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LGBT Film Fest will pull artist back to Dayton

The actress-director calls the city ”a big weird in the middle of cornfields.”

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By Terry Morris, Staff Writer 6:47 PM Friday, September 18, 2009

DAYTON — Even though she was “bored” and “chafing to get out” as a teen-ager, Daresha Kyi said she has no regrets about growing up in Dayton.

“Dayton’s a breeding ground for characters. It’s not what it appears to be. It’s a big weird in the middle of cornfields,” she said. “All that normalcy encourages a yearning for more.”

The writer, actor and director will return for a visit next weekend during the fourth annual Downtown Dayton LGBT Film Festival.

It opens on Friday, Sept. 25, with “Little Ashes,” which features “Twilight” co-star Robert Pattinson.

Kyi has a small role in “Wig,” the first of nine films in Saturday afternoon’s “Top Drawer Shorts.”

It was written by and stars another Ohioan, Scotch Ellis Loring, as a man who copes with his mother’s death by wearing the wig she wanted to be buried in.

“I play one of his friends. We stage an intervention to get him to take off the wig so his mother can be buried. There’s definitely a lot of humor in it,” Kyi said.

“Wig” was directed by Todd Holland, Loring’s husband-partner, who has been nominated for a 2009 Emmy Award.

Loring said he will attend the Dayton LGBT Festival and be part of a talk after the screening. Others planning to appear are Daniel Robinson, the star of Friday’s second feature, “Big Gay Musical,” and Collin Brazzie, cinematographer for “Last Call,” which will also be screened during Saturday’s shorts.

“Little Ashes” is about the lives and loves of artist Salvador Dali, author Federico Garcia Lorca and filmmaker Luis Bunuel.

Presented by the Downtown Priority Board and the Neon Movies, the festival will include several other films told from a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender point of view.

Two prominent documentaries are “Prodigal Sons,” which follows transgender lesbian Kimberly Reed, who quarterbacked her Montana high school football team, to a class and family reunion; and “Training Rules,” about the consequences of playing for a Penn State women’s basketball coach who enforced three rules — “no drugs, no drinking, no lesbians.”

Following the poignant short “The Saddest Boy in the World,” the closing film will be “An Englishman in New York,” with a cast including John Hurt, Denis O’Hare, Jonathan Tucker, Cynthia Nixon and Swoosie Kurtz.