The Provincetown International Flm Festival, which runs June 15-19, may boast plenty of titles from distant shores but it also celebrates local connections. Films with area ties include “Thirsty” (June 15), director Margo Pelletier’s musical feature about the life of Scott Townsend, known to Provincetown audiences as Thirsty Burlington, a popular female impersonator. Pelletier began developing the project in 2008 with Townsend, who plays himself in the film. In her words, the scripted film weaves elements of “humor, fantasy, musical performance, and choreographed dance numbers [that] serve to balance out the hard-to-swallow, tragic events within Scott’s life.”
Provincetown residents L.A. Teodosio and Jim Lande, who launched Racepoint Films in 2014, produced two films screening at PIFF. Ira Sachs’s “Little Men” (June 17 and 18) is about the friendship between two 13-year-old boys whose families are locked in a battle over Brooklyn real estate. Deb Shoval’s “AWOL” (June 16 and 18) tells the story of an aimless young woman in rural Pennsylvania who falls in love with a housewife neglected by her husband.
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Connecticut native C. Fitz directed the documentary “Jewel’s Catch One” which will have its world premiere June 18 and 19. Fitz earned her master’s at Emerson College then lived in Boston for many years while working in advertising. “Jewel’s Catch One” is the name of the popular Los Angeles nightclub run by LGBT activist Jewel Thais-Williams for 42 years before it closed last year. Narrated by CCH Pounder, the film features interviews with Sharon Stone, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Thelma Houston, Sandra Bernhard, Bonnie Pointer, and Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)
Local documentarians Amy Geller and Allie Humenuk shot much of “The Guys Next Door” (June 16 and 18) in Maine. Filmed over four years, their portrait of a modern family follows Erick and Sandro, a gay couple who had two daughters via a surrogate, Erick’s longtime friend Rachel, who’s married with children of her own.
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Provincetown’s own John Waters will host a screening June 17 of Janus Films’ new restoration of his 1970 trash classic “Multiple Maniacs” starring Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, and Mink Stole.
For more information go to www.ptownfilmfest.org.
Fox Point revisited
Through her own films and those released through her SPIA Media Productions Inc., Claire Andrade-Watkins has chronicled Cape Verdean history since 1986. “Our Rhode: 30 Years of Cinema by and About Cape Verdean Rhode Islanders,” at the MFA June 18 and 19, is a retrospective of her work. Andrade-Watkins will join Portuguese director Francisco Manso for a discussion following screenings of Manso’s “Testamento” on June 18 at 11 a.m., and “The Consul of Bordeaux” at 2:30 p.m. Watkins-Andrade’s 2006 feature “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?” screens June 19 at 1 p.m. “Working the Boats: Masters of the Craft” (2016), a six-part series about Local 1329 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, screens that day at 3:30 p.m., followed by a discussion.
For more information go to www.mfa.org.