"A Love Note to Black People; Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.‚" - Alicia Garza As a QPOC living in Boston, I have a message for my fierce, valiant, black and brown warriors out there on the front lines right now. In those moments when you have become so undoubtedly and existentially exhausted (as we all are), remember this: utilize the strength in our allies, as we have never seen such a profound volume of support for any of our plights. Myself? I will channel my rage and sadness into the opportunity to show this program. I will utilize Wicked Queer 2020, xerb.tv and the support of my team so we can rejoice and recharge. We will give black filmmakers and actors the platform they need, so they can tell OUR stories to a world that is finally ready to listen to us.

Long unavailable in the U.S., director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art and black mascara. No less than Stanley Kubrick cited the film as a direct influence on his own dystopian classic A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. An unknown club dancer at the time, transgender actor Peter (from Kurosawa’s RAN) gives an astonishing Edie Sedgwick/Warhol superstar-like performance as hot young thing Eddie, hostess at Bar Genet — where she’s ignited a violent love-triangle with reigning drag queen Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) for the attentions of club owner Gonda (played by Kurosawa regular Yoshio Tsuchiya, from SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO). One of Japan’s leading experimental filmmakers, Matsumoto bends and distorts time here like Resnais in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, freely mixing documentary interviews, Brechtian film-within- a-film asides, Oedipal premonitions of disaster, his own avant-garde shorts, and even on-screen cartoon balloons, into a dizzying whirl of image + sound. Featuring breathtaking black-and- white cinematography by Tatsuo Suzuki that rivals the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, FUNERAL PARADE offers a frank, openly erotic and unapologetic portrait of an underground community of drag queens. Whether laughing with drunken businessmen, eating ice cream with her girlfriends, or fighting in the streets with a local girl gang, Peter’s ravishing Eddie is something to behold. “She has bad manners, all she knows is coquetry,” complains her rival Leda – but in fact, Eddie’s bad manners are simply being too gorgeous for this world. Her stunning presence, in bell- bottom pants, black leather jacket and Brian Jones hair-do, is a direct threat to the social order, both in the Bar Genet and in the streets of Tokyo. A key work of the Japanese New Wave and of queer cinema, FUNERAL PARADE is being beautifully restored in 4k from the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements for re-release in 2017.

Long before LOVE, SIMON and CALL ME BY YOUR NAME became common fare at the multiplex, the only places gay men could see their lives and lusts depicted on screen was at their local “all-male” adult cinema. From coming out stories to romances, from bizarro horror to camp comedies, the hundreds of films churned out by the gay adult film industry throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s were a driving force behind the growth of gay culture and constitute a largely forgotten cinematic document. A video companion to the Artforum “Best of 2018” Instagram feed of the same name, ASK ANY BUDDY compiles fragments from over 125 movies to create a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the era. With rare footage shot at dozens of real, legendary, and long since demolished queer cruising spots and social spaces, ASK ANY BUDDY is a funny, sexy portrait of urban gay life in the years following the Stonewall Riots—or at least how it looked in the movies.