Billing itself as the world’s only multicultural gender-inclusive film festival, Fusion Los Angeles LGBT People of Color Film Festival will take place this coming weekend, November 11 through 13. It will be the third consecutive year for the festival, which showcases documentary, narrative, and short films and videos. The festival will also feature workshops, panels, receptions, music and spoken-word programs—many of them free events.

“Fusion is a one-of-its-kind festival that builds bridges between L.A. communities, celebrates local artists, affirms identity and fights homophobia,” according to Stephen Gutwillig, Executive Director of Outfest. “Up until now,” he says, “there has never been a cohesive festival that showcased and blended so many ethnicities within a queer context.”

The festival opens today (November 11), at Hollywood’s historic Egyptian Theatre, with a program of short films about hard-hitting truths and passionate encounters, then an open-bar after-party. If the past is any indicator, the two full days of innovative works that follow may provide a showcase for a standout film slowly garnering its due notice.

Last November’s festival closed with Rodney Evans Brother to Brother—a widely acclaimed favorite on the film festival circuit that won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival as well as awards at LGBT film festivals in New York, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Fusion 2005 will close with Bam Bam and Celeste, a feature film directed by Lorene Machado  that stars Margaret Cho, who also wrote the screenplay. Cho plays thirty-something Celeste, fag hag to Bam Bam (Bruce Daniels). Daniels appeared in Cho’s 2004 concert video, Revolution.

Loosely based on Cho’s teenage years in San Francisco in the ’80s, the film follows the two friends—who run a hair salon—as they speed away from their Midwestern hometown in a hot pink getaway vehicle headed right for New York City. A contest for a TV makeover show lures them to the biggest of big cities, where they somehow manage to cross paths with the racist and homophobic dolts who haunted them in high school.

The film features an excellent supporting cast that includes longtime gay rights activist Kathy Najimy (Sister Act), John Cho (Harold in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Alan Cumming (a Scottish sometime writer/producer/director with more than 50 acting credits to his name), and Jane Lynch—Tina’s slimy divorce lawyer on The L Word and the hilarious dog handler in Best in Show who gets her own paws on the bombshell owner of the standard poodle she trains.

Nisha Ganatra, who directed and starred in Chutney Popcorn, also makes an appearance in the film. Cho will also play her own mother in the film, as she often does in her standup performances.

The festival will also screen The Aggressives (2004), a video documentary about a community of male-identified lesbians of color who perform in drag balls and live life of distinctive style and attitude. The outspoken, world-weary/wise bunch call themselves “aggressives,” and are as unlikely to identify as transgender as they are to embrace a drag king or lesbian identity. They exist outside the confines of rigid gender categories and celebrate a masculinity that they embody on their own terms.

The camera follows them on their boisterous everyday escapades and captures them in raw, intimate interviews—affording a glimpse of their lives narrated in their own varied voices.

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