Written by:
Candace Moore
» Order
this Issue of Curve:
18#5
White and straight characters are now the tokens as the following shows focus on colorful queer lives and communities. Director Amber Sharp’s engaging pilot Don’t Go played the film festival circuit last year, winning the Blue Flame Award for Best Director at the Oakland Black LGBT film festival in California. We’re rooting for it to get picked up as a cable series. U People and Playing Spades are serial webisodes available for download at JengoTV.com, an LGBT people of color media network aimed at diversity.
Don’t Go (A. Sharp Productions): The pilot episode of director Amber Sharp’s Melrose Place for queer women of color introduces us to buddies Jaden (Melange LaVonne) and Bone (Sklyer Cooper) on a sunny day, two bois breaking a sweat while working out in the sand in Long Beach County, Calif. When Jaden gets uncommonly queasy, Bone teases Jaden about her femme-y girlfriend Melody (Go Fish’s Guin Turner), who is intersex, wondering aloud if Melody’s been “sticking it” and if she’s shooting blanks (or perhaps not). Drama does indeed unfold at the Los Angeles fourplex where lovers Jaden and Melody are the landladies and the lives of their friends and neighbors intersect and entangle around them. In the first episode, a long-lost father is found, we’re let in on a big secret Bone has been keeping, the results of a pregnancy test shake things up and new tenant Shanti (Nisha Ganatra) moves into the complex, running away from her family, who want to arrange her marriage. Light, funny, and true-to-life moments elevate the soapy stuff. Despite carrying quite a few story lines, this dramedy flies, perhaps due to its fresh characters. The actors are obviously having fun in their roles and it shows. (dontgotheseries.com)
U People (JengoTV): Hanifah Walidah and Olive Demetrius are a charming butch-femme couple who make sweet, sweet art together. On JengoTV, they let us into their process, sharing their latest film project with viewers in this free podcast documentary series. Fifteen-minute-long webisodes take us behind-the-scenes to their apartment, where they frame their ideas and flirt with each other and the camera, and onto the streets, where their U People correspondent, Gloria Bigelow, chats with Brooklyn, N.Y., residents about moments when they’ve felt (or been made to feel) “different, other, or outside the box.” Believing that “mostly everybody’s America’s misunderstood,” Walidah and Demetrius cultivate a forum for a culturally diverse array of everyday people to tell stories of feeling othered, in order to heal and be heard. They also treat the camera to spins, dancing at Ubiquita, a New York City club, and other hotspots. U People gets to the political vis-à-vis the personal; the show offers viewers a close look at Walidah and Demetrius’ lives, highlights local cultures and showcases on-the-fly interviews with passersby. All the segments feel positive, relaxed and spontaneous. Walidah and Demetrius also generously invite viewers to “holla back” on their website and upload videos with their own “U People stories.” (jengotv.com)
Playing Spades (JengoTV): Affairs, jealousy, catfights, 3 a.m. phone calls and many other “intimate details” are front and center in this high-stakes game of lesbian love. Islande Evans (Tonya Fore-Holston) is introduced by the Internet serial’s narrator as a “poised woman with an aggressive stance” who “with a beer, puff and a smile” can’t help but play, but soon finds herself “embroiled in a love triangle.” A powerful professional woman who has her shit together but still likes to party, Islande lets passion rile her up in her private life. We get to peek in at a player beset by plenty of sexy female melodrama in this soap opera with no stops. Well, there are four, technically, if you purchase the episode in five parts on JengoTV (your money helps facilitate more media by LGBT people of color). The show is also on DVD. You never know which hand will be dealt next in Playing Spades, a show based on the Girls Around the Way novels by Deardria Nesbitt, but whatever it is, it’s bound to get steamy. (jengotv.com) |
