“I had done some things for them, on and off for years,” Ansen said. “The former festival director Darryl MacDonald, who was a friend of mine, asked me to come aboard about three years ago as lead programmer. I had stopped working for the L.A. Film Festival, where I was the artistic director for five years and it was kind of a great match for me, because I have a place in Palm Springs. It’s a festival that is right up my alley and I love its emphasis on foreign language films, it’s very large and varied, so it was a very nice fit.” Ansen, who spent nearly three decades as a film


ravaging their community; while the U.S. documen- tary Love, Cecil explores the life of photographer and designer Cecil Beaton. The Rage Monthlyspoke with renowned film


critic David Ansen, who serves as Palm Springs International Film Festival’s Lead Programmer to get the scoop on how the festival comes together and what audiences can expect.


critic forNewsweek, said that going from critic to programmer was “a natural transition,” but one with a catch for him. “You bring all of your experience and my many, many years of watching movies. But it’s different, for one thing it’s much more of a team sport, whereas being a critic is a solitary profession,” he explained. “And you look at movies a little bit differently; as a programmer you’ve got to keep your audience in mind. You can’t just program everything exactly to your own taste. But we know our audience there and I know what they like and you try to balance it out.” Ansen is pleased with the scope of the LGBT movies being showcased at this year’s festival and that diversity is important when selecting films. This year’s entries had an unexpected quality to them, as he explained. “This year I was really struck by the number of movies that were submitted by other countries that have very strong LGBT content… and from countries that you might not expect it from, like South Africa,” he said. “It’s not so surprising from Norway, say, but Finland submittedTom of Finland. Now that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. It was not noted as a particularly gay-friendly country until fairly recently and yet that’s their Oscar submission…I think that’s an encouraging sign.”


As for what he would consider to be his biggest achievement during his tenure as lead programmer, Ansen had this to say. “There’s been a lot of things that have been gratifying about it, you get these wonderful moments,” he stated. “I’ve always compared being a programmer to being like a midwife—you’re bringing this baby into the world and showing it off. It’s also very gratifying when a filmmaker comes into town; there’s one particular example that I always think of. There was this young, fairly experimental Greek director who had never been to the U.S. and had all sorts of preconceptions about it,” he recanted. “He was pretty far to the left and his movie was not a mainstream movie. He was very excited that we programmed it and very excited by the reception. He wrote me this unbelievable e- mail and said that his entire view of the United States had been changed by the experience and turned into a very positive thing.” Ansen detailed how the LGBT submissions will


be celebrated with a special party, calledGay!La during the Palm Springs International Film Festival at Toucan’s Tiki Lounge (2100 N Palm Canyon Drive), onThursday, January 11. “We’ve got about 19 LGBTQ movies this year,” Ansen said. “I mean there’s actually more if you count movies that have significant gay characters. We do ‘Gay!La,’ which is a centerpiece of the festival, and there’s a ‘Gay!La Hers’ and ‘Gay!La His.’ Last year, we combined them and Gus Van Sant directed the first section of When We Riseand everybody was there, Gus, all the actors and there was a ten-minute standing ovation. I’ve never seen one go on for so long. It was a perfect audience for it, an older gay audience that had lived through that whole experience. They were incredibly moved, people were crying, it was an amazing thing. “This year, we’re going back to the ‘His’ and


This year I was really struck by the number of movies that were submitted by


other countries that have very strong LGBT content…and


from countries that you might not expect it from.”


For more information about the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the entire film schedule and event lineup, or to purchase tickets for the Gay!La events, go topsfilmfest.org.


‘Hers’ andMy Days of Mercyis going to be the Gay!La Hers (Thursday and Friday, January 11 and 12), which features a love story between Ellen Page and Kate Mara and there’s a lot of chemistry there,” Ansen said. “We are going to do a double bill of two documentaries for the Gay!La His, one isThe Gospel According to André (Thursday, January 11 through Saturday, January 13), and the other that is very dishy and fun is the Scotty Bowers docu- mentaryScotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Thursday and Friday, January 11 and 12).”


JANUARY 2018 | RAGE monthly 37


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