A million thanks from WQ Team 😍 + 2019 Jury Awards ⭐

THANK YOU FROM OUR BIG GAY HEARTS!

11 days, 170 movies, 47 screenings, and 12 signature short programs...WOW!

This year was a landmark year for the festival, and it wouldn't happen without YOU! So, THANK YOU for supporting queer filmmakers and artist, THANK YOU for supporting your local queer film festival. THANK YOU for showing up, for speaking up, and for believing that queer cinema is an essential part of our culture and our community.

A million thanks from the bottom of our big gay hearts!

- Wicked Queer Team

JURY AWARD: NARRATIVE FEATURE

JOSÉ

"JOSÉ drops us into one of the most dangerous, religious and impoverished countries in the world where a young Guatemalan gay man (played by Enrique Salanic in a tender and fearless debut) finds escape through random sexual encounters. When he meets a Caribbean migrant named Luis his life becomes shaken with intoxicating passion and must ultimately choose between the life he has always known and the man he is destined to become.

Director Li Cheng illustrates Jose’s emotional journey through fixed, long camera takes that reveal action and characters framed in meticulous compositions of richly textured landscapes. In a year of narratives that cover a wide swath of topics from the trans experience to depictions of crippling anxiety, Peter Pan complexes to forbidden love, polyamoric allegories of American democracy to extraterrestrial stories of friendship, JOSÉ is perhaps most remarkable for being a film that has made the greatest impact with the least amount of plot. The visual storytelling and honest performances connect us to the human vulnerability of love in its most raw form.

Congratulations to Li Cheng and thank you to all of the filmmakers who participated in this year’s festival. We look forward to seeing what stories you have in store for us next!"

- Dee Dee Edmondson, Melva T. James, Kevin Lynch from Wicked Queer Jury 2019

HONORABLE MENTION: YO IMPOSIBLE directed by Patricia Ortega

JURY AWARD : DOCUMENTARY

CALL HER GANDA

"It might be cliché to say that the jury had a difficult task in choosing a winning documentary feature for this year’s Wicked Queer: Boston LGBT Film Festival, but it’s an accurate statement.  The overall quality of the entries was so high that we not only chose a winner, but also two honorable mentions.

Our choice for the winning film was CALL HER GANDA, a wrenching account of the brutal murder in the Philippines of a transgender woman by a U.S. Marine and the pursuit of justice by three strong Pilipino women – the murdered woman’s mother, an activist lawyer and a transgender journalist.  In addition to the significance of the story, how the murder of a trans woman galvanized the country to protest American imperialism in a sustained way, the film itself is a formidable work of art.  The superb editing negated the need for narration, providing deep, rich character development and unfolding the story in all its intricate details without becoming bogged down or confusing."

HONORABLE MENTION: MISS ROSEWOOD and BIRDS OF THE BORDERLANDS

"MISS ROSEWOOD provides a dichotomous view, a successful balancing-act really, between the outrageous queer performance art of Rose Wood in a popular, high-profile club in New York City and the portrait of the artist herself, a portrait painted with layers comprised of her family, her “non-traditional” gender presentation, her love and skill at making beautiful wood furniture, her gentle spirituality and her gender transition, all wrapped in a bow of compelling cinematography.

"In BIRDS OF THE BORDERLANDS, we see bare-bones filmmaking used to its maximum effects, capturing interweaving stories of queer Arabs in Jordan and the genderqueer Australian filmmaker who provides a safe space for them to find respite from dangerous cultural and familial pressures and violence.  The emotion and tension that run throughout the film are juxtaposed by the authentic spirits of these young people who only wish to be loved and live as their true selves.

We congratulate the filmmakers, P.J. Raval of the winning film CALL HER GANDA and Helle Jensen (MISS ROSEWOOD) and Jordan Bryon (BIRDS OF THE BORDERLANDS) for the honorable mentions, as well as the other filmmakers for their excellent submissions to this year’s festival."

- John N. Affuso, Anderson Clark, Carmen Oquendo-Villar from Wicked Queer Jury 2019

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