Today's Staff Pick is from Alexis Whitham, Programming & Hospitality Associate.
The Sleeping Beauty of East Finchley
Thursday, June 16 at 10:00PM, Castro Theatre
Monday, June 20 at 7:00PM, Rialto Cinemas™ Elmwood
The description: Choirs aren’t just for high school kids, and neither is romance, as Joan discovers.
Middle-aged Joan is sleepwalking through a dreary life, tending to her ailing mother and working a boring office job. Her only pleasure is in the songs she sings in the solitude of her room. Enter Patricia, her mum’s visiting nurse, who persuades Joan to join a women’s choir and share her voice with the rest of the world.
Complications ensue when Joan, troubled by her Catholic faith and fears of public exposure drops out of the choir just as it heads to the big LGBT music festival. Will Pat have to sing solo?
Why Alexis thinks you should see it:
The power of music seems to be a common theme at Frameline this year, with an array of inspirational tales from Leave it on the Floor to Leading Ladies to the campy short I Was a Teenage Werebear. But there is something quietly moving about the way that music changes one little life in the touching The Sleeping Beauty of East Finchley, the tale of a cautious middle-aged English woman who discovers that a sweet gang of lesbians doing renditions of mid-twentieth century music can not only free her long-hidden amazing voice, but also possibly another side she is struggling to realize.
This film is also preceded by my favorite short doc in the festival, I Still Love Them, which in a mere 13 minutes, manages to convey more love and heartache and depth than most films can in 90.
