Llik Your Idols/Advocate for Fagdom director Angelique Bosio (interviewed below and in our upcoming zine about her second feature) has spent the past year or so shooting a film about Parisian lingerie designer Fifi Chachnil, and is looking for funds to complete the project.
This pledge-based funding model (used so effectively recently by Summer Camp in funding their debut album) is a really interesting one, and one with huge implications for filmmakers if it does take off. The target is €4200, and there are plenty of goodies on offer for your euros. You can read about the project (in French) and consider your pledges here. Well worth your time and diminishing single european currency.
Angelique (Llik Your Idols) Bosio's excellent new documentary Bruce LaBruce: The Advocate for Fagdom will follow a triumphant appearance at the Berlinale with a trio of screenings at the BFI as part of the 2011 Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.
We're beyond psyched for these screenings, this is not to be missed - the film is a captivating collage of interviews, archive and LaBruce's films and art, woven together into a an insightful and entertaining biographical portrait of the man, his work and his dreams, and featuring the likes of John Waters, Gus Van Sant, Harmony Korine, Vaginal Davis, Jack Sargeant, Richard Kern and more. Bosio's previous film Llik Your Idols was the centrepiece of our first official Pictures night, and it's great to see her work progress and delve into new and emotional places.
"an illuminating portrait of one of queer cinema's most vital transgressors." - Michael Blyth, BFI
The screenings are as follows, and keep reading for the trailer and a quick Q&A with Angelique Bosio.
Friday 1st April - 18.40 in the BFI Studio Saturday 2nd - 12.20 in the BFI Studio Monday 4th - 18.10 in NFT1
Priority tickets are available now, and general tickets on sale March 18th via the BFI.
Angelique Bosio Q&A
TP: What drew you to making a film about Bruce LaBruce?
AB: The distributors of my previous documentary, "Llik Your Idols", offered me to direct a DVD bonus for the French edition of "Otto; or, Up With Dead People". I was a bit hesitant at first. Indeed, I didn't want to appear as a one trick pony since Bruce LaBruce was in my first documentary and since the subjects seemed at first quite similar. Nevertheless, I felt frustrated that I had had to cut the whole part specifically about him in the final cut of "Llik...". I guess that's what ended up convincing me to make this film. As the French edition of "Otto..." was canceled, I kept on working on this project but made it a full documentary. I have to admit that I didn't know much about Bruce. I got more and more interested and passionate about the film and him as I was filming and discovering that he embodied a few issues that were so dear and important to me. And the person himself was so nice and generous that the 2 year adventure turned out to be quite a pleasure. I know it sounds cheesy but...
(photo by Richard Kern)
TP: What can people expect when they watch it?
AB: I hope they won't expect anything ! I mean I tried to make a film that could interest people that are not necessarily cinephiles, gay, queer, or into Bruce's work in the first place. To me, it raises questions that are linked to Bruce but that are not exclusive of what and who is not Bruce. It's not an experimental documentary when it comes to the form but the rather academic form helps me attract more people I think, trying to change their mind more softly or to make them wonder about subjects that are generally subjected to prejudices that we are hardly aware of. Even when one has a very liberal speech on an every day basis, I believe they (even I) have deep rooted prejudices about some specific issues (relationships, religion, races, sexuality etc...). Here I tried to use elements that, put together at the right moment, would make us aware of the limits of our liberal minds. So I guess people can expect to ask themselves at least one question. At least I hope so. But what they shouldn't expect is a fiendish biography of Bruce.
TP: What was the best and worst thing (or things) about making the film?
AB: It's quite hard to reduce more than two years of my life/work with two opposite moments or feelings... I guess doing something after "Llik Your Idols" was quite liberating. I felt I was growing up ! To be able to work with the people I had met along the years and to be able to count on them, to realize I had a crew actually, was fantastic. To travel and meet new people along the way that (for some) are going to stay in your life, it's great too. And the best moment for me was the evening I spent in Portland at the Union Jack watching pole dancers. When it comes to the worst things... Well... I guess me and my producers weren't on the same page and it was sometimes really difficult to make things happen in a peaceful, easygoing and emulating atmosphere. Also I have a real job that I keep doing even when I am filming my documentaries. I am a production secretary / assistant, so the whole making of this film (and my third one at the same time) really drained me out of energy and physical life ! I have spent more than two years trying to keep my head out of the water so I think that's the worst part of it ! Now I'm fine and happy to show the film. It's a reward.
TP: How does it feel now it's out and being screened around the world?
AB: Like I said, the screenings are like the candies and lollipops you get after going to the dentists. It is an incredible opportunity for me to defend the issues raised in the film and discuss it with the people I meet at festivals, and to travel, simply. I just hope I will get strong reactions from the audience and be able to really discuss things.
Article originally published in The Pictures Issue 2
“I’m afraid I don’t consider myself a filmmaker, or anything specific for that matter.” Parisian Angélique Bosio does not like being tied to labels. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she made one of our favourite documentaries of the past few years. Llik Your Idols tells the story of the Cinema of Transgression, a moment in New York time when artists like Richard Kern, Nick Zedd and Lydia Lunch came together to form a loose movement of extreme filmmakers, their work inspired by poverty, nihilism, sex and drugs. At the heart of the film are a series of interviews with the main protagonists of the scene in which they paint a vivid portrait of their lives and loves in squalor and talk openly about that fertile period when some of the most shocking, gruesome and salacious scenes ever seen in underground film were committed to Super 8. Angélique’s open, almost naïve interview technique allows her subjects the ability to reminisce freely and undirected where a more experienced and routined filmmaker may have prompted the opposite effect.
“To be honest, I started work in the cinema abut 10 years ago now,” explains the quiet, unassuming young réalisatrice, “because I knew what I did not want to do – namely to work in music labels, publishing companies, galleries, banks etc. I didn’t know a thing about cinema, or not enough, therefore I felt absolutely free.” But if making Llik Your Idols was a labour of freedom, it was a far from easy process. She worked on it in what little time remained outside of what she calls her “official job” for the best part of 5 years in a production process fraught with difficulties.
“I started in the summer of 2002 and finished it in July 2007, then it ran festivals. The whole thing started quickly. I decided to work on the project in the spring of 2002, wrote a few e-mails, got a few answers, booked some tickets. I wasn’t even sure I was to meet with these people with I booked the tickets, it had to happen, that’s all. Then I got lucky, somebody gave me 1000 Euros and I went to New York in August.”
Angélique flew to New York and conducted the official interviews, getting on with her subjects “quite well” and returning over the following years to revisit, ask more questions, or interview new subjects, slowly but surely completing the jigsaw of the finished film. She befriended Jack Sargeant, author of Deathtripping, the Creation Cinema book about the scene, and modelled for Richard Kern. But as the project grew, funding became an issue, and it was here that the difficulties began.
photo by richard kern
“I tried to work with different production companies that would stop the shooting, waiting for financial support from a French TV channel, which never came of course. So I would alternate periods of shooting and periods of waiting, patiently.” Production continued on blind faith, and editing commenced in 2006 “at home with Aurelie Cauchy. Then another production company, and the editing was stopped.” The stop-start production process was almost enough to curtail the project altogether, but again naïve optimism won through and the film was eventually finished in 2007, “with people I’d rather not talk about,” That wasn’t all. Even with a completed project to hand, securing a release proved difficult - “a production company tried to block everything and it was a mess for another whole year.”
Finally in late 2007 the film hit festivals, and now, two years later, the DVD is available in several territories, with the European edition available October 20th, a welcome pay-off for Angélique, and one that more than compensates for the time and finance put in. “I will never earn any money out of this documentary,” she says, “on the contrary, I have lost some. But I had to do it anyway. I was not motivated by money, I really needed to create something. I never hoped that I would sell it.”
The finished film has proved a deserving hit with critics and the audience it has so far found, owing in part to its openness and accessibility, and has achieved another of its aims (that it has in common with this zine), to bring these works to new audiences. Unlike many documentaries on the subject of underground film, which are often abstracted to the point of being avant garde themselves, Llik Your Idols needs no foreknowledge. “I hope I don’t make films for myself,” she says. “I have tried to make Llik Your Idols a documentary that could interest people who wouldn’t know a thing about this scene. The idea is to spread the word.”
It’s an attitude in the film that chimes with Angélique’s overall outlook towards the creative process, particularly when coming up against production obstacles or negotiating such dark subject matter, as she did in this documentary and her upcoming portrait of Bruce LaBruce. She approaches her work and stays motivated by “being stupid, dreamy and pretending to be naïve…do I sound like Cinderella?” As seen in Llik Your Idols, this naïve, questioning, curious presence wading through stories of bondage, torture and hard drug abuse is more Lewis Carroll’s Alice. You get the sense that this kind of investigation, of involvement, is why she prefers documentary to fiction.
“I don’t think fiction is a natural penchant of mine,” she confirms. “I have had one single valid idea for a short film but gave up too easily when told there was a feature film doing the same thing already. Documentary, [though], allows me to work with music, play with the edit, travel, get into funny situations, meet some people. I can be the control freak I truly am and follow the tide at the same time.”
Angel’s investigations are about to yield two more documentary features, partly the result of a productive (in total contrast to her past experience) partnership with independent producers and distributors Le Chat Qui Fume – “amazing people to work with” – who have given her as free a reign as possible in their production. The first chronicles the work of controversial gay porn-art filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, and the second follows French designer lingerie icon Fifi Chachnil.
“I would like to spend more time trying to learn photography after I have finished them I think,” referring again to her reluctance to be any one thing for long. You suspect though that, even in a different medium, Angélique’s inquisitive world view will shine through. Any investigation is about making connections, and Angélique’s films to date show this particularly, her subjects as pieces of a large and slowly emerging picture. Richard Kern or Fifi Chachnil, “to me there’s a link between all these people.” In the five years of making Llik Your Idols, she proved she has the patience and the curiosity to never stop looking.
