22nd connecticut gay and lesbian film festival

Pedro

Nick Oceano, 2008, USA, 90 min

PEDRO celebrates the extraordinary life of Pedro Zamora, a young man who when he found out he was HIV positive at 17, made the courageous decision to dedicate the rest of his life to speaking out about his condition in an attempt to raise awareness about the disease in his community, even testifying before the United States Congress to argue for more explicit HIV/AIDS educational programs aimed at youth of color before auditioning for The Real World in 1993. His appearance on The Real World brought his story and his message to MTV's youthful audience and beyond, and when Zamora's health began to deteriorate in late 1994 (after he left the show), it became front page news nationwide, and his death at age 22 provoked a worldwide outpouring of grief.

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PROGRAM

Love Sucks

Ingrid Jungermann & Sara Winters, 2008, USA, 9 min

LOVE SUCKS is a dark comedy about Jane and Margaret, a vampire couple attempting to make a long-term relationship work. Spending hundreds of years together has pitched them both into the throes of co-dependency, so they do what any couple struggling to make things work would do: they go to therapy.

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Shorts Program: Imaginanimation

Pat's First Kiss

Pat Mills, 2007, Canada, 4 min

Take a creepy British hostel, a first kiss, and a half-cooked chicken and you have the ingredients to the unfortunately true story of the filmmaker's first kiss with a stranger he met overseas, told with animated delight.

Functional Design

Christian Robinson, 2006, USA, 4 min

The goose king knows you’re gay. A young boy gets a visit from a royal fowl in this animated film, and the king tells it like it is. Director Christian Robinson shares a universal message about the importance of being honest with yourself and the people you love.

Operated by Invisible Hands

Nicole Brending, 2007, USA, 7 min

(In French with English subtitles)

Ellen discovers her true romantic yearnings when she spends the night with Doreen. But when she wakes up in the morning, she panics, and the two dolls find themselves entangled in a mess of plastic limbs and artificial hair.