Film

Utah Film Center Damn These Heels 2020: Two Chilean queer dramas – The Prince, Ema – are riveting with strong acting, production quality

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The South American continent consistently has been the source of riveting queer drama cinema and two Chilean films in this year’s slate of the Utah Film Center’s 17th annual Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival are worthwhile offerings. They include El Principe (The Prince), an impressive directorial feature-length debut by Sebastián Muñoz, and Ema, directed by Pablo … Read more

Utah Film Center Damn These Heels 2020: Outstanding documentaries Transkids from Israel, Queer Japan offer cosmopolitan comparisons to the American LGBTQ+ experience

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Two of the dozen documentaries being screened at the Utah Film Center’s 17th annual Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival offer fascinating cosmopolitan and cultural comparisons to the American LGBTQ+ experience. Both are outstanding: Transkids from Israel by director Hilla Medalia and Queer Japan, directed by Graham Kolbeins. Transkids The experiences of four Israeli transgender teens going … Read more

Utah Film Center Damn These Heels 2020: Queen of Lapa is radiant, regal documentary about life of Luana Muniz, sex worker activism

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There was regal radiance in the life and work of Brazilian activist Luana Muniz and the Queen of Lapa documentary, directed by Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat, is a resplendent example of cinema verité that truly invites the viewers to inhabit the safe haven that Muniz created for sex workers including transvestites, transgender individuals and … Read more

Utah Film Center Damn These Heels 2020: World premiere Same-Sex Attracted documentary highlights LGBTQ+ students at BYU, questions of faith, coping with honor code

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Utah was abuzz when Brigham Young University – often called The Lord’s University for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – announced on Feb. 19 that the clause prohibiting “all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings” would be removed from the school’s honor code. Two weeks later, BYU students … Read more

Utah Film Center Damn These Heels 2020: 17th annual queer film festival may be virtual but slate packed with 23 international films, 4 shorts programs, special events including drive-in experience

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Utah Review is providing daily coverage of the Utah Film Center’s 17th annual Damn These Heels Queer Film Festival. Follow daily for feature reviews of the 2020 slate during the festival. One of Utah Film Center’s signature centerpieces is moving to a virtual platform this year with its well-established brand of exceptional … Read more

Fight for public lands: Public Trust documentary to be screened by Utah Film Center, featuring director David Byars in talkback with KUER-FM RadioWest’s Doug Fabrizio

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The absorbing, intricately structured documentary Public Trust opens with a majestic, joyous montage of America’s public lands, accompanied by stirring orchestral music and narrated by journalist Hal Herring. However, the film quickly segues into the public land debates, which are anything but majestic or joyous. These lands, Herring says, are as quintessential to the American … Read more

Utah Film Center sets livestream event featuring BOSS: The Black Experience in Business documentary; panel with Utah Juneteenth Freedom and Heritage

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A significant epiphany in the exceptional documentary BOSS: The Black Experience in Business is how director Stanley Nelson chronicles everything that Black entrepreneurship has come up against through more than three centuries of history, yet still achieving many of American business’ greatest innovations. Absorbing, lucid and never overwhelming, this exquisitely synthesized case of history, which … Read more

Utah Film Center’s livestream of What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael will feature talkback with director Rob Garver, Time film critic Stephanie Zacharek

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Film critic Pauline Kael emerged during one of Hollywood’s most significant transitional periods of The New Hollywood, followed almost immediately by the first wave of modern blockbusters. Of Jaws, she called it “the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made… [with] more zest than an early Woody Allen picture, a lot more electricity, [and] it’s … Read more

Utah Arts Festival launches virtual platform of Festival Vibes Fridays today for the month of June

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Normally for four days in June, Library Square and the surrounding civic campus in downtown Salt Lake City are transformed into a village of arts and culture for the Utah Arts Festival (UAF), the state’s largest multi-disciplinary gathering of its kind, drawing between 70,000 and 80,000 visitors annually. Despite the inevitable decision in March to … Read more

Revisiting the Malheur occupation: Utah Film Center sets livestream event with No Man’s Land documentary

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published June 1 but as the Utah Film Center has rescheduled the livestream event of this documentary to June 23 at 7 p.m., The Utah Review is republishing this feature review today. Viewers also should take note that another film by the same director (David Garrett Byars), the 2020 … Read more