When it comes to LGBTQ+ movies, Jeff Paris said his friend group has a running joke — that all the movies have the message that “being queer sucks.”
“So many independent movies are about the really bad parts about being gay or trans,” said Paris, program manager of the 2022 Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival. “We’ve tried with the programming this year to really balance that.”
The festival — running Oct. 14-16 in the Regent Street Black Box at Eccles Theatre in downtown Salt Lake City, and online Oct. 14-23 — aims to feature “uplifting” independent narrative films and documentaries for, by and about queer people, he said.
“For me, for the festival, we have tried to define queer films as films that tell a queer story,” Paris said. “Most of the films have some element of a queer character or a significant queer storyline.”
The 20 films being screened in the 19th annual event — the longest running LBGTQ film festival in the Intermountain West — were chosen from submissions through the platform FilmFreeway, from new queer releases or through outside recommendations, such as the Sundance Film Festival. (One film from Sundance is “Framing Agnes,” which won the Next Innovator Award and the Next Audience Award, and gives a “different perspective about a trans woman from the 1950s,” Paris said.)
The stories chosen for Damn These Heels, Paris said, are “harrowing, funny and romantic.” One that he recommends everyone see is “Unidentified Objects” from director Juan Felipe Zuleta.
(Riceball Films / First Threshold) Matthew August Jeffers stars in the science-fiction comedy drama "Unidentified Objects," the opening night film of the 2022 Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival, running Oct. 14-16, 2022, at the Regent Street Black Box at Eccles Theatre in Salt Lake City.
“It’s not the type of film that the festival largely chooses for opening night,” Paris said. “It’s a comedy with some drama mixed in there. It’s a sci-fi roadtrip, really quirky. Beautifully done and [one] that I don’t think people will get a chance to see broadly.”
Paris also highlighted the closing-night movie, “Wildhood” from director Bretten Hannam, which focuses on queerness in Indigenous populations. Another recommended title, he said, is Alice Wu’s 2004 film “Saving Face,” a selection meant to “demonstrate that these stories have been around for a long time” and not “as controversial as people want it to sound right now.”
(Sony Pictures Classics) Lynn Chen, left, and Michelle Krusiec star in Alice Wu's landmark 2004 lesbian romance "Saving Face," which will screen at the 2022 Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival.
A number of films in the festival tell stories of transgender people — which Paris called a “hot topic” in Utah, where the state Legislature last year passed a ban on trans girls participating in high school sports. (The ban has been blocked by a judge, pending a lawsuit.)
One Utah-made film — a short music video, “We’re Here,” shot in the Capitol Theatre and featuring Salt Lake City musician Talia Keys — was selected to screen in the festival.
“We don’t get a lot of submissions from Utah filmmakers,” Paris said. “We wish we got a lot more.” Paris noted that the Utah Film Center, which presents Damn These Heels, is implementing a program to get free resources to independent filmmakers.
Damn These Heels arrives just as queer cinema is in the middle of a landmark moment: The Sept. 30 release of “Bros,” starring and co-written by comedian Billy Eichner. The movie, Paris noted, is the first gay-centered romantic comedy released “to the world in a meaningful way.”
“Bros” also opened with a disappointing $4.8 million gross at the box office, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “Straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn’t show up for ‘Bros,’” Eichner wrote in a tweet thread after the release.
Paris said, “I think a lot of people react to the nature of two men in a romantic, sexual relationship being shown on screen negatively.”
Damn These Heels likely won’t suffer fallout from “Bros’” poor performance, Paris said, because not enough people know about the festival. But, with the “current zeitgeist” in the world of “queerness being seen [more] negatively than it has been for a while,” it’s possible, he said.
Paris noted the evolution of the stories Damn These Heels has shown in his years at the Utah Film Center. “For a long time, the majority of stories that were being told in independent film were about gay men and lesbians,” he said. “There’s an expectation that stories have changed and that we want to tell broader stories about what it means to be queer.”
The 2021 GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index, which “maps the quantity, quality and diversity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer characters,” looked at films released by eight major motion picture studios in 2020. The index found a decrease in bisexual representation, and out of 44 films examined, only five had a lesbian character, and only 10 had any LGBTQ characters. And while “queer women characters outnumbered the men,” there were no transgender or non-binary characters.
“We never get to the point where we don’t need to be telling these stories,” Paris said. “The more you see queer people, the more you get comfortable with that idea that they’re a lot more like us than they are different than us. That’s an important part of what we’re trying to do.”
The Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival runs Oct. 14-16 at the Regent Street Black Box at Eccles Theatre, 144 S. Regent St., Salt Lake City. For program information, a list of films, and to buy tickets, go to damntheseheels.org.
