Thursday’s theme at the 48^th Ann Arbor Film Fest was “Out Night,” showcasing three LGBT-inspired short films and one feature length documentary in the Main Theater. First up was “Black Ops Arabesque,” a short film directed by Californian Jared Drake.

Black Ops Arabesque

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“Black Ops Arabesque” opened with a man, who looked like one of Agent Smith’s clones from The Matrix trilogy, receiving an ominous phone call about a kidnapping operation. A few minutes later, Smith-clone and his ballet-dancing daughter are backed into a corner with guns pointed at their heads. The thought “This isn’t very gay at all” was about to cross my mind – then the ballet dancer yelled “5, 6, 7, 8!” and all of a sudden gunmen and all are dressed up like The Village People dancing to the Scissor Sister’s “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing.” I think Drake is really onto something here. If all negotiations that started with a gun ended up with a choreographed dance routine, the world would be awesome.

Tools 4 Fools

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Next in line was “Tools 4 Fools,” a humorous commercial-spoof marketing gently-used sex toys, directed by Kate A. Brandt featuring household lesbian celebrities like Julie Goldman and Jenny Shimizu. While the film lacked the sort of message one would expect from a short at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the audience seemed more than happy to eschew political commentary in favor of laughing the entire time.

EVERYTHING TO LIVE FOR

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The last short film was “EVERYTHING TO LIVE FOR,” directed by Michigan native Scott Northrup. A downbeat change from the other two, Northrup’s film focused on a gloomy narrative supported by shots that may very well have been compiled from 60s-era family vacation videos. The narrator reluctantly mourned an unfaithful lover as the screen showed images of hotels and beaches and palm trees. Northrup’s narrative left many questions unanswered  (How long were they together? How did his lover die? Who the hell are these children that the narrator keeps mentioning?) while asking a bigger one: why can’t we ever let go?

City of Borders

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Out Night’s feature was “City of Borders,” an award-winning documentary about the gay community in Jerusalem, directed by Yun Suh. The film opened with a group of young Palestinian men sneaking over the border into Israel to get to Shushan, a gay bar in the middle of Jerusalem that sees Palestinians and Israelis alike walk through its doors. Over the course of the documentary, we meet Boody, Palestine’s first drag queen; Adam, an Israeli who can’t understand people’s hate for the LGBT community but harbors great disdain for the Palestinian cause; Sa’Ar, Jerusalem’s first openly gay city council member and owner of Shushan; and Samira and Ravit, a couple who break two big taboos as an Arab-Israeli lesbian couple.

I haven’t seen a documentary as simultaneously optimistic and depressing as City of Borders since I watched Invisible Children as a high school student. The film starts out with an abundance of hope, as gay Palestinians and Israelis dance and drink in solidarity. But the camaraderie gradually breaks down. At a World Pride Rally in Jerusalem, Adam expresses his anger at people who bring signs calling for tearing down the borders on the West Bank. He even yells at a woman wearing a “Meat is Murder” shirt, saying, “I’m a carnivore! It’s not related!” Similarly upsetting is how the Orthodox Jews, Christians and Muslims come together to protest a pride parade in Jerusalem. It highlights a fundamental problem in many activist movements – the tendency to unite against something rather than promoting true harmony.

Samira and Ravit provide an excellent summary of the film, and the conflict in the Middle East, when they describe their current relationship problem. Ravit wants kids; Samira doesn’t – but somehow, they insist, they’ll make it work.