A Queer Review of the Austin Film Festival (2023)
Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.

What's the value of forest? Is it enough to manage our forests the sustainable way locally, as in Switzerland, where they are managed wisely since 150 years? Or this means debts on other forests as Amazon? And what can we do about it?
Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.
A film about family and sacrifice... and carnivorous locusts coming after you.
'The Lost Daughter' doesn't paint over the choices Leda and Nina make as mothers as right or wrong but examines the messy in-between.
“I’m always interested in exploring female fantasy, and the sexy witch is a loaded archetype that is simultaneously about men’s fears and fantasies about women, and women’s feelings of empowerment and agency. So whereas we are used to seeing the sexy witch or the femme fatale from the outside, I wanted to explore her from the inside.” - Anna Biller, on why she made The Love Witch
“And I think to myself….what a wonderful world”. Louis Armstrong sang about this notion via his classic 1967 song, an ode to witnessing elements of our life that should be but some reminders of exactly what that concluding line of each verse indicates. Now we see our contemporary realities and, just being honest, it makes a sentiment like this seem SO overtly far away….perhaps even impossible….to accept or believe could be. It sounds harsh, but again, so much of what is occurring speaks not to beauty, but bedlam.
In the shadow of towering film production companies lived dozens of grindhouses, genres, and low-budget films deemed too “unclean” for the modern film audience.