PALM SPRINGS SHORTFEST: SENSUAL
SUMMERTIME FUN
by thom senzee Tickets for the 2014 Palm Springs International ShortFest and Film Market, taking place Tues-
day, June 17 through Monday, June 23, may have gone on sale back in April, but the “reel” excite- ment is just now winding up as the lineup of titles has been selected. Now all of you aficionados of short-form cinema can grab your sunscreen and your favorite pair of movie star sunglasses and head out to the desert’s early summer film fest scene.
In anticipation of ShortFest 2014, The Rage Monthly spoke with two bud-
ding directors whose films may be of special interest to LGBT audiences—not to mention anyone who loves love, sex, beauty and finely crafted cinematic entertainment. “I feel like it doesn’t matter about gender, race or even sex,” says Ping-Wen Wang, director of ShortFest entry, Between Us. Wang’s film explores the dynamics of a lesbian affair between an art teacher hired by a woman and her husband to teach the couple’s children. In the 11-minute film, Tara’s children and husband come home unexpect-
edly after a planned swimming outing is canceled—just in time to almost catch her with Ariel, the new art teacher, in the act of impassioned, adulterous lovemaking. Art teacher Ariel gets stuck hiding in a closet, suddenly finding herself privy to the private conversations of her newfound lover and her lover’s husband. She soon has a choice to make—a choice between false promises and the promise of true love. The fact that the two women are indeed two women in love, or in lust as the
case may be, is unimportant says director Wang. It’s the question—the time- less, universal question—of love itself that matters most. “If real people love each other, those things are incidental,” says Wang. “What matters is that people
feel the need and the strong desire to experience love. The genders and sexual orientations of characters in a love story should be incidentally demographic,” says Wang. “The star of the show should always be ‘in love’ in a love story.” A second-year graduate student in film production at Loyola Marymount
University near Los Angeles, Wang says she is not completely satisfied with her production, Between Us. “If it’s a success, I think it’s because of the parts of the production process called casting and cinematography,” she told The Rage Monthly. “I was very fortunate to have Kelsey Taylor as my cinematographer and also to have the very good actors that were cast.” It should be noted, that Wang’s modesty, however endearing, belies the
truth of her film’s lovely, high-value production aesthetics, sumptuous direction—good luck to any recently-reformed smokers when they see the cigarette scene, which looks better than sex and says more with each cloudy exhale than most people can with a thousand words—and its storyline that is built on the writer-director’s genuine convictions about the universality of love. And get this: Between Us, which was also accepted by the prestigious New Zealand film festival called OutTakes, is Wang’s first short film produced with sound. “In film school, we have to do a silent film first,” she said. “This is my first
Palm Springs 44 RAGE monthly | JUNE 2014 RAGE monthly CONTINUES ON PAGE 46
LGBT CINEMA AND
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