Peccadillo Pictures’ 10th birthday bash plus Jill Bennett, Cathy DeBuono & Ashleigh Sumner on lesbian actors, romance & er, speed freak girl

by Florentine

There are some things we at Cake HQ are real fond of, like gay stuff for instance.  And birthdays; where our love of frosted sponge collides head-on with general merriment and/or shiny gift wrap.  So then, imagine our joy when we got invited along to the mother of all gay birthdays during this years’ LLGFF, in the (serious-pat-on-the-back) form of Peccadillo Pictures’ 10 Year Anniversary.  You’ve gotta hand it to Peccadillo, a London-based distribution company that’s spent the last decade bringing LGBT film and documentary to our humble little isle, where other industry folk have often feared to tread.  They’ve probably done more for the accessibility of gay cinema in the UK than Cheryl Cole’s done for the Society Against Marrying Footballers.  Which is quite a lot.

Of course with any good party comes guests, and when you’re a company with titles like Peter Jackson’s ‘Heavenly Creatures’, Piper Perabo starrer ‘Lost & Delirious’ and ‘XXY’ (Argentina’s 2007 Oscar entry) under your big gay belt, your guests are going to rock pretty hard.  What erroneous fools we would be, we said to ourselves whilst clutching Oxford English dictionaries, if we didn’t take a camera along for the occasion and point it at interesting people while we talked to them.  And talk we did.

Jill Bennett and Cathy DeBuono

Ashleigh Sumner

Doing our interviewing thang...

Lured to our pretty scarlet sofa with broken promises of cake and semi-professionalism (must. stop. swooning)  during the course of the evening were the cast of upcoming lesbian-romp ‘And Then Came Lola’, fresh from its premiere at the festival.  This light-hearted comedy inspired by the classic ‘Run Lola Run’ uniquely features an all-LBT cast in a lezzy love triangle that unfolds through a mixture of live action, animation and upbeat tunes.  It also happens to star lesbian favourites Jill Bennett (Dante’s Cove, We Have to Stop Now) and Cathy DeBuono (Out at the Wedding, 3Way), as well as bouncy, bright-eyed newcomer Ashleigh Sumner.  See what they had to say for themselves below.

The Most Cake ident designed by Jasmine Bonshor

‘And Then Came Lola’ is available to buy on DVD from 24th May.  Any keen katies can pre-order on Amazon, where all your hyper-organisational needs will be abundantly fulfilled.  For all those who missed the free-flowing champagne and festival chatter of the evening, this is pretty much what it looked like.  But more 3D.

photographs by Christa Holka and Sophie Allen

Big thanks to the Cakettes, Peccadillo and all our clever techy friends for making the picnic basket of yummy stuff above happen…