Go Fish
This week we are showing Go Fish (1994) on Monday, 6/1, at 8pm.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors are at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie at 8:10!
Please note the Monday showtime!
After a few weeks of rather challenging selections in the From Below, we thought we should kick off June with something a bit lighter and lovelier: Rose Troche’s 90s slice-of-lesbian-life indie romcom Go Fish! Made on a shoestring budget by a group of queer women who mostly met in Chicago’s ACT UP-centered activist scene, the film follows co-screenwriter/star Guinevere Turner as Max, a spunky college student who must confront her romantic predispositions when she is set up with V.S. Brodie’s Ely, an older, earthier woman who she thinks is definitely not her type. My initial pitch for the bawdily talky, black-and-white Go Fish was to say it’s kinda like a Lesbian Kevin Smith movie a la Clerks, until I discovered that not only did Clerks come out at the same 1994 Sundance Festival, but that Kevin Smith fell in love with Go Fish and affectionately ripped off certain dialogue scenes for his own, uh, lesbian-adjacent film Chasing Amy. Maybe Kevin Smith should be called the terminally straight Rose Troche?
Since we’ve started the From Below, we’ve had a recurring interest in showing movies from the New Queer Cinema moment of the late 80s and early 90s, and Go Fish both continues this trend and is itself a response to New Queer Cinema. Rose Troche, born to Puerto Rican parents and raised in suburban Chicago, has said that she started out developing Go Fish as a far more experimental feature, her version of Todd Haynes’s Poison, which we showed last year. When their meager budget began to run out, Troche and Turner actually turned to the movement-defining essay “New Queer Cinema,” calling and reaching out to every filmmaker and producer listed in the piece to see if anyone could front some money so that they could finish their own femme induction into the canon.
We’re excited to pop into Chicagoland’s best gay cafes and bars (circa 1994) with you this Monday.
Charlie, Stefan, Stark