Faces in the Crowd

PIGLFF enters its 14th year.

by Tami Fertig

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The Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival can be a little intimidating. You flip through the doorstopper of a catalog and, with a couple of exceptions, recognize few names or faces. Sure, knowing every detail is not always important — we'd go see gay zombie flick Otto; or, Up With Dead People no matter what. But we figured you might like to know what you're getting into (there's, uh, roadkill-bunny-eating in Otto), so we watched as many of this year's 176 movies beforehand as we could.

There's a little sex, a little religion, a little family-friendly fare (yes, you read that right, suitable-for-kiddies stuff is all the rage). In Breakfast with Scot (screening next week), a gay couple adopts a gay 11-year-old, while Tru Loved — which features Best in Show's lesbian dog handler Jane Lynch — follows the struggles of a girl with two moms and dads. After Tru's screening, Lynch will receive the fest's Artistic Achievement Award for Acting; Natalie Hope McDonald chatted her up about gay family life.

Meanwhile, Sam Adams talked to Temple professor and science fiction writer Samuel Delany. In The Polymath, a new doc about his life, Delany describes his promiscuous years as a young man in NYC. Dude says he's slept with 50,000 men, all while managing to churn out a mind-boggling number of award-winning novels. Now that's a face and name to remember.