Tampa Bay International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival Annual Award Winners

Interesting look at aboriginal culture and how it continues to survive in modern, urban environments near and around Johannesburg. (David Johnson)

The Wound is a very important film from a promising new director, John Trengrove. The story is set during a philosophical detente between the past and the future, the city and the wilderness, conformity and individuation, a tenuous peace occurring within the space and time of a Xhosa rite of passage ceremony. To a foreign viewer, the shock of witnessing male circumcision taking place without sterile conditions and anesthesia might seem a brutal price to pay for passage, but to keep perspective, it is helpful to consider our own coming of age rituals centered around unsupervised, disorganized, isolated, unceremonious roulette experiences that often result in death from suicide, murder, or some drug or alcohol related tragedy. From that lens, it seems enviable that in South African rural Xhosa communities, boys are collectively escorted into manhood by adult males via time-tested cultural rituals. Besides its importance as a ground-breaking film that provides the world of viewers the opportunity to witness a culture other than their own, The Wound is outstanding in its depiction of sexuality between men as a natural expression of love and desire. Ironically, as the filmmaker is outing this secret Xhosa ritual, the charged tension throughout this film is the threat of exposure of the central gay relationship by a young man for whom this particular experience of transition stands in agonizing contradiction to modern values that are powerfully alluring him away from the traditions of his ancestors. (Karin Wolf)