Outfest 2023 Best Films

Pornomelancholia – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

Pornomelancholia is a slow paced character study of a up-and-coming porn star navigating the Mexican porn industry. It has plenty of dry humor and an underlying commentary on social media culture.

The film starts with a mid-range shot of Lalo standing alone by a busy street in the city. People walk past him and cars pass behind him as we watch him peer around. It seems like he’s waiting for someone or taking a breather in a chaotic day. However, before the shot lingers further, Lalo breaks down into a soft sob as the title credits pop up: Pornomelancholia. It’s a prelude for the critique of superficial influencer-culture that Lalo uses to make his way into the porn industry.

Lalo is portrayed as a lonely man parading as a popular sex icon. His Instagram videos hide the fact that he works in a small factory with two other people that he hardly talks to. His confidence in his sexuality online contradicts his inability to come out to his family – shown in the rehearsed voice messages he can’t bring himself to send to his mother. It follows films such as Sweat in showing that the digital lives promoted by influencers don’t always reflect reality.

Despite the underlying commentary, there is dry humor in Pornomelancholia. This is probably the only film that you can watch that is built around a Zapata led Mexican revolution porn film. It also probably runs on for too much of the film, but the pornographic shots, which linger for more than expected are designed to make you awkwardly uncomfortable (like Lalo himself). The sex scenes are provocative, but not as outrightly as another Mexican festival film – Battle in Heaven.

Overall, if you’re looking for a slow-paced festival film that follows a gay man working his way into the porn industry, Pornomelancholia is worth a watch. Whilst the culture fostered by the industry and Lalo is portrayed as fake, his journey feels unique, real and believable.

The Fabulous Ones – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

The Fabulous Ones is a warm home-made story featuring real friends reuniting to relive their memories from 30 years ago. The drama comes from a fictionalized will of one of their old friends, but the personal, real stories provide the substance for this docufiction.

From the tone of the film, it feels like most of this film is a documentary. The characters all get along too closely for it to feel fictionalized. However, the director uses different film types to blur the past and present, and also reality and fiction. Sepia-tinted film makes some shots feel old – as if shot 30 years ago in the character’s past – and these are edited alongside clearer shots to indicate the present. Some scenes also alternate between these two types of film to make it unclear what is fictionalized and true to reality, such as the seance and re-enactment of their ‘dead’ friend. The blurring of reality and fiction and past and present through the type of film also fictionalizes their pre-transition lives. Home footage and photos of the characters pre-transition, look like the scenes of the seance, making their pasts feel less real than the present.

Whilst their pre-transition lives are made to feel like the fictionalized parts of this documentary, The Fabulous Ones doesn’t shy away from sharing the characters’ real experiences as Trans-women. Throughout their reunion, the camera focuses on each character to hear their queer coming of age experience and how their individual families and the society around them reacted. These scenes draws you closer to the characters by sharing their more intimate experiences, and in doing so, holds the film back from going full happy-dream with the fictionalized elements of the film. These moments ground the film in the unfortunate reality that not everyone is able to be who they are without prejudice.

If you’re looking for a quirky docufiction that lightly explores some heavy personal experiences through a fictionalized will left by a ‘dead’ friend, this film is for you.

Clashing Differences – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

In Clashing Differences an international women’s rights group based in Germany changes its original white-women led panel to avoid being ‘cancelled’. The updated panel however sees through their attempts to fulfill the diversity checklist in this satirical comedy.

It’s hard to get a satire right, especially when you’re satirizing topics that you can easily get wrong (such as racism), whilst keeping the tone light enough to maintain the comedy. Clashing Differences doesn’t get everything ‘right,’ but it is a pretty good attempt. The fourth-wall-breaking monologues from each character all pack a punch whilst conveying a wide range of experiences. It also always feels like the film is told from a multi-cultural perspective, by centering the non-White characters (bar-one) over white characters. That being said, the film does feel like it falls into its own trap. In trying to expose the tokenization of the multicultural characters it almost tokenizes the same characters. Each one of the characters covers a different multicultural reaction to their own tokenization.

However, the larger problem with Clashing Differences is the relationships between the characters. None of them get along through the majority of the film’s run time, clashing because of past relationships, and not just their ideas for confronting the international women’s group they’re there for. The only thing that ultimately brings them together are literal Nazis which gives viewers an out for thinking about all of the more subtle racism that the characters talk about beforehand (as Nazis always surpasses more subtle racism). It also feels like a tool to help end the film too.

Despite the convenient ending, Clashing Differences is still worth a watch. You’ll likely get some enjoyment from the satire of well-wishing white-led feminist groups and the drama fired up by conflicting views.