Anyone who has seen enough gay or lesbian films can attest to the fact that the majority of gay-themed films are, simply put, crap. Mediocre films like the eyeball-rollingly bad It's in the Water and Better Than Chocolate are celebrated because, well, there often really isn't much else out there to choose from. It is because the pickings of quality gay films are so slim, that I usually have low expectations when delving into a gay and lesbian film festival. So imagine my surprise at the 8th Annual Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival where all but one of the dozen or so features I saw were decent to actually pretty darn great!

The pleasant surprises of this year's fest ran the gamut from compelling documentaries, to surprisingly fresh fictional films. The fest opened with the crowd-pleasing, but kinda forgettable, Die Mommie Die! with—gasp!—Jason Priestly in attendance to draw a theater packed with not-so-closeted 90210 fans. I started to fear for the festival when my second film, The Old Testament, from China, tested my tolerance (very low), and became my first walkout of the fest. I feared my choices would become a downward spiral of quality from there. But no such luck! Many treats were in store after that.

Among the documentaries, there was the fascinating and frustrating Flag Wars, about well-off gays moving in (and thus gentrifying) a run-down urban black neighborhood. Dildo Diaries offered many hearty guffaws at the bizarre laws against sex toys in a state where guns are legal, but dildos are not (this means you, Texas). Don't You Worry, It Will Probably Pass showed, through video diaries of three Swedish girls, that the emotional struggle of wrestling with your sexual orientation as a teen is a universal. And, probably my favorite doc of the fest, Put the Camera on Me is a hilarious look at the neighborhood home movies of a teen auteur in suburban California in the 80s, who went on to become a Hollywood director.

Amazingly enough, many of the fiction films were very good as well, led by the Audience Award winner, Latter Days, about a swinging waiter falling for a clean cut Mormon missionary—that wrung laughter and tears from the packed audience. Thom Fitzgerald's The Event, which had screened earlier this year at SIFF, made an appearance, and the surprise sneak preview Girls Will Be Girls had the fest crowd screaming with laughter. There were also a few archive films that got the rare big-screen treatment, including Katherine Hepburn's obscure cross-dressing romp Sylvia Scarlett, a spruced-up restored print of Dorothy Arzner's racy Working Girls from 1931, and a splashy Cinerama sing-along version of Singin' in the Rain (I don't know why I had never seen this classic before, but seeing it for the first time in such a fine theater was certainly the way to do it).

All in all, this year's festival proved to be a great success. I'm not sure if I just chose my films well this year, or if things are finally looking up for gay cinema!

Here's a list of what Moviepie managed to catch at the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, with a red arrow next to our recommendations:

9 Dead Gay Guys (4/8) (UK)    Die Mommie Die! (4/8) (USA) Dildo Diaries (6/8) (USA)    Don't You Worry, It Will Probably Pass (5/8) (Sweden) The Event (7/8) (Canada) Flag Wars (7/8) (USA)

Girls Will Be Girls (6/8) (USA)    Goldfish Memory (4/8) (Ireland) Latter Days (7/8) (USA) Put the Camera on Me (7/8) (USA)    Sylvia Scarlett (4/8) (USA) Working Girls (1931) (6/8) (USA)