The 50th San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival ended with a split decision: the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle awarded its outstanding first narrative feature prize to both Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus and Sam McConnell’s Test after voting ended in a statistical tie — a first for the festival’s juried awards.
Chiarella’s Australian debut uses horror to excavate internal and external homophobia; McConnell’s Test, a gritty sports drama, earned particular praise for a star-making performance from its screenwriter, Brock Yurich, playing a closeted amateur bodybuilder.
On the audience side, Jane Schoenbrun’s closing night film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — a queer psychosexual slasher starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson — won best narrative feature, while Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s experimental rodeo documentary Jaripeo took best documentary.
Brydie O’Connor’s Barbara Forever, a portrait of pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, won outstanding documentary feature and is set for a theatrical release through Strand Releasing this fall.
Short film honors went to the Brazilian Morpheus & Charon (outstanding narrative short) and Cecile Fountain-Jardim’s Doug + Me (outstanding documentary short), a formally inventive film about the director’s uncle, who died of AIDS before she was born.
