Go Fish

Writer and star Guinevere Turner will join us for an on-stage conversation with acclaimed LGBTQ film historian Jenni Olson on Saturday, July 20th in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Go Fish’s premiere at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival

It takes a village (or at least the entire Chicago dyke community) to bring hip Max (queer icon Guinevere Turner, who co-wrote the film with director Rose Troche) and crunchy Eli (V.S. Brody) together. This includes college professor Kia (T. Wendy McMillan), who is seeing the semi-closeted divorcee Evy (Migdalia Melendez), and the promiscuous Daria (Anastasia Sharp), who is sleeping with practically everyone else.

About Guinevere Turner:
Guinevere Turner is a writer, director and actor who has been working in film and TV since her 1994 debut film Go Fish, which she wrote, produced and starred in. She teamed up with director Mary Harron to write the films American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page and the 2019 film Charlie Says. She was a writer and story editor on Showtime’s The L Word, and she played the recurring character Gabby Deveaux on that show. She has written and directed seven short films, two of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. She can be seen in film roles that include The Watermelon Woman, Chasing Amy, American Psycho and The L Word. Her latest screenplay, Charlie Says, was directed by Mary Harron and opened in theaters and on digital platforms in May of 2019. Guinevere has taught screenwriting at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, University of Georgia, UCLA and NYU. She published an essay in The New Yorker in April of 2019, and has expanded on that essay in a memoir to be published by Penguin Random House in May of 2023.

About Jenni Olson:
Jenni Olson is a writer, archivist, historian, consultant, and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and, like her many short films, have screened internationally to awards and acclaim. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia were acquired in April 2020 by the Harvard Film Archive (more info here about: Harvard’s Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection), and her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history, in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, was published by the Oxford University Press. Amongst Jenni’s many honors she has been recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the Berlin Film Festival for her decades of work championing LGBTQ film and filmmakers. She currently works as an independent consultant specializing in film marketing and distribution, repertory curating, archival producing and helping filmmakers archive their work. As one of the world’s leading experts on LGBTQ film history she continues to write and be widely interviewed on these topics.