Outfest UCLA Legacy Project public screenings resume at the Billy Wilder Theater
LOS ANGELES — The University of California Los Angeles Film & Television Archive has more than 500,000 items in its moving image collection. That is a big responsibility, said May HaDuong, who has been director of the archive for nine months now.
"It is actually kind of what's so wonderful about [the archive]," HaDuong said. "Every kind of individual person who could be touched by this collection, the content of it, we really try to reach those individuals."
The archive is also home to one of the largest LGBTQ moving image collection globally. In 2005, the archive partnered with Outfest for the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, a series of screenings to help bring the collection of over 41,000 items to the public.
"We were able to with Outfest find a need, and meet that by really taking time to collect, to preserve, to present," HaDuong said.
After a long pandemic closure, public screening has commenced at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum. One of this year's featured guests is filmmaker Jamie Babbit, whose coming-out comedy, "But I'm a Cheerleader," has become a cult favorite over the years. Babbit said the film took some time to build an audience as its irreverent comic tone was not the norm back in 1999.
"I wanted it to feel uplifting, because at the time there was a lot of queer movies that were really depressing, that had like either murder or suicide in the end," Babbit said.
The Outfest UCLA Legacy Project is also screening Babbit's short film, Stuck (2001), a warts-and-all look at an elderly lesbian couple based on Babbit's real-life relatives.
"It wasn't like this beautiful, wonderful relationship between these two old ladies," Babbit recalled. "No, it was toxic. It was abusive. And everyone in the family was like, 'We really don't care that you're gay, we just cannot deal with how mean you guys are to each other.'" — Kristopher Gee, Dec. 11, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Spectrum website.
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