“…And to the LGBTQ community of Oxford and beyond, I hope that I might have had a small part in helping you feel seen. Cinema absolutely has the power to do that.”
Walford said, “From the beginning of WTxFF, I said that we would only do the film festival as long as we saw a need for it. While there is still much work to be done to give a platform to the work of women directors, producers, writers, editors, directors of photography, and composers, we have seen much headway made during the past five years. Our goal was to show the range of the female storyteller, and to celebrate great and distinctive work in every genre, every style. WTxFF sought to achieve a place where the notion of gender behind the camera could take a backseat to the grit, emotion, and vision projected on the screen. And in a lot of ways, we saw that increasingly happen at our film festival.”
Vasquez and DiGiorgio said, “We took on the challenge to do a virtual presentation and the combination of our Billy the Kid Film Festival with Justina Walford and the Women Texas Film Festival actually confirmed that we were on the right track in creating this film festival just two years ago. It was clear – even in the virtual space – how special and unique Texas film is and how much our local Hico and Hill Country community enjoys and supports the work of those filmmakers. The fact that we could also make a dedicated effort to support and put forward the work of some wonderful women filmmakers and talent also made for a wonderful weekend.”
Vasquez and DiGiorgio said, “We launched the Billy the Kid Film Festival last year because the thought of combining the unique personality of Hico with our love of film was a winner no matter how we looked at it. However, our audiences’ and our filmmakers’ safety is first and foremost, and this virtual presentation will also give us an opportunity to share these films statewide and hopefully introduce them to even more film fans.”
The historical roots of many issues we face in American society presently are discussed in the film, ranging from segregation, race relations, and equity in education. At one moment in the film Baldwin Chiu makes the point that in school he never learned anything about the discriminatory laws that affected Chinese-Americans and other minority groups.
Utilizing stop-motion animation at pivotal moments, Olivia Peace’s inter-disciplinary talents are on full display. She uses artwork to convey the dramatic, often illusory feelings of late-stage adolescence. Along with nimble writing by Jess Zeidman and some astute observations, these moments lend credence to Olivia Peace as a promising filmmaker to watch, should she continue down that path.
I always try to hire women, people of colour, trans or bisexual and otherly abled people. I will always do so. I’m not sure others follow suit but I do keep hearing that of more crews these days, so that’s a good thing.
We wanted to make up a relationship between two souls who connect each other from their hearts. And we think that true love is always innocent and always finds its own way no matter if it is between two men or women.
What I love about these films is that there are women of all ages watching these who have always settled for a protagonist kind of like them. And that is the great challenge for most of us women as we grew up with male protagonists, white female protagonsts, cis-hetero protagonists forcing us to fit our color, our identity, our queerness into those mainstream places. Nothing makes me feel better than hearing someone say, “Finally, I see me on that screen.”
Along with the rising tension, the film seems in its core a feminist exploration where men are merely mentioned plot points, things to be missed, and the women move the story embracing their aloneness in vibrant, diverse ways. As Lombardia says in her interview here “Like planets in the solar system, these seeming divergent characters’ worlds rotate around the same type of male absence.”
