Cast

Cheryl Dunye, Lisa Gornick, Guinevere Turner, V.S. Brodie, Deak Evgenikos, Skyler Cooper

Film description

Four middle-aged lesbians accidentally kill a younger lesbian and try to cover up the murder, a subterfuge that upends their monotonous though coherent lives.

As fitting for independent cinema, the autothematic layer of the images is quite important here, and highlights the film’s context in lesbian film culture. The ambivalent portrayal of the lesbian community fixes The Owls as a continuation of the 1990’s New Queer Cinema, which contested previous images of gays and lesbians (e.g. Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) about a murder committed by two Jewish gays in the 1920s).

Lesbian film community mainstay Guinevere Turner portrays one of the main roles in the film – her achievements include screenwriting, directing, and independent production. She co-wrote Go Fish, one of the most important American lesbian films of the 1990s. Additionally, she worked on the cult lesbian TV series, The L Word, in which she also stars. The Owls also includes performance by Deak Evgenikos, whose credits include another important lesbian film, Itty Bitty Titty Committee (2007).

Anna Taszycka