The 25th annual Provincetown International Film Festival starts Wednesday, with Billy Porter, Bruce LaBruce, Megan Stalter and Julio Torres receiving honors.
Documentaries celebrating “Midnight Cowboy” and Hollywood icon Rock Hudson, and feature films starring Billy Porter and Tilda Swinton will screen at the 25th annual Provincetown International Film Festival, June 14-18.
More than 100 narrative features, documentaries, and shorts will be screened over five days. Director-writer-actor Bruce LaBruce (“Gerontophilia,” “The Affairs of Lidia”) is the recipient of this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge. Honors will also be presented to actor-singer-writer Billy Porter, “SNL’s” Julio Torres, and “Hacks” actress Megan Stalter.
The annual Cape Cod film festival, which was founded in 1999, opens with “Cora Bora,” starring Stalter as a struggling musician trying to win back her girlfriend, and closes with the comedy “Theater Camp,” a mockumentary about a rundown performing arts camp in danger of being closed. Ben Platt (“Dear Evan Hansen”) stars alongside Molly Gordon (“Booksmart”), who co-writes and directs with Nick Lieberman.
Besides documentary and narrative films, the festival includes panel discussions, parties, book signings, a clambake, and much more.
The festival also will present the comedy “Problemista,” starring Torres and Tilda Swinton as an erratic art-world outcast, and an advance screening of the first two episodes of the four-part Hulu true crime series “Never Let Him Go.”
Other notable showings are “A Little Prayer,” with David Strathairn playing a father meddling in his son’s marriage in the drama, “A Little Prayer,” and “Joy Ride,” featuring four Asian-American friends (Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Stephanie Hsu) on a girls’ trip through Asia in search of one of their birth mothers. “Our Son” is a domestic drama about a divorcing couple (Porter and Luke Evans) fighting for custody of their young son. Veteran filmmaker Ira Sachs (“Keep the Lights On”) is back at PIFF with “Passages,” about a destructive love triangle. It stars Adèle Exarchopoulos (“Blue is the Warmest Color”) and Franz Rogowski. Daryl McCormack (fantastic in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” and “Bad Sisters”), plays a young novelist trying to make a name for himself in “The Lesson,” a literary thriller also starring Julie Delpy. “The Pod Generation” takes on technology-enhanced parenthood, with Emilia Clarke (“Game of Thrones”) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”).
A handful of documentaries with hometown connections will also screen. “I Am a Town,” is a love letter to Provincetown from resident Mischa Richter, who shot the famous cover photo for Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” album. It hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery. “In the Whale” chronicles the story of Cape Cod lobsterman Michael Packard, the man who was swallowed by a humpback whale off the coast of Herring Cove beach. (Spoiler alert: He lived to tell the tale). Filmmaker Ivy Meeropol dives into how the Cape’s coastal community is renegotiating its relationship with the marine environment in “After the Bite.” Boston’s desegregation busing crisis is the subject of “The Busing Battleground.”
In other local connections, filmmaker Arthur Egeli reimagines the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in “Art Thief” and Tom Welch, the lead projectionist at Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, is the focus of the documentary short, “Projectionist.”
Hollywood icons are the subject of a pair of films. Fans of “Midnight Cowboy,” the only X-rated film to ever win Best Picture, can pony up to “Desperate Souls,” a documentary from Nancy Buirski that examines the Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman masterpiece. In “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed,” Stephen Kijak pulls the curtain back on the closeted matinee idol, whose death from AIDS in 1985 shocked the world. The documentary will premiere at 9 p.m. on June 28 on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.
For the full lineup and to buy tickets, go to provincetownfilm.org.
Boston Movie News 