Impressive Works in Gay Film Festival

Outfest ’95 opens its 10-day run Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Directors Guild with Patricia Rozema’s beautiful, passionate “When Night Is Falling,” the first of nearly 200 films, shorts, videos and other events.

It stars exquisite-looking Pascale Bussieres as a theologian engaged to another theologian (Henry Czerny) when she becomes captivated by an equally exquisite circus performer (Rachael Crawford).

The resulting emotional pain and confusion is expressed with graceful gravity by the Canadian director of the delightful “I Heard the Mermaids Singing.”

Among the shorts screening in the “Boys on the Verge” program opening night at 8:30 and again on closing night at 5:30 is Peggy Rajski’s Oscar-winning “Trevor,” which confronts the horrors of puberty for gay males with a jaunty affection.

Documentarian Marlon Riggs’ altogether remarkable 86-minute “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.) is a final testament from an important, groundbreaking filmmaker dying of AIDS.

Riggs--who died in April, 1994, at 36--attempts a definition of blackness as broad as possible as a way to plead for inclusiveness among African Americans, calling for a banishment of divisive distinctions based on skin color, class, gender, sexual orientation and religion.

“Black Is . . .” is a wide-ranging work celebrating diversity and filled with warmth and humor, in which Riggs sought the views of many people, famous and otherwise. It is also a loving chronicle of Riggs’ family, rooted in Louisiana, and a harrowing diary of his day-to-day battle against AIDS.

As in previous Riggs films, most notably the controversial “Tongues Untied,” “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t” is deftly structured, incorporating performance arts, especially dance--Bill T. Jones performs--as punctuation.

Mark Decker’s “Casa Hollywood” (Saturday at 9 p.m.) has its heart so firmly in the right place that it encourages you to disregard its unevenness. Its formidable linchpin is drag queen “Tatiana” Volty, cast as the glittery but strong, wise and loving Latina Earth Mother proprietress of a Hollywood drag club. Her foster son (Michael Banks)--a handsome straight--dreams of TV stardom while Volty confronts losing her establishment, a warm haven for people of all colors and sexual orientations, to Hollywood redevelopers.

Charley Lang’s 24-minute “Live to Tell,” which screens as part of the “Living Proud” program (Sunday at 2 p.m.), is a touching, brave account of the first gay and lesbian senior prom ever, held last year at the L.A. Hilton.

Nancy Meckler and writer Wendy Kesselman’s “Sister My Sister” (Sunday at 4 p.m.) is a work of astonishing accumulative power that takes us into a French provincial 19th-Century townhouse where the only concession to the 20th Century is electricity.

It is 1932, and a pretty teen-ager (Jodhi May) comes to live and work with her older sister, a diffident maid (Joely Richardson) in the house, which belongs to an obtuse widow (Julie Walters) so exacting that she makes Harriet Craig seem a slob.

The widow also has a miserably unhappy near-adult daughter (Sophie Thursfield) that she possesses with an iron hand and dresses like a child. In this already tense atmosphere a flaming passion ignites between the sisters, illuminating the suffocating narrowness of the lives of all four women, who are played superbly. “Sister My Sister” is based on the same actual incident as Genet’s “The Maids.”

Heather MacDonald’s “Ballot Measure 9” (Sunday at 7 p.m.) is a truly frightening documentary on how Oregon’s gays and lesbians literally risked their lives to campaign against the notorious anti-gay 1992 ballot measure. Ballot 9 was sponsored by a highly organized and self-righteous religious right, which is shown resorting to every conceivable rabble-rousing scare tactic in trying to get it passed. In an atmosphere of escalating violence and danger, the film depicts closed-minded Bible-bangers exploiting to the hilt the appalling ignorance of their followers. (213) 466-1767.

Syrus Alvand’s disappointing “Once and for All” (at the Monica 4-Plex Friday for an open-ended run) finds a Tehran couple meeting to divorce only to have it denied because the wife is pregnant; what eventually will ensue is all too obvious from the start. (310) 394-9741.