CHRISTIE PITS FILM FESTIVAL
Sunday, August 20, 2023

The Wizard of oz

With the short films Esmerelda’s Castle & La main gauche (The Left Hand)

The Wizard of Oz takes us into a world populated with good witches, bad witches, inept wizards, talking scarecrows, tin men, flying monkeys, and scared lions (and tigers and bears, oh my!). The magical land of Oz may be entirely the product of the imagination of the young Dorothy Gale (Queer icon Judy Garland at her most iconic) after she’s knocked out by a tornado in rural Kansas, given that it is populated by  figures that bear a striking resemblance to her real-world family. Or maybe it truly is Another World, somewhere over the rainbow. For Dorothy there may be no place like home, but for us there’s no place like Oz. 

When the line between reality and dream becomes fuzzy, how do you know if you really traveled to Oz, or never actually left home? Both Oz’ Dorothy and bored office worker Lydia in short film Esmerelda’s Castle make unexpected trips to strange and magical places, which may or may not exist, populated by characters who look a little too familiar. Local filmmakers Rachel Cairns and Sarah Hempinstall take inspiration from the classic fantasy film, replacing the Wicked Witch of the West with a misogynist boss, and substituting Queer allegory in Oz for the literal secret Queer cabaret the protagonists discover. Meanwhile, Maxime Robin’s semi-autobiographical La main gauche (The Left Hand) transforms a simple misunderstanding into a transformative experience of joyful childhood gender creativity, culminating in a lush and visually sumptuous musical finale.