite would be the crossgender body-swap comedy.  In Homebody, a gender-questioning 9-year-old boy discovers the meditative power to inhabit the body of his adult-woman babysitter and lives a day in her literal shoes.  It’s a premise you’d expect to find in a 1980s sex comedy or in amateur online erotica, but here it’s handled with an innocence & sweetness that disarms its potential for moral or political disaster.  Four years ago, Your Name. kicked open the door for more thoughtful, earnest gender-swap comedies to saunter through, and this is the first movie I’ve seen take advantage of that opening so far.  It makes sense that delicate, modernized approach to the genre would come from a film festival acquisition and not a mainstream comedy, so let’s appreciate this sweet little movie before the inevitable live-action Hollywood remake of Your Name. spoils the mood.

Relative newcomer Colby Minifie puts in an A+ slapstick performance as the babysitter host-body in this possession story.  Her client is a “Wells For Boys” type indoor kid who’s obsessed with his babysitter in a way that extends beyond the boundaries of a typical childhood crush into an intense jealousy & idolization.  A few quick YouTube tutorials later, and he’s using “free spirit” transcendental meditation to inhabit her body, living a casual afternoon as an adult woman.  Meanwhile, her consciousness is locked away in a Sunken Place limbo, slowly emerging to coach him through the trickier parts of living in her body before their proper places are righted.  The scope of the picture is intimately small & mostly guarded from danger, but it doesn’t shy away from the squirmier curiosities children have when figuring out their relationships with their gender & their bodies.  This particular kid indulges in crayon illustrations of his vore fantasies, carefully listens to adults piss from the outside of locked bathroom doors, and inadvertently invites his babysitter’s boyfriend to hook up while he’s piloting her body – all uncomfortable glimpses into his private psyche.  For the most part, though, you just hope he has a nice afternoon exploring his feelings & identity on the other side of the gender divide, hopefully without ruining this sweet woman’s life in the process.

Homebody makes an impressive impact, considering its limited means.  Director Joseph Sackett wrings a lot of visual vibrancy out of the crayon drawings & YouTube meditation tutorials that illustrate his protagonist’s gender journey.  The movie also would not work at all if not for the talent of Minifie in her dual role as babysitter & client, clearly defined as two separate personae through the subtleties of her physical presence.  It’s a movie that could very easily sour its own mood with a tonal or political misstep.  It’s also one that could allow itself to be reductively summed up as “Freaky Friday meets My Life in Pink“.  It’s got a lot more going on than that sales pitch would imply, though, especially as an intimate character study of a highly specific type of child that doesn’t tend to get a lot of screentime.  Overall, it’s a wonderfully earnest exploration of childhood gender identity & general obsessiveness.  It was also the highlight discovery of this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, at least for me.

-Brandon Ledet