WILDNESS is a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic bar in the MacArthur Park area that has been a thriving part of the Latin/LGBT immigrant communities since 1963. Chronicling what happens to the bar when art student, Chicago transplant and director Wu Tsang falls in love with the bar and sets up a weekly dance/performance art party, it raises the questions of how popular is too popular? What happens when the safe spaces in our community start to go mainstream? Throughout the film we see the bar struggle with success as the clientele start to move away from its Latino working class, immigrant and transgender base towards a more hipster flavored audience that doesn’t always respect the original community and family aspect of the bar. As media outlets start covering the immensely popular party, the new attention on the bar brings increased police surveillance and some of the regular girls of the bar are deported. Inspired by narrative documentaries such as Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied and Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan director Wu Tsang decided at that moment to utilize his previous organizing experience and film it. The film shows what can happen when such a precious safe space is threatened by gentrification and its own growing popularity. Full of love, energy, pathos and community, Wildness in essence is the love story between a young, idealistic queer person in search of something and the magical bar that takes him in and helps him grow up.

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This year we are bringing you the best LGBT short films from the YoungCuts Film Festival. The YoungCuts Film Festival is an event showcasing the best independent films by undiscovered talents. The Festival features short films produced by emerging filmmakers and serves as a launch pad for filmmaker careers, providing exposure and recognition for some of the most exciting new talent from around the globe – student film makers and non- student film makers alike.

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Ian Harvie's debut stand‐up comedy concert film, Superhero, is the culmination of his very personal journey of having been born a girl and later becoming a self‐made man. It’s Ian's facile sense of ease, not just his gender‐bending presence that makes his humor groundbreaking; and has lead him to make history on more than one occasion. It’s these very qualities that attracted the notorious Margaret Cho to publicly rave about Ian’s work and have him as her opening act for years. Ian is 'quite possibly the most unique comic in the country' says Frontiers Magazine and yet his jokes strike the core of all shared human experiences.

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