As Pride 2016 kicks into gear, we will be joining Patsy and Edina at the Absolutely Fabulous Extravaganza at the Out Here Now Festival in beautiful Kansas City, Missouri. SAFE WORD will be one of four films that will help celebrate the new AbFab film release later this summer, and it’s right on time! I am in sore need of a lesson in high fashion followed by a week of heavy drinking.
Pink Apple Zurich!
We are celebrating our 44th festival screening in Zurich! The Pink Apple Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is showing SAFE WORD in a shorts program on Friday, April 29. While my producer and I will not be attending (we are shooting a new film!), we will salute the screening with best wishes and a beer. Also on the program is SCHLEIERHAFT, an award-winning short film from Germany about a Muslim family who discovers the father is transgender. Last year I was on a film festival jury here in Chicago which awarded that film the Jury Prize. We will be in exquisite company!
Best of KASHISH!
We are honored to announce that SAFE WORD has been selected for the Best of KASHISH: a daylong event featuring highlights from the 2015 festival in Mumbai, India. The screening takes place January 23 at Godrej One in Mumbai. Thank you so much for the honor!
For more about the festival, visit their website here.
Short Scene
A message intrudes on Greg and Billy’s role-play fantasy. Starring Benjamin Sprunger and Kevin Cox.
But Is It Art?
Swingers Swinging by Tom Hill
We knew we had something dirty on our hands, but we didn’t know exactly how dirty until we were tapped by the Kinsey Institute, who at this moment is showing Safe Word as part of their 2015 Juried Art Show. That’s right folks: how perverted are you on a scale of one to ten? Eleven, baby! Art lovers and the raincoat set mingle at the Grunwald Gallery of Art in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, to ponder erotic art, the human form, and a panoply of sexuality. What a beautiful thing, and in the great Red State of Indiana! Who knew? Despite the awful Religious Freedom Act, we always knew those Republicans had fun in the sack.
Check out a preview of the exhibition here.
Make Mine A Tripel
Today we honor our screening at the Tels Quels Film Festival in Brussels, Belgium with (what else?) Belgian beer. If there are three things close to my heart, they would be film festivals, beer, and Belgian waffles, pretty much in any order. Tels Quels is actually a cultural and social service agency serving the LGBTQ community, and the festival has had numerous incarnations over the years under various auspices. We’re so glad Tels Quels is keeping the festival alive and healthy and socially conscious, even while they’re showing unredeemable trash such as Safe Word.
French Kiss
We are thrilled to announce Safe Word won the Audience Award at Reeling! Thank you Chicago for showing some hometown love! It was a blast being in the festival, and a very special experience, especially now that I know how many other perverts were in the room.
Safe Word is cruising through November with festival screenings in Rehoboth Beach, Santa Barbara, Montreal, and Puerto Rico! Lovely festivals all, and what a way to round out the year. This Thanksgiving I plan on having fish tacos and poutine to celebrate.
Trick or Treat
October has been an extremely busy month for Safe Word — seven festivals in seven days, plus two more the week before, for a total of nine! We’ve been ringing doorbells in Albuquerque, Louisville, Atlanta, Seattle, and Tampa to name a few, plus toilet papering trees in Hamburg, Germany, our first overseas date. October is a heavy LGBT festival month, but with all the homo romantic comedies on tap you’d never guess the kinship with ghosts and goblins. But it’s there! We should embrace our inner demons — a real long hot naked hug, because it’s that time of year, and they need love, too. Otherwise you could … maybe… dress up as a pirate?
Behind the Scenes
In celebration of our Chicago screening on Saturday, here are a few more behind the scenes photos of the perpetrators and victims.
Going Down in Chi-Town
I’m super excited for a couple reasons.
1. Safe Word will be playing in Love Is A Monster: Gay Comedy Shorts program in Reeling: the Chicago LGBT Film Festival on Saturday, September 20.
2. It’s playing in a Landmark Theater. I love Landmark. I’ve seen countless indie, foreign, and art films in their fat cushy seats while drinking beer smuggled in from the corner store.
3. I’m a former employee of Chicago Filmmakers, the organization that runs Reeling. I have no relationship to the programmer, but I commend her very bad taste in programming the film. Continue reading