It Came from Chicago

Hannah Free. Outfest. 7/10/2009.

Outfest 2009 has begun. On the spur of the moment, I joined a friend at a this evening at a screening of Hannah Free, a film about an older butch lesbian dealing with aging and recalling the love of her life. It was a lovely film with beautiful cinematography by Gretchen Warthen and the performances, particularly by Sharon Gless (the mother from Queer as Folk and Burn Notice. She makes a great lesbian.

There were some really refreshing things about this film, particularly that there were actual images of butch women and also older lesbians, both of which are rarely seen in mainstream films. The performances were truly excellent. Sharon Gless was, of course, fabulous, but so was the rest of the cast. Jacqui Jackson was charming and adorable as a young woman who adopts Hannah as a lesbian elder and Kelli Strickland as the baby butch version Hannah was seriously crush-worthy.

I'm really glad I saw this partially because it emerged from the Chicago theater scene. It was written by Claudia Allen, who is a lesbian playwright in Chicago at the Victory Gardens Theater. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know anything about her work prior to this (although I think I did see someone give a paper about her play Xena Lives!), so I'm really glad that this brought this work to my attention.

The film wasn't perfect; there were some cringe-worthy moments of awkwardness, particularly some really unnatural-sounding exposition at the beginning of the film. Some of the folks I was with complained that it felt a little stagey at points, although either I didn't notice or I'm interpreting the same moments as unnatural awkwardness that they consider theatrical. Overall, the film was just sweet and refreshing. It was also a bit of a tearjerker; I was crying from about 10 or 15 minutes into the film, but there were so many beautiful, funny, honest scenes between the ones that made me cry that I found the whole thing charming and really enjoyable rather than sappy.

Overall, Outfest is off to a great start for me.