Igor Yankilevich | Gold Star / 2019

goodbye kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Igor Yankilevich (screenwriter and director) Gold Star / 2019 [3 minutes]

 

Actors Vonzell Carter and Renell Michael White are playing basketball as this very short film begins, almost as if mid-thought, with Carter asking White, “What happened, Chris? I thought you moved away or something.”

     The answer is curt, like an announcement: “I got married. We’re having a baby. Ain’t you happy for me? I’m gonna be a dad. I’m going to teach him how to play ball.”

     The character Carter plays sees it almost a taunt: “You came here to tell me that?”

    Chris asks how the team is doing, the other responding he’s no longer on the team, he dropped out, leaving us to wonder why. Is it because is friend had also deserted the team?

   And suddenly we realize that Chris’ comments were, I fact, a kind of taunt of sorts, a sad announcement as the two get serious about their ballgame, the one character challenging the now married friend. He loses, as he clearly has in life.

     Suddenly, in attempting to block him, the touch brings back something that we have suspected all along is behind this strange encounter. Carter’s character kisses Chris, who readily returns it, in fact it seems as if he might continue it a while longer, but his friend pulls back, walking off to the lockers or even leaving the place.

      These men apparently have had a gay relationship, but Chris has suddenly pulled away to establish his heterosexuality, to fulfill all the central macho values of marriage: a son who you can teach how to be a man. There is no discussion of his wife, of how the transition came to happen, why he hadn’t spoken about it with his friend before this moment—although we can imagine that he feared to face the truth and having to deal with the real situation of leaving his former lover behind.

    IMDb reports this same film as being a 2014 movie of 7 minutes in length. But I can find no evidence of that film elsewhere, and even one poster who describes it as an excerpt provides us only with the same 3 minutes I found on another source. Letterboxd and The Move Database both list it as being a 2019 release of 3 minutes. And since this mini-movie version seems almost perfect as it stands, I have to presume this was the original release or a new editing released by Yankilevich. In any event, I find no trace of another available version.

 

Los Angeles, September 5, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).