Gay and lesbian filmmakers honored at San Francisco International Film Festival

The San Francisco International Film Festival wrapped up its 44th year Thursday and honored some of this year’s most high-profile gay-, lesbian-, and transgender-themed films. A first-ever tie for Best Narrative Feature Audience Award honored Cheryl Dunye’s Stranger Inside and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, while Kate Davis’s Southern Comfort was named Best Documentary by the Golden Gate Award jury. Stranger is the story of a lesbian who is reunited with her mother in a women’s prison; Hedwig deals with a German would-be rock star who is the victim of a botched sex-change operation; and Comfort examines the life of a couple, one of whom is a male-to-female transsexual, the other female-to-male. Legendary out underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger was presented the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award for his vastly influential filmography of beautiful and provocative experimental work.