Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema
From intimate romances to radical queer comedies, heartbreaking dramas to fearless genre films, our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series celebrates the diverse and endlessly fascinating history of Queer Cinema from around the world. Tickets to this series are discounted down to $9 across all screenings!
Happy Together
- Mon, Sep 21
The Frida Cinema's seating is first-come, first-serve. For our Midnight Screenings, please plan on arriving by 11:30pm to ensure ample time for parking, picking up concessions, and securing optimal seats. Screening will begin promptly at midnight.
Director: Wong Kar-Wai Run Time: 96 min. Release Year: 1997
Starring: Chang Chen, Gregory Dayton, Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai
This year's Art House 101 series is concentrating on Global Queer Cinema, and where better to start than a 4K restoration of Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown: Happy Together. Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung star as a couple traveling through Argentina that are locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy. They break up, make up, and fall apart again and again. Setting out to depict the dynamics of a queer relationship with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, when the country’s LGBT community suddenly faced an uncertain future, Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of a love affair that’s by turns devastating and deliriously romantic. Shot by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle in both luminous monochrome and luscious saturated color, Happy Together is an intoxicating exploration of displacement and desire that swoons with the ache and exhilaration of love at its heart-tearing extremes.
Poison
- Mon, Sep 28
The Frida Cinema's seating is first-come, first-serve. For our Midnight Screenings, please plan on arriving by 11:30pm to ensure ample time for parking, picking up concessions, and securing optimal seats. Screening will begin promptly at midnight.
Director: Todd Haynes Run Time: 85 min. Release Year: 1991
Starring: Anne Giotta, Buck Smith, Edith Meeks, Lydia Lafleur, Millie White
The second feature directed by Todd Haynes,the Oscar-nominated filmmaker of Far from Heaven and Carol, Poison is the next film up in our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series. This groundbreaking American Indie was the most fervently debated film of the early 1990s and a trailblazing landmark of queer cinema. A work of immense visual invention, Haynes’ spectacular follow-up to his legendary Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is audacious, disturbing and thrillingly cinematic. Inspired by the writings of Jean Genet, Poison deftly interweaves trio of transgressive tales-“Hero,” “Horror” and “Homo”-that build toward a devastating climax. “Hero,” shot in mock TV-documentary style, tells a bizarre story of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice; “Horror,” filmed like a delirious ’50s B-movie melodrama, is a gothic tale of a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague; while “Homo” explores the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates. A runaway hit which made national headlines when it was attacked by right-wing figures including Dick Armey, Ralph Reed and minister Donald Wildmon, Poison is unsettling, unforgettable and thoroughly entertaining.