Week of Jul 14
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A rarely seen treasure of Queer film history, "Meet... Bradley Harrison Picklesimer" (1988) was shot over three years, and paints a colorful portrait of the Lexington drag queen who owned a bar on Main Street in the 80s. Presented with other short films by director Heather McAdams, who joins in person Bradley Picklesimer himself at the Academy Museum on Thursday.
Kind of a Drag: Experimental Films, Documentaries, and Scratch Animation by Heather McAdams, 1980-1995
Jul 17, 7:30 PM @ Academy Museum
Filmmaker Heather Adams and subject Bradley Picklesimer in person
Cartoonist and DIY filmmaker Heather McAdams presents new restorations of her films, including the 32 min portrait of the legendary Kentucky drag queen.
Also This Week
Nasty Baby
Jul 16, 7:00 PM @ Los Feliz 3
Filmmaker Sebastián Silva in person
A gay couple enlists the help of their friend Polly to create a baby. Meanwhile, they must also contend with their homophobic neighbour who becomes a big nuisance.
Tickets from American Cinematheque
The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival
Jul 17, 7:30 PM @ Laemmle Royal
Filmmaker Julie Rubio and co-producer Blake Wellen in person
With her distinctive high-gloss sensual nudes and cooly elegant portraits of high society during the Jazz Age, Polish-Jewish artist Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) helped define the Art Deco style and the glamour and transgressive vitality of post-WWI Paris. Feminist, style icon, and bisexual libertine, Lempicka combined cubism, classicism, and surrealism to reinvent the female figure, not as an object but as the protagonist.
FREE: LA QueenCiañera
Jul 16, 6:00 PM @ Barnsdall Gallery Theater
Film subject and TransLatin@ Coalition founder Bamby Salcedo in person
Bamby Salcedo, an undocumented transgender Latina human rights activist, organizes her 50th birthday celebration attended by people significant to her life and survival. As she prepares for the event, Bamby travels through LA county and watches her life go by; from the streets where she smoked crack and the Men’s County Jail to journalists and academics she has enlisted for her causes, plush homes of supporters, and communities and organizations she has gathered together to change the lives of transgender people in the United States.
Tinsman Road
Jul 15, 7:30 PM @ LOOK Dine-In Glendale
Filmmaker Robbie Banfitch in person
In the backwoods of New Jersey a young man navigates the serpentine mystery surrounding his long-missing sister and their family home.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Jul 15, 8:00 PM @ Whammy Analog Media
Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig undergoes a personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an ‘internationally ignored’ but divinely talented rock diva, inhabiting a ‘beautiful gender of one’.
Tickets from Cool Girl Cinema Club
Pink Flamingos
Jul 17, 8:45 PM @ Art Theater Long Beach
Join John Waters for a special screening of his trash masterpiece Pink Flamingos on the big beautiful screen in the David Geffen Theater. Make a day of it and check out the Academy Museum's John Waters Pope of Trash exhibit beforehand to see Waters' whole career in retrospective.
Tickets from Art Theater Long Beach
FREE: Moonlight
Jul 18, 7:30 PM @ Hammer Museum
Double Feature with "Razing Liberty Square," a documentary about the displacement of residents in the historically Black neighborhood where "Moonlight" is set.
Tickets from UCLA Film & TV Archive
The Celluloid Closet
Jul 20, 4:00 PM @ Vidiots Eagle Theater
Starting in 1972, Vito Russo put together a traveling clip show of LGBT representation in film, marking one of the first efforts to chronicle Queer cinema history. It was turned into a book in 1981 then a movie in 1995, making it a landmark of Queer images in classical Hollywood.
Next Week
He Never Dies: The Films of Kalil Haddad
Jul 27, 7:30 PM @ 2220 Arts + Archives
Filmmaker Kalil Haddad in person
Queer Palestinian-Canadian filmmaker Kalil Hadid presents the LA Premiere of his short film series "He Never Dies," seven short films that blend archival, experimental, and erotic film.
The Wedding Banquet
Jul 25, 8:00 PM @ Brain Dead Studios
Director Andrew Ahn in person
Frustrated with his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris and running out of time, Min makes a proposal: a green-card marriage with their friend Angela in exchange for her partner Lee's expensive IVF. Elopement plans are upended, however, when Min's grandmother surprises them with an extravagant Korean wedding banquet.
Tickets from Brain Dead Studios
But I'm a Cheerleader
Jul 21, 7:30 PM @ Academy Museum
For anyone who has ever worried that all lesbian films are too serious, Jamie Babbit signle-handedly proves that queer women can be funny as hell in this now-classic queer comedy.
Hellraiser
Jul 23, 7:30 PM @ Culver Theater
The first film in gay writer/director Clive Barker's pain-and-pleasure demon horror franchise, which only got queerer in the 2022 reboot.
Tomboy
Jul 24, 7:00 PM @ Laemmle Glendale
The winner of the Teddy Award at the 2011 Berlinale, this French coming-of-age film from Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Woman on Fire) follows a 10 year-old who leads a new life as a boy after moving to a new neighborhood.
Tangerine
Jul 24, 7:00 PM @ Laemmle NoHo 7
A new queer Christmas classic, Tangerine follows trans workers Sin-Dee and Alexandra on a holiday odyssey across Los Angeles. Shot on a micro budget on three iPhones, Tangerine is a triumph of scrappy indie can-do--that led to Gotham and Spirit awards for co-star Mya Taylor.
Shortbus
Jul 25, 10:00 PM @ Eastwood Performing Arts Center
Hedwig creator John Cameron Mitchell wrote and directed this sexually explicit ensemble comedy about the intersecting (sex) lives of couples gay straight and in-between, leading up to a gathering at the weekly Shortbus art/sex salon and orgy.
Vegas in Space
Jul 25, 10:00 PM & Jul 26, 10:15 PM @ Vidiots Eagle Theater
This camp classic, distributed by Troma films, is a wacky sci-fi drag story about three soldiers who must take a sex change pill to infiltrate a pleasure planet and fight a galactic villain. Starring drag icons Doris Fish, Miss X, Tippi and more!
FREE: Tongues Untied
Jul 27, 4:00 PM @ Getty Museum
Marlon Riggs, with assistance from other gay Black men, especially poet Essex Hemphill, celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act. The film intercuts footage of Hemphill reciting his poetry, Riggs telling the story of his growing up, scenes of men in social intercourse and dance, and various comic riffs, including a visit to the “Institute of Snap!thology,” where men take lessons in how to snap their fingers: the sling snap, the point snap, the diva snap.
The Watermelon Woman
Jul 27, 6:30 PM @ Academy Museum
Cheryl, a young black lesbian, works a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about a black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical “mammy” roles relegated to black actresses during that period.
