GLR July-August 2025

FILM

Windows on Worlds Far from Home

N OW in its 41st year, Boston’s Wicked Queer Film Festival has become an international af fair, with April’s program in cluding features from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Nepal, the Philippines, Poland, Sweden, and the U.K., in addition to the U.S. Over the ten-day fes tival, themed “Community is Resistance,” I watched a dozen narrative features, four documentaries, and two dozen short films to identify several entries of interest. T HE UNEXPECTED FIND OF THE FESTIVAL was Some Nights I Feel Like Walking fromFil ipino writer-director Petersen Vargas, which takes us from the colorfully lit night time streets of Manila to a blazing bonfire amid a countryside village festival. Uno, Bay, Ge, and Rush are jaded teenage street hustlers trading sex for rent money in the capital city when Zion, a naïf with a mys terious past, joins their scene. Uno, the pro tagonist, first encounters a bruised and

Uno’s affection for Zion and the literal and metaphorical journey they make together recall the 1991 Gus Van Sant film MyOwn Private Idaho , in which a hustler portrayed by River Phoenix falls for a dilettante played by Keanu Reeves. But the connec tion between Uno and Zion proves to be deeper. Russell Morton’s cinematography is gorgeous on Manila’s streets but never more impressive than at the film’s climax, which takes place during a single continu ous shot lasting at least 15 minutes and covering a mile or more, from an isolated encampment of drag queens and trans women to a village square where the group forges a lasting bond. I T HAS BEEN 32 YEARS since Taiwanese writer-director Ang Lee and his longtime screenwriting partner James Schamus brought The Wedding Banquet to arthouse screens, and a lot has changed for the LGBT community since then. Korean-American writer-director Andrew Ahn, working with

J EREMY C. F OX

SOME NIGHTS I FEEL LIKE WALKING Directed by Petersen Vargas Daluyong Studios

THE WEDDING BANQUET Directed by Andrew Ahn Bleecker Street THE REBRAND Directed by Kaye Adelaide True Sweetheart Films I’M YOUR VENUS Directed by Kimberly Reed Par ti cipant HEIGHTENED SCRUTINY Directed by Sam Feder Just Films

co-writer Schamus, has crafted a loose remake of Lee’s film that’s quick to acknowledge the current reality. As the 2025 ver sionof The Wedding Banquet opens, PFLAG mom May Chen re ceives an award for supporting her lesbian daughter Angela, who quietly simmers with frustration over her mother’s late-in-com ing acceptance. In the new version, Angela and her wisecrack ing best friend Chris (played by Bowen Yang) are saddled with self-doubts that weigh down their respective relationships: An gela’s with Lee and Chris’ with Min. Min, a Korean grad student whose visa is expiring, hatches a plan for a green card wedding to Angela so he doesn’t have to leave Seattle or come out to his family. To sweeten the deal, he offers to fund in vitro fertilization for Lee, who badly wants to be a mother and has already undergone two unsuccessful rounds of treatment. But to pull off their ruse, they’ll need to impress Min’s canny grandmother Ja-Young, who is wiser and more in sightful than anyone anticipates. This Wedding Banquet is fre quently moving but also packed with belly laughs. The sold-out crowd at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts clearly ate it up. D IRECTOR K AYE A DELAIDE ’ S satirical found-footage horror comedy, The Rebrand , may be the first scary movie in which the Big Bad is a social media lifestyle influencer. Blair (Andi E. McQueen, playing a muscular butch who bears a striking re semblance to Penn Badgley of Netflix’ You ) and Thistle (Nancy Webb, who cowrote the film with Adelaide, as a femme styled like a drag queen cosplaying as Lindsay Lohan) appear to share an ideal heteronormative-lesbian life but have been publicly canceled by their online admirers after Thistle made unspeci

fragile Zion while seeking sex in a bus station restroom, and then they’re reunited when a man in a porn theater hires them for a three-way. Uno is drawn to Zion’s innocence and feels pro tective of him: this newcomer hasn’t been hardened like Uno and his friends. “This thing that we do, it brainwashes us into thinking we can’t own anything. Even our bodies,” he tells Zion. After tragedy strikes, the teens begin an odyssey that changes them individually and resets relationships among them.

Argel Saycon and Miguel Odron in Some Nights I Feel Like Walking.

Jeremy C. Fox is the managing editor of this magazine and a former reporter and editor for The Boston Globe .

TheG & LR

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