The Florida Film Festival takes over Orlando from April 9-18. These three LGBT-friendly documentaries are being shown as well as over 100 other flicks. Read more online-exclusive, bonus reviews. Get more information on the festival.
The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
(Documentary directed by Leanne Pooley)
Jools and Lynda Topp are political lesbian twins from New Zealand. They’re also yodeling, folk-singing comedians who had a television show. To their fans, they are icons totally worthy of gushing worship.
It’s a miracle they even got started.
The Topps were born into the backwards farming culture. Their loving parents almost accidentally gave the sisters the tools to 
survive: pride, loyalty and humor. Jools and Lynda adored their agricultural childhood, but after they joined the Army, they decided to see the world. Somehow, they stumbled across their gifts for songwriting and performance, infused with skits of multiple characters based on loving mockery.
Leanne Pooley’s film is kind and sweet; it tells the twins’ biography in a thorough but lackadaisical manner. It’s folksy like the Twins’ music; it’s colorful like the sisters’ characters. Old photos, skits, stand-up and concerts round out this thoroughly enjoyable picture.
The things this documentary explores are quietly fascinating. What is it about the Topps’ comedy that allows them to also be deeply political to steelworkers and LGBT alike? How have they used their act to help end nuclear proliferation and expand LGBT rights? Is it because their sense of harmony and timing are so perfect that people listen? The biggest question: Why aren’t they even more famous?
Dumbstruck
(Documentary directed by Mark Goffman)
There’s such a small distance between passion and pathology. Dumbstruck explores that gap using ventriloquists.
We meet the one-time beauty queen who was jilted at the altar. We get to know the famous cruise performer who hates being away from his family. A 13-year-old white boy from the Midwest also loves the art; his dummy is an “urban” black.
There’s the famous Terry Fator, the 42-year-old who after years of struggle, won America’s Got Talent. Finally, we have Wilma, the six-foot-five transgender woman whose act is more “homespun” and less “polished,” often performing to just a handful of people.
Can you already sense that the talent here varies wildly? Dumbstruck contains portions of sheer discomfort, buckled by very brief moments of gifted performance. How you feel about the experience will vary. Are you creeped out by people who seem to live through inanimate objects, calling their dolls “children”? Don’t go. Are you fascinated to see how an unusual obsession can once in a great while lead to actual brilliance? Then, don’t miss it.
Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields
(Documentary directed by Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara)
It’s OK if you’ve never heard of The Magnetic Fields. They’re a band built for obscurity, to be loved by only a few.
First of all, the leader is mercurial gay man, Stephin Merritt. His melancholy bass vocals are a cross between David Bowie and Leonard Cohen after a handful of barbiturates. His lyrics are an unusual mix of cleverness, silliness and melodrama. To the press, this front man likes to say witty, depressing things in the manner of Droopy Dog. In person, this perfectionist has some of the most frustrating interpersonal skills you’ll ever witness.
The Magnetic Fields plays an eclectic combo of experimental pop, alt-country, and low-fi orchestral works. They use things like kitchen whisks, found objects and toys to augment their guitar, piano, drums, and cello. Since the late 1980s, The Magnetic Fields has alternated between prolific inundation and long stretches of silence, almost fading into obscurity between releasing gleefully morose albums.
As a documentary, Strange Powers is both fun and frustrating—often simultaneously. This folksy film is like the band’s catchy music: joyfully reveling in bleakness, following no particular course, ending up wherever it may.
