The hardhitting drama Love Is All You Need? has been the biggest sensation at Cinequest, and is sure to be the Cinequest film most talked-about nationally. It’s a powerful and often excruciating examination of the impacts of homophobic bullying, hate speech and hate crimes.
Writer-director K. Rocco Shields uses the novel approach of inverting gender and sexual preference roles, so the world of Love Is All You Need? is 90% homosexual, with the heterosexuals as the despised minority. Shield has expanded her 20-minute short of the same name by adding additional story threads. At the Cinequest debut, Shields said that teachers have been disciplined for showing the short in their classes.
The story is set in a Midwestern college town dominated by a conservative evangelical Christian pastor. A 12-year-old girl is questioning her sexuality, and male and female college students are exploring their own sexuality. None of them are treated well in the local community. Shields has taken actual hate speech from sermons from the despicable Westboro Baptist Church and put them in the mouth of homosexuals trashing heterosexuals. (I don’t the word “gay” in this post because in Love Is All You Need? it’s used by homosexuals to describe heterosexuals, along with various homophobic epithets.)
The emotional and physical brutality keeps piling on itself, right up to a reenactment of the Matthew Shepherd murder. It’s unrelenting to the point that the audience is battered and exhausted, not unlike 12 Years a Slave. Because it’s such a grim film-going experience, I’m not seeing Love Is All You Need? as a hit with general audiences, but I do expect it to become a cultural sensation. It’s uniformly well-acted, and young actress Kyla Kenedy is particularly convincing. It’s quite an achievement by K. Rocco Shields, and well worth watching.