Love/Juice is a passionate, strikingly beautiful film about female friendships in contemporary Tokyo. Kyoko and Chinatsu aren’t lovers, just roommates who eat, sleep, go clubbing, do dope, and brush their teeth together. Chinatsu is a lesbian photographer who is working on a visual diary. Kyoko, less mature, develops a crush on a taciturn boy who runs a local fish store and barely acknowledges her existence. When Chinatsu is dumped by her girlfriend, Kyoko tries to console her and the two almost make love. And suddenly, it’s make-or-break time for the girls’ relationship. Without hyped-up melodramatics of any kind, Shindo Kaze’s directorial debut is one of the freshest and most believable films about female friendship ever made.

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Winner of the Teddy Jury Award at the 2000 Berlin International Film Festival, Chrissy is the story of an ex-runaway and street kid who was diagnosed HIV+ at age 18, and did not reveal her sexual orientation or her illness to her family until eight years later. As we follow Chrissy, her mother, and three younger sisters for the next year, we are given access to a world one must see to really understand. Filmmaker Jacqui North takes us on a personal journey of a family learning about acceptance and love. Breaking records as the most watched documentary on Australian television, where it first aired on World AIDS Day in 1999, Chrissy is an honest and daring film.

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Neither sensational nor sentimental, the remarkable Southern Comfort is a documentary about 52-year-old female-to-male transsexual Robert Eads who, dying of cervical and ovarian cancer, is neglected by doctors uncomfortable with treating him. “A hillbilly and proud of it,” Robert cuts a striking figure in his home in the Georgia black hills, where he falls deeply in love with male-to-female transsexual Lola Cola. Director Kate Davis functioned as a one-person crew in order to intimately capture this rare blend of humor, romance, and tragedy. Even though Southern Comfort (the title refers to a support group peopled by Eads and his transgender friends) is as much about generosity, courage, and tolerance as it is about a potentially discomfitting subject, the film sent shock waves through the Sundance Film Festival where it won the award for Best Documentary Film. As Eads tries to find help for his condition, his resolute kindness, dignity and compassion in the face of adversity help him build a community of friends and gives Southern Comfort its punch.

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