The bitter fight for supremacy between a school’s most popular girls takes an unexpected turn when Tanner (Michael J. Willett) becomes its first openly gay student. As they race to bag the big trend in fashion accessories, the Gay Best Friend, Tanner must choose between skyrocketing popularity and the friends he is leaving behind. Darren Stein (Jawbreaker) returns with another comic send‐up of high school clique culture, including memorable cameos by Megan Mullally and Natasha Lyonne.

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WILDNESS is a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic bar in the MacArthur Park area that has been a thriving part of the Latin/LGBT immigrant communities since 1963. Chronicling what happens to the bar when art student, Chicago transplant and director Wu Tsang falls in love with the bar and sets up a weekly dance/performance art party, it raises the questions of how popular is too popular? What happens when the safe spaces in our community start to go mainstream? Throughout the film we see the bar struggle with success as the clientele start to move away from its Latino working class, immigrant and transgender base towards a more hipster flavored audience that doesn’t always respect the original community and family aspect of the bar. As media outlets start covering the immensely popular party, the new attention on the bar brings increased police surveillance and some of the regular girls of the bar are deported. Inspired by narrative documentaries such as Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied and Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan director Wu Tsang decided at that moment to utilize his previous organizing experience and film it. The film shows what can happen when such a precious safe space is threatened by gentrification and its own growing popularity. Full of love, energy, pathos and community, Wildness in essence is the love story between a young, idealistic queer person in search of something and the magical bar that takes him in and helps him grow up.

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Nimer, a Palestinian student and dedicated son, dreams of studying abroad and of a better life. One fateful night he meets Roy, an Israeli lawyer, and the two fall in love. As their relationship deepens, Nimer is confronted with the harsh realities of a Palestinian society that refuses to accept him for his sexual identity, and an Israeli society that rejects him for his Palestinian nationality. When his close friend is caught hiding illegally in Tel Aviv and sent back to the West Bank to be brutally murdered, Nimer is sent hurling down a path of personal sacrifice and mortal danger. Now he must choose between the life he thought he wanted and his love for Roy.

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