Family Ties

The ties of family and community ensnare and baffle us as often as they uplift and nourish us.Ý These three diverse works challenge us to think about, to imagine, and to remember who we are in relationship to the families we are born with and the families that we create.

 

Welcome To Africville, Directed by Dana C. Inkster, ÝBrazil, SOUTH FLORIDA PREMIERE

This beautifully made and evocative short fiction film follows three generations of black women, two of whom are lesbians, as they spin their stories on the eve of the destruction of their tight knit community.Ý

RitualNation, Directed by Sean Kaminsky, United States, SOUTH FLORIDA PREMIERE

Far removed from Miami, people get naked, sweaty and tribal in three "circuit" parties where concepts like family and community take on new and more transcendent meanings.Ý This off-beat, fast paced documentary short takes a peek at the Rainbow Family, Burning Man and the Radical Faeries (founded by gay pioneer Harry Hay), a trio of large gatherings all held in the great outdoors, and all rife with homos and homo energy.

Theme: Murder, Directed by Martha Swetzoff, United States, SOUTH FLORIDA PREMIERE

In 1968, Hyman Swetzoff, a Boston art dealer, left his wife and two young children, and moved in with an unknown Greek prizefighter.Ý Later that year, he was found fatally beaten to death and the crime was never solved.Ý Now, his filmmaker daughter turns her lens on his story, hoping to at last understand the father she lost and the unsolved ghosts of a childhood she has left behind.Ý As she sifts through the layers of truth and memory, using photographs, old papers and interviews with her family and her father's friends, filmmaker Martha Swetzoff discovers a world she never knew was there: the hidden, twilight existence of married homosexual men in the years before Stonewall.Ý A mystery that unfolds in a riveting blend of poetic imagery, first-person documentary and investigative journalism, Theme: Murder is a stunning meditation on family secrets and a Festival must-see.ÝÝ Director Martha Swetzoff will attend the screening and discuss her film with the audience.

3:00 PM Screening $10