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.

Charming and continually drunk millionaire sees a woman on the street and falls madly in love with her, she works as a striptease dancer and has a mentally handicapped brother. They fall in love, but he unfortunately has to marry someone else.
Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.
Dramatic Horror!!! Wait, what?? Did you say "dramatic horror"?? IS there such a thing?? I mean, TRULY. Well, if San Francisco-based, Pakistani-born independent filmmaker Dr. Hassan Zee and this film critic have anything to say about it, there IS such a beast as experienced through the director's newest feature film set to officially debut October 4th in the City by the Bay. Folks, indie film will always be a bastion of experimentation and originality, and this film for me fits that bill.
SPOILERS AHEAD. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song distinguished itself from Hollywood films of its time by introducing New Wave cinema storytelling methods into Black cinema.
Sorry to Bother You ultimately speaks to the unfair advantages that the country’s power structures award to those with the resources to control others, as Lift’s easy access to the media allows his opinion to be the only one that matters in the eyes of the unsuspecting and easily impressed public. Moreover, it reveals the extent to which the American Dream has any true validity. It postulates how the promise of success and fulfillment as promoted by the American Dream more often than not leads to the undoing of the individual. Interestingly, in its revealing of the American Dream as merely a facade, Sorry to Bother You wisely questions whether or not anything can really be done to undo a system that has been accepted and in action for centuries.
It’s fun, it’s energetic, but it’s also understated and vicarial. Zola is a modern black fairytale and future of black movies.
Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris, with an economy of language, but a world of expression, weave us inside this futuristic tale of how your “one true love” may exist in the future in Benjamin Cleary's 'Swan Song.'