By B. Ruby Rich

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The annual trek up the mountain to Park City felt different this year, with the powerful spirit of Brokeback Mountain haunting the new crop of queer films on offer. After all, Sundance is the festival where the early glimmerings of a "new queer cinema" were first nurtured, starting with the jury award to Poison 15 years ago. What would queer film be like this year up on the mountain, and which legacy would it join or start? Consider my first clue, upon seeing my housemate's T-shirt: a picture of a saddle and the words "Ride me." What an omen.

Taking that spirit in stride, here's a cluster of onscreen sightings from midweek Sundance. Out of the Bay Area came riding Bill Basquin's Range, a lyrical depiction of the workaday life of a working rancher. The catch? It's a view of nature and masculinity filtered through the black-and-white vision of a transgendered country boy. The extrafilmic information made for a fascinating exercise in interpreting the gaze.

Another local film, Santa Cruz homeboy Cam Archer's Wild Tigers I Have Known, set off justifiable buzz as it brilliantly updated the sort of out-of-sight universe long mined by Harmony Korine. It's no accident Gus Van Sant signed on as executive producer. Archer, with his cinematographer Aaron Platt, sketches the contours of queer subjectivity on the cusp of adolescence. It's like seeing someone reinvent the traditions of the avant-garde by throwing gender into the melting pot. Like Brokeback, though, Wild Tigers locates sexuality within the natural world, replacing the peaks with redwoods. Dreamy and sexy, transgressive and poetic, Wild Tigers will cause a stir.

It was a perfect foil, thanks to my viewing schedule, for The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, the debut film from the latest Filipino talent, Auraeus Solito and equally talented cinematographer Nap Jamir. Also set on the cusp of an adolescence swamped by gender reconfigurations, Blossoming tells the story of a 12-year-old boy-girl who serves her family of thieves until the neighborhood's rookie cop stirs up romance. Camp and tragedy are majestically interwoven in this picture-perfect melodrama. The kids' beauty pageants alone are worth the price of a ticket.

Finally, Brokeback's shadow of violence comes to life in a new South African short by the young Ugandan-British filmmaker Lovinsa Kavuma, and it is anything but fictional. Rape for Who I Am is an astonishingly eloquent look at hate crime: the systematic rape of township lesbians. Despite their tragic stories, they refuse victimhood in favor of political action. "The rose has thorns" is their slogan. Not a bad motto for those of us disgruntled with the Park City makeover by corporate sponsors, swag, and parties (yes, including the Queer Lounge!) and eager to fight our way through to the genuine films still at the heart of this branding opportunity, I mean, film festival. SFBG