OUTwatch – Wine Country’s LGBTQI Film Festival is an online virtual film Festival from Friday, October 16 through Sunday October 25 this year. We’ve named the Festival: Looking Back; Moving Forward.  We honor those individuals and groups who fought for LGBTQI rights bringing us to this point in time, where we both enjoy many advancements but still struggle to keep those civil rights and expand them to our entire community.  The Festival will showcase four enlightening, empowering and entertaining documentaries. 

This year, our featured films are: Tongues Untied This 1989 experimental documentary film is  directed by Marlon Riggs, one of the top gay filmmakers of the time. It features Essex Hemphill, a celebrated Black Gay male poet as well as Riggs, actor Brian Freeman, and others. The film seeks, in its author’s words to, “…shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” This film combines political statement, spoken word and dance to create a film that won awards from Berlin, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Cured This powerful new documentary by Bennett Singer illuminates a pivotal yet largely unknown chapter in the struggle for LGBT equality: the campaign that led the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973. Through archival footage and interviews with the activists, this film reveals a pivotal moment in the gay liberation movement—one that changed not only the LGBTQ community, but the field of psychiatry. Ahead of the Curve  In 1990, Franco created a safe place for lesbians in the form of Curve magazine. Her approach to threats and erasure in the ”90s was to lift all kinds of lesbians up and make them beautifully visible. The magazine helped build a foundation for many intersectional movements being led by today’s activists in the face of accelerating threats to the LGBTQ community. TransMilitary This 2018 documentary chronicles the lives of four individuals (Senior Airman Logan Ireland, Corporal Laila Villanueva, Captain Jennifer Peace & First Lieutenant El Cook) defending their country’s freedom while fighting for their own. They put their careers and their families’ livelihoods on the line by coming out as transgender to top brass officials in the Pentagon in hopes of attaining the equal right to serve. The ban was lifted in 2016, but with President Trump now trying to reinstate it, their futures hang in the balance again.

If you would like more information about this topic or to schedule an interview with Co-producers Gary Carnivele, Jody Laine and Shad Reinstein, please call Gary Carnivele at 707.938.0761 or email gary@outwatchfilmfest.org.  

Calendar Listing

Friday, October 16 – Sunday, October 25. 

OUTwatch – Wine Country’s LGBTQI Film Festival October 16 – 25.  An exciting virtual film festival, featuring four important LGBTQI documentaries.  

Each film: $12. 

Phone: 707.225-1302   

Web site: www.OutWatchFilmFest.org