Frameline: Homos By The Bay

We stopped by the Victoria for the second-to-last day of the Frameline film fest yesterday afternoon to check out Homos by the Bay, the collection of short films by local queer filmmakers. And it was jam-packed! We had to elbow our way into the petite theater, and there was a line down the aisle just for popcorn. After thinking about it, it made sense -- who's going to be the most able to pack a theater if not your local filmmakers, and their actors and crew?

The shorts, as shorts tend to do, varied wildly in length, subject matter, and quality -- but we did enjoy Samara Halperin's Hard Hat Required, a stop-motion Lego animation of a risque construction site (pictured above, which also had excellent music). We also found ourselves drawn into the soap-opera-like Homotopia (denoting the sellout gay bad guy in the movie with a NEWSOM t-shirt was a nice touch, we thought).

Even in the YouTube age, there's something very cool about watching short-length films on a big screen. The excitement of the filmmakers was palpable, and it's great to see we've got so much different types of talent in the area. We were hoping for more shots of the city in the movies, but we basically always think that for anything set in San Francisco.