Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival opens Thursday with the Cannes-saluted “La Bola Negra.” Oscar buzz is in the air. It’s also the first major gay film in the 44-year-old event’s history, after a decades-long quest by organizers to showcase high-profile queer stories.
The nearly three-hour passionate panorama, which links three gay men in stories set before, during and after Spain’s Civil War, was written and directed by two gay men and stars three gay actors — rare for a big release. A gay-themed manuscript by Federico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish poet and playwright executed in that war, figures in the plot. He is played by a gay Madrid playwright and performance artist.
“This is unprecedented in so many ways,” Reeling founder and executive director Brenda Webb said in a Zoom interview. “An epic queer love story — those don’t come along very often.” In past years she would lobby Hollywood studios for months to screen a new gay or lesbian feature in Reeling with no luck. “Brokeback Mountain” was a nope. Webb did get “Bros,” “Bent,” “Stonewall” and “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” “When we have gotten them, they’ve not come easy to us,” she said.
Booking “La Bola Negra” culminates a “sea change” in mainstream regard of Reeling and other LGBTQ+ fests, said Webb. “Part of the difficulty is that if a distributor had a gay film, one of the reasons they didn’t want it to be an LGBTQ film festival was because they didn’t want it to be labeled ‘gay,’ even if it was gay. It’s almost like they tried to keep it a secret, right? It was a gay film, but it was kept closeted by distributors who were afraid it would limit the audience if they had called it a queer film or put it in a queer film festival.” Over time, gay and lesbian fests demonstrated there was a large audience, gay and straight. “Netflix, I think, sees the queer audience as key to the success of this film,” she noted.
Netflix picked Reeling for the local launch of “La Bola Negra.” Ticket holders at the sold-out Music Box Theatre screening Thursday will get a first look at the likely Oscar contender. The Spanish-made subtitled film comes back to the Music Box for a 35 mm theatrical run next month.
Netflix releases “La Bola Negra” in select theaters Oct. 16 but does not start streaming the film until Dec. 2. Variety reports that “47-day exclusive window [is] the widest theatrical commitment the company has given one of its titles to date.”
“La Bola Negra” premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where co-directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo were jointly named best director. The longtime collaborators co-wrote the screenplay with Spanish playwright Alberto Conejero.
“We wanted it to be a big movie to assert that LGBTQ+ stories can be big — that they don’t have to appeal to just a niche audience,” Calvo told the Madrid newspaper El Pais. “Let’s give all the straight people the war movie they want, but let’s give our community the love story that they want,” he told the audience at the Telluride Film Festival last week, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Touted by Chicago Filmmakers as “the second-longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival in the world,” Reeling was founded in 1981 with the goal of giving Chicago’s LGBTQ+ community the stories they wanted but were not getting from Hollywood. This year’s fest will screen 36 narrative and documentary features and 59 shorts from 22 countries at three venues from Sept. 17-27.
The nonprofit Chicago Filmmakers, now based in Edgewater, was originally located at 6 W. Hubbard St. when Webb began the festival. The 90-seat storefront theater showed 16 mm shorts by experimental filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger and Barbara Hammer.
“They bring in a lot of experimental work,” documentary filmmaker Gordon Quinn told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1982. “Their Lesbian and Gay Film Festival was an enormous success. It influenced film programs around the country.”
Audiences grew and offerings included more narrative and nonfiction feature-length entries by independent filmmakers. This year’s lineup includes diverse genres, even a horror film with a satanic ectopic pregnancy.
Here are a few to check out:
“Meeting Marsha”
Writer-director McKenzie Goodwin, co-host of the Two Dykes and a Mic podcast, scores a delightful L.A. comedy on queer careerism. The title’s aging TV star, the egg donor mom of a struggling playwright, shows up and upsets a lesbian wedding proposal. The screening is sponsored by Tello Films, a streamer that bills itself as “Like Netflix, but lesbian.” (6:30 p.m. Sept. 23, Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St. )
“The Brittney Griner Story”
Alexandria Stapleton directs a moving profile of the celebrated 6-foot-9-inch pro basketball center who was detained on drug charges and sentenced to a Russian penal colony. This ESPN documentary ought to appeal to more than WNBA fans. Spoiler: She was freed in a high-profile prisoner swap. Co-presented by Bad Queers Podcast and Babe’s Sports Bar. (4:15 p.m. Sunday, Landmark)
“The Celluloid Closet”
For closing night, Webb books a 30th anniversary screening of a landmark documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Lily Tomlin narrates this critique of the history of Hollywood stereotypes of gay, lesbian and trans characters. The title comes from the 1981 book by Vito Russo. He started researching when working in the Museum of Modern Art’s film archive. Webb remembers him lugging two cans of 35 mm clips to the Music Box for a snowy Champagne opening night in 1986. “I was so incredibly impressed that he had gone through this hellish day [canceled flights, bad weather] and that he had such a positive showmanship,” recalled Webb. (6 p.m. Sept. 27, Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema, 1326 W. Hollywood Ave.)
Reeling’s opening and closing nights both make real the agenda found on the fest’s site: “For 44 years, Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival has believed in the magic of queer cinema. Not because it lets us escape the world, but because it helps us see the world, and each other, a little more clearly.”