The Nashville Gay and Lesbian Film Festival continues through Sunday night at the Belcourt, presenting some 50 features, documentaries and shorts that explore facets of the GLBT experience. The fare ranges from family-friendly programming in the afternoons to naughtier stuff as the witching hour nears. Tickets are available at the door; for more information, see www.mtsu.edu/~jhwillia/nglff.html. Below is a recap of some of the highlights, along with a special message from a filmmaker represented in the fest:

"Greetings, lovely Nashvillians! This is Edith Edit, once a sheltered Vanderbilt student, meek waitress, Lucy's Record Shop regular, and idealistic aspiring documentary videomaker-come-(or cum) pansexploitation multi-genre whore. I would sell my editing bay to the devil to be present at the Nashville LGBT Film Festival this weekend and sneak into the back row to watch all of you squeal with delight for my sci-fi queer sex romp, Dominatrix Waitrix (screening 7 p.m. Saturday). But alas, I am stuck in L.A. working a masochistic editing gig that I simply cannot run away from. Please come and see my movie this Saturday night! I will be there in spirit.

For the love of smut, Edith Edit"

On with the show.

FRIDAY

3:30 p.m.: Way Far Out After-School Special

Suitable for teenagers, this shorts program runs the gamut from Lego animation (Q. Allen Brocka's "Rick and Steve, Parts 2 & 3," about the happiest gay couple in the world) to Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay's "I Am a Boyband," in which the director clones himself into a one-man 'N Sync to sing a 16th-century ballad. Think OutKast's "Hey Ya!" video, only with a white Canadian and madrigal music. Co-presented by One-in-Teen Youth Services with sponsorship support from the Vanderbilt University Office of GLBT Life.

5:00 p.m.: Way Far Out Shorts

"Bears," in human terminology, are burly gay men with hairy, cuddly bodies. In memory of the late Chip Evans, vice president of the Music City Bears, who died last month, the NGLFF presents the short film "A Bear's Story," about one man's search for grizzly love. The opposite of bear is "twink," and a twink gets his cream filled by "The Milkman" in Ken Takahashi's short. Elsewhere, Sigmund Freud finds it's fun to play at the YMCA ("Freud Slips," by David M. Young), while the Norwegian short "Precious Moments" follows what happens when an underage boy answers an older man's personal ad. "A Bear's Story" is sponsored by the Music City Bears.

7:15 p.m.: Rise Above: The Tribe 8 Documentary

The pioneers of a punk subgenre sometimes called "dykecore," the women of San Francisco's Tribe 8 make gender-bending guerrilla theater out of cock-rock clichés. Tracy Flannigan's remarkably thorough documentary mixes band interviews of painful candor (like lead singer Lynnee Breedlove's account of a gang rape during her junkie days) with the group's cathartic performance at the way-lavender Michigan Womyn's Music Festival—where the bandmates are crushed to find lesbian protesters who accuse them of promoting sexual violence. The concert footage does justice to their riotous live shows: the heat and frenzy are so vivid you can practically smell the latex of Breedlove's kielbasa-sized strap-on. Preceding the film is "Hummer," an award-winning short by Go Fish writer-star Guinevere Turner.

9:30 p.m.: Wild Side

Director Sebastien Lifshitz follows up his well-regarded debut Come Undone with this explicit drama about a transgendered prostitute (Stephanie Michelini) who revisits her childhood when she takes a Russian sex worker (Edouard Nikitine), and an Arab hustler (Yasmine Beldadi) back to care for her dying mother. The film is in English and French and Russian with English subtitles. Get there early for the British short "Homo Zombies," a dawn-of-the-queer-dead saga, and stay late for the afterparty at Lipstick Lounge.

SATURDAY

11:00 a.m.: Young Children's Program

A kid who takes heat from friends and family because he'd rather sing and dance than field flies and make tackles is the subject of the hour-long Oliver Button Is a STAR, a mixture of live action and animation based on Tomie dePaola's children's book Oliver Button Is a Sissy. Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft and makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin are among those who appear to share their childhood reminiscences. In another animated short, a gay uncle puts a new spin on the old bedtime story in "Fairy Tales: Next Gen."

12:30 p.m.: Masha Mom/Cause of Death: Homophobia

A Jewish Russian-American lesbian's struggle to become a mother and the murders of gay men in Israel are explored in a pair of documentaries making their local premiere. For the preceding doc, Ian McKellen narrates a portrait of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission's global activism in Renee Rosenfeld's "Everyone. Everywhere." A reception with visiting actors and filmmakers for young people gets underway at 1:30 p.m.

2:30 p.m.: The Graffiti Artist

In James Bolton's gritty feature about the graffiti subculture, two taggers alienated from their surroundings in Portland, Ore., hit the road for Seattle, only to have their friendship tested by emotional and ethical crises. Also on the bill: "A South Bronx Tale," in which a teenage Latina worries how to respond when her life and reputation are threatened; and "Fairies," in which a bullied teen seizes the moment musically during a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Co-presented by One-in-Teen Youth Services with sponsorship support from the Vanderbilt University Office of GLBT Life.

5:00 p.m.: The Cookie Project

This sex-change documentary carries three separate warnings about its graphic content, which gives it a kind of Faces of Death prurience. "However," one warning continues, "the operation is a work of art"—although to my averted eyes, it looked more like TDOT tunneling through a wall of beef. Stephanie Wynne's crudely made but jaw-dropping documentary follows Delwin Fields—a former Marine, LAPD cop and family man with two grown kids—as he prepares to change his name to Cookie and become a transsexual lesbian. The movie's intended to enlighten, and if you have any curiosity about the process, this will satisfy it (and how). The movie finally asks Fields the big question: "What's the biggest thing you hope to get from this operation?" His answer is forthright: "A coochie." Cookie Fields and director Wynne will appear at the screening, courtesy of Women's History Month at Middle Tennessee State University.

7:00 p.m.: Dominatrix Waitrix

"Edith Edit" (the pseudonym for a talented documentary filmmaker now working in Chicago) wrote, produced, directed and edited this hardcore sci-fi satire with quasi-musical numbers. Edit waited tables for several years, and pent-up resentment gushes from her video featurette as a libidinous artificial dominatrix played by Sache takes the form of harried servers and browbeats their surly customers into submission. The writer-director-everything compares the top-bottom dynamic of SM to the server-customer relationship, and in the movie's anything-goes climactic orgy she upends the power hierarchy of each. Somehow we doubt Williams-Sonoma would approve of Edit's uses for a pepper mill.

9:15 p.m.: Testosterone

A funny cameo by the reliable Jennifer Coolidge can't redeem this thuddingly inept comedy-thriller about a graphic novelist (played by David Sutcliffe) who pursues his missing boyfriend (Antonio Sabato Jr.) to Buenos Aires seeking resolution, even if it means defying the boyfriend's ruthless mother (Sonia Braga from Kiss of the Spider Woman). The director, David Moreton (Edge of Seventeen), handles comic-book style about as suavely as Beetle Bailey eludes Sgt. Snorkel: the movie's a tedious mess of gun-toting Yanqui fantasy and ludicrous posturing, only not as interesting as that sounds.

11:30 p.m.: The Raspberry Reich

If the Godard of La Chinoise hooked up with the John Waters of Desperate Living, this is the twisted spawn they'd adopt. Canadian provocateur Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass) makes sexual politics literal in this revolutionary burlesque, in which a Baader-Meinhof wanna-be (Susanne Sachsse) demands that her straight comrades reject their bourgeois shackles by boning each other like crazy. Their rallying cry: "Join the homosexual intifada!" The movie's listless staging and semi-pro porn performances actually punch up its slack Warholian wit, and LaBruce plasters the screen with bold-faced slogans (some cribbed from Raoul Vaneigem's Situationist tract The Revolution of Everyday Life) that give the scuzzy images graphic energy. As for the sex, let it be said that LaBruce definitely puts the "hard" in "hardcore." With Genesis P'Orridge (big surprise). No one under 18 admitted, due to explicit sexual content; the afterparty is at Club Blu.

SUNDAY

12:30 p.m.: Proteus

A different sort of prison drama from directors John Greyson (Zero Patience) and Jack Lewis, who use casual anachronisms to tell the story of an interracial triangle among a South African prisoner, a repressed British botanist, and a Dutch sailor convicted of sodomy in 1725 Cape Town. A selection at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival, the film is in English and Afrikaans with English subtitles.

2:30 p.m.: "Homecoming"

Nashville screenwriter-director Will Akers hosts the premiere of his 10-minute short, in which a prodigal child returns to face a chilly family welcome. It's part of a "Mommies and Daddies Dearest Shorts Program" featuring the Australian comedy "What Grown-Ups Know," the '70s glam-childhood remembrance "All Over Brazil," and the French sci-fi drama "Oedipe - [N+1]," which carries the idea of conversion therapy to technological lengths in the near future.

5:00 p.m.: Dixie Queen

In his documentary portrait, Miles Christian Daniels pays tribute to Tara Nicole, the transgendered drag queen known throughout Wilmington, N.C., as "the Bitch Goddess of the Port City." The child of a North Carolina tobacco farmer, Tara Nicole discusses growing up gay in the South, specifically in North Carolina, and shares her struggle with a breast enlargement that went terribly awry. The film is shown as part of a "Golfers, Queens, Bears, and Brides" program along with "Holy Matrimony Billy!", a propaganda-film parody in which poor Billy pines for his secret crush—one President George W. Bush—and the lesbians-on-the-links comedy "Where the Girls Are."

7:30 p.m.: Brother to Brother

In writer-director Rodney Evans' drama, winner of a special jury prize this year at Sundance, a gay teenager meets a homeless man (Roger Robinson) who turns out to be Bruce Nugent, one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance and the first African-American author to publish work written from an overtly gay perspective. The movie shifts between the teen's present-day struggles and Nugent's memories of the 1920s in the company of Langston Hughes (Daniel Sunjata), Zora Neale Hurston (Aunjanue Ellis) and James Baldwin (Lance Reddick). Evans will appear at the screening and also Monday at MTSU.

—Jim Ridley