San Francisco Frameline Festival Top Jury Prize Shared by Two Films

The 50th San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival ended with a split decision: the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle awarded its outstanding first narrative feature prize to both Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus and Sam McConnell’s Test after voting ended in a statistical tie — a first for the festival’s juried awards.

Chiarella’s Australian debut uses horror to excavate internal and external homophobia; McConnell’s Test, a gritty sports drama, earned particular praise for a star-making performance from its screenwriter, Brock Yurich, playing a closeted amateur bodybuilder.

On the audience side, Jane Schoenbrun’s closing night film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — a queer psychosexual slasher starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson — won best narrative feature, while Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s experimental rodeo documentary Jaripeo took best documentary.

Brydie O’Connor’s Barbara Forever, a portrait of pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, won outstanding documentary feature and is set for a theatrical release through Strand Releasing this fall.

Short film honors went to the Brazilian Morpheus & Charon (outstanding narrative short) and Cecile Fountain-Jardim’s Doug + Me (outstanding documentary short), a formally inventive film about the director’s uncle, who died of AIDS before she was born.

The festival’s closing weekend, which coincided with San Francisco’s Pride festivities — the massive citywide celebration of all things queer — brought two sold-out, boisterous premieres to the Castro Theatre, the legendary cinema hall in the heart of the city’s gay district that recently reopened after a $41 million renovation.

On Thursday, John Early debuted Maddie’s Secret, his homage to films like Kate’s Secret, a 1985 TV movie starring Meredith Baxter about a woman with an eating disorder. Introducing the film, Early thanked Frameline onstage and joked that the film was “reverse engineered to be played at the Castro” — rather than wait a decade for camp-classic reappraisal, he said, he wanted to skip straight to the crowd, theater, and city it was built for.

Saturday, the documentary Hunky Jesus — a history of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the long-running charitable drag nun order led by Sister Roma, “The Most Photographed Nun in the World™” (real name Michael Williams) — drew an equally enthusiastic hometown crowd, with Sister Roma proving herself a natural movie star: Bea Arthur in kabuki makeup, with the comic timing to match.

Frameline50 drew roughly 50,000 attendees across 11 days, screening nearly 150 films from more than 30 countries.