Quebec director sweeps awards for gay coming-of-age movie

Quebec filmmaker Xavier Dolan swept three of the four prizes Friday at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight for his film I Killed My Mother (J’ai tue ma mere).

The 20-year-old’s first feature won the Art Cinema Award, given by an international jury of independent cinema programmers and the SACD Prize for best French-language film.

Dolan also won the Regards Jeunes 2009 Prize, given to a first film by a jury of young cinephiles.

The remaining prize, the Europa Cinemas Label, was given to the Austrian movie La Pivellina by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel.

The Montrealer wrote and directed the coming-of-age movie, which is about a 16-year-old boy just discovering his gay sexuality and fighting with his mother, who constantly annoys him.

The film was one of the most talked about titles of the Directors’ Fortnight — a sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival — and its first screening was greeted with a standing ovation.

Dolan, who has compared his Cannes experience to a fairy tale, said the awards left him speechless.

“I’m completely flabbergasted, we never thought we would win a prize,” Dolan told the French language all-news network RDI.

“I can’t begin to tell you how moving this is,” he added.

See Quebec director sweeps awards for gay coming-of-age movie Canada.com

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/quebec-direct…

Prop 8 Town Hall Casts Blame For Loss

West Hollywood, California - Reacting to the exclusive cyber town hall run by the No On 8 campaign a fortnight ago, to which access was limited to non-Apple platform users and those with high speed Internet connections, grassroots activists gathered at West Hollywood Auditorium on Sunday for a traditional town hall meeting on the loss of the No On 8 campaign.

Most of the voices heard expressed frustration and/or anger at what they called the insular and inept leadership of the campaign.

Organized by Robin Tyler, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that won Californians the right to marry, and the organization Marriage Equality, on whose board she sits, a panel of long time activists listened to speakers and then opined themselves on the No On 8 campaign’s shortcomings.

As the meeting wore on, it became apparent that a consensus developed that the grassroots part of the movement had been used poorly, at best, and ignored completely at worst.

Prominent gay movement icon Ivy Bottini, a West Hollywood Lesbian and Gay Advisory Board member and veteran of anti-gay initiative politics, having led the successful fight against 1976’s Proposition 6, the Briggs Amendment, noted immediately that she had not even been called by the small No On 8 executive campaign committee.

See Prop 8 Town Hall Casts Blame For Loss
WeHo News, CA