Gay-Lesbian Film Tour Makes Stop At Neptune

Most American cities have an annual film festival of some sort, and some have gone on to the next stage: creating monthly specialty festivals.

The International Festival of Films by Women Directors has become an annual fall fixture at the Seattle Art Museum, and last summer's Arab Film Festival is not likely to be a one-shot event. For the third year in a row, the Neptune is the site of a gay-lesbian film festival.

Beginning tomorrow and continuing through Feb. 21, more than two dozen films about gays and lesbians will be screened at the Neptune. Many have played here before, but only for one-night stands at other festivals, and several are Seattle premieres.

The films have been selected from the schedule of the 1989 and 1990 New York International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film, and Seattle is the first stop on a 12-city tour that will include Houston, Boston, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The official title of the tour is ``Passion, Politics and Popcorn,'' which suggests the diversity of films, styles and issues addressed.

The schedule includes one Oscar-winning documentary (``Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt''), one classic from the early 1930s (the original German version of ``Maedchen in Uniform''), a legendary underground picture (``Pink Narcissus'') and a number of serious recent movies (the East German ``Coming Out,'' the British ``Nocturne'').

Tickets are $6 per program, and they're available at the Neptune's box office at each performance. This is the schedule:

``Summer Vacation 1999,'' at 5:30 p.m. tomorrow and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Previously shown at the 1989 Seattle International Film Festival, this unique Japanese film has 14-year-old girls playing a group of teen-aged schoolboys, one of them an apparent suicide.

``Because the Dawn'' and ``Nocturne,'' at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow and 7:30 p.m. next Thursday. Two British lesbian dramas that run less than an hour. The former is a seduction story about a saxophonist and a sports photographer. ``Nocturne'' stars Lisa Eichhorn (John Heard's suicidal wife in ``Cutter's Way'') as a repressed woman who relives her childhood memories when two lesbian vagabonds break into her home.

``Comrades in Arms'' and ``Rights and Reactions,'' at 9:30 p.m. tomorrow and 5:30 p.m. Monday. A pair of hour-long documentaries, the first combining newsreel footage with re-creations of gay affairs during World War II. (Directed by Stuart Marshall, it plays like a British response to ``Before Stonewall,'' the 1984 documentary that established World War II as a coming-out occasion for many American gays and lesbians.) ``Rights and Reactions'' deals with gay and lesbian civil rights and the AIDS epidemic in New York City.

``Pink Narcissus,'' at midnight tomorrow and 9:30 p.m. next Thursday. Last seen at the Broadway's sadly defunct midnight-movie series, this 1970 underground cult movie was photographed in Super 8 by Jim Bidgood, then blown up to 35mm. It's an erotic fantasy in spectacularly garish color.

``Desire,'' at 1:30 p.m. Saturday and 9:30 p.m. Wednesday. Stuart Marshall's feature-length 1989 film about the brief flowering of homosexuality in Germany before and during the rise of the Nazis. The Los Angeles Times' Kevin Thomas calls this ``one of the most thoughtful films in the festival . . . very informative on the fate of homosexuals and lesbians in the concentration camps.''

``The International Sweethearts of Rhythm,'' ``Storme: The Lady of the Jewel Box'' and ``Tiny and Ruby: Hell Divin' Women,'' at 3:30 p.m. Saturday. This collection of half-hour shorts has been titled ``Sisters in Jazz.'' The first and last films were co-directed by Greta Schiller, who made the prize-winning ``Before Stonewall''; both deal with a touring black musical group of the 1930s and 1940s. Michelle Parkerson's ``Storme'' is a documentary about America's first integrated female-impersonation troupe.

``Friends Forever,'' at 5:30 p.m. Saturday and 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. A feature-length 1986 Danish film about gay teen-agers. Directed by Stefan Henszelman.

``Another Way,'' at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. Hungarian lesbian love story that won the best actress prize for Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. It takes place during the period following the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and was directed by Karoly Makk, a male graduate of the Budapest Academy of Film Art who created several Hungarian post-war classics, including ``Love,'' a 1971 film that came out on videotape last month.

``Coming Out,'' at 9:30 p.m. Saturday and 5:30 p.m. next Thursday. This prize-winning 1989 film is an eye-opening look at sexual repression in East Berlin. It's also a depressing portrait of a confused gay schoolteacher who strings along a girlfriend, doesn't seem to be very good at his job and fumbles his big chance at romance. The character is such a nonentity that it's ultimately difficult to feel much sympathy for him, or even to understand what he wants or intends at film's end. Previously shown at last year's Seattle International Film Festival.

``Maedchen in Uniform,'' at 1:30 p.m. Sunday. Two years ago, New York's gay film tour showed the sentimental 1957 color remake of this 1931 anti-Nazi classic. Set in a strict boarding school for girls, the original dealt openly with lesbianism at around the same time Hollywood was transforming plays like ``The Children's Hour'' into heterosexual stories.

``Night Out'' and ``Trojans,'' at 3:30 p.m. Sunday and 9:30 p.m. Monday. A 48-minute New Zealand production, praised for its black-and-white cinematography and a starring performance by Colin Batrouney, plus a 33-minute British interpretation of the life of Constantine Cavafy, the Greek poet who lived in Alexandria in the 19th century.

``Looking For Langston'' and ``Tongues Untied,'' at 5:30 p.m. Sunday. These films about black gay men have become a popular double bill on the festival circuit. The former is Isaac Julien's artfully photographed, 40-minute British fantasy about Langston Hughes' life in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. ``Tongues Untied'' is Marlon T. Riggs' 55-minute film about interracial homoeroticism.

``Life on Earth As I Know It,'' ``How to Kill Her,'' ``Can't You Take a Joke?'' and ``Justine's Film,'' at 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Four lesbian shorts, produced in Australia, Canada and the United States, and grouped together under the title, ``In and Out of Love.'' The 45-minute Canadian entry, ``Justine's Film,'' won praise from the National Film Board of Canada's short film jury.

``Days of Greek Gods,'' at 9:30 p.m. Sunday. An unnerving collection of innocuous, unintentionally funny shorts that passed for soft-core gay porn in the 1950s. Previously shown at the 1989 Seattle International Film Festival, the program is a jaw-dropping reminder of the repressed sexuality of the period.

``She Must Be Seeing Things,'' at 7:30 p.m. Monday. Feature-length 1987 American film directed by Sheila McLaughlin, about a lesbian affair between a filmmaker and a lawyer who disguises herself as a man in order to follow her lover.

``Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt,'' at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. Dustin Hoffman narrates this Oscar-winning 1989 documentary, which is made up of interviews with AIDS widows, widowers and other survivors, including Sallie Perryman, who lost her 11-year-old hemophiliac son; Vito Russo and Tracy Torrey, who watched their lovers die (both Russo and Torrey died of AIDS after the film was completed); Sara Lewinstein, who lost the gay father of her son; and a woman whose drug-addicted husband succumbed to AIDS. All five participated in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and this inevitably heartbreaking film ends with the ceremonial unfolding of the quilt in Washington, D.C.

``Novembermoon,'' at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Alexandre von Grote's moving German/French 1984 drama about a lesbian affair during the occupation of France, involving a Jewish refugee and a Parisian woman who hides her while pretending to collaborate with the Nazis. Garbriele Osberg is particularly striking as the refugee.