The Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival returns for its 28th year

Friday, October 18

Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton

“Follow your own weird” was the mantra of artist James Broughton, and he certainly lived up to it, crafting a career as a poet and film artist in the bohemian scene of ’60s San Francisco. This doc, by Dawn Logsdon, Stephen Silha and Eric Slade, follows Broughton’s life, beginning with his experimental filmmaking (including the film the still image above is from, The Bed) and moving on into his advocacy of sexual liberation and the late-in-life relationship that reinvigorated his career.

Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton screens at 5 p.m. Friday. Admission is free. Woodland Pattern will screen a selection of Broughton’s films November 22, to celebrate the filmmaker’s centennial.

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Reaching for the Moon

This biopic takes as its subject Elizabeth Bishop, an American poet who went to Brazil in 1951 for what she thought would be two weeks. She ended up staying for 12 years; the reason in part: Lota de Macedo Soares, the woman she fell in love with. Reaching for the Moon follows Bishop over that decade-plus, as her relationship complicates with the stresses of trying to maintain a household with Soares’ former lover and child, the tensions of two artists working alongside and around each other, and hardships neither can see coming.

Reaching for the Moon, in English and Portuguese with Portuguese subtitles, screens at 7 p.m. Friday. 

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Adulthood, Approximately: An Evening of Men’s Shorts

This shorts program contains five different flicks ranging in length from 10 to 26 minutes, each a coming-of-age tale in its own way. Films on the docket include: Jackpot (above), a riff on classic teen comedies about a boy trying to make it home with a stash of gay porn; Adults Only, about a man isolated by a former romance who finds himself drawn to a porn arcade; Yeah, Kowalski!, a comedy about a 13-year-old late-bloomer who tries to impress his school crush Shane; Kiss Me Softly, a Belgian film about the son of a successful singer who struggles to come out in a town where his father is the center of attention; and For Dorian, a drama about a father realizing his son with Down syndrome is undergoing his own sexual awakening.

Adulthood, Approximately will screen at 9:30 p.m. A post-film event will take place at Art Bar.

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