"Victoria Mix": Queer Cinema Comes To Harlem

For five days in November [1996], Harlem became not just a place filmmakers like Spike Lee come to when they have a movie to shoot. This time the world-famous community was the site of a film festival called "Victoria Mix" that showcased dozens of "queer African Diasporic film and video" in the elegant Victoria 5 Theatre on 125th Street, down the street from the Apollo Theatre.

The uptown screenings were part of the 10th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, which had two other Manhattan venues screening different groups of films. (The film festival proudly claims to have "premiered more works by queer filmmakers of color than any other film festival in the world.") And for the first time, Harlem was the site of a gay and lesbian film festival, an historic event that Shari Frilot, the festival director, was "very excited about." Frilot, who is of African-American and Puerto Rican heritage, is  a filmmaker herself.

"Victoria Mix" consisted of more than 50 films and videos by both well-known and lesser-known filmmakers and was divided into eight programs" "Fire!" (the first evening of film, which was hosted by Gay Men of African Descent); "Harlem Stories"; "Let's Talk About Sex"; "The House That Identity Built"; "Oh Yes It's Ladies Night"; "Taboo Subjects"; "City Lore"; and "Family Drama."

On the night of the "Fire!" screenings, which like the other three programs I attended drew a small audience, there was the smell of smoke in the theatre;that seemed to emphasize the theme of the program. (There had been a fire next door a few hours earlier.) The program took its name from the 1926 Harlem Renaissance magazine co-edited by Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, in commemoration of "the same creative intensity" that has been passed down and continues to thrive within the current generation.

Of the 15 films I saw, the most noteworthy were: British filmmaker Isaac Julien's beautifully photographed, although at times didactic, feature-length study of race, sex,and class bias called The Passion of Remembrance (1985), Black Nations/Queer Nations? (1995), Shari Frilot's documentary of the March 1995 conference, One Moment in Time (1992), Felix Rodriquez's short film about an Hispanic drag queen's decision to have a sex change operation to please a straight? lover, and Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself: An Autobiography (1995), Yvonne Welbon's documentary about her six-year sojourn in Taiwan.

Frilot, who had three of her films in the festival, told me that she had "every intention of not making it our last year" at the Victoria 5 Theatre. In fact, she plans to do non-"Mix" business there as well.

This article was submitted to the New York Amsterdam News on November 18, 1996 and to Whazzup! magazine (Oakland, California) on December 31, 1996. Neither publication ran it.