In film festival’s ‘Love Is All You Need?’ homosexuality is the norm and straight people are bullied

K. Rocco Shields wanted her anti-bullying film “Love Is All You Need?” to be as realistic as possible. So when she sat down to write the screenplay, she let nonfiction help her out.

The film, which Shields directed and co-wrote with David Tillman, features a hypothetical America in which homosexuality is the norm and straight people are bullied and ostracized. In crafting the speeches of the reverend who serves as the movie’s arch-villain, Shields listened to sermons from the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kan., for inspiration.

In addition, during a scene in which a girl contemplates suicide, the vehement text messages that appear on-screen are based on ones that Shields read from real suicide cases. If those words prove jolting to audience members when the film plays Friday at the Newport Beach Film Festival, well, that’s part of the director’s point.

“We live in a liberal Los Angeles where people think this doesn’t happen,” the Burbank resident said. “They’re sympathetic when it does.”

Shields, who identifies as a lesbian, has gotten many strong reactions to her film — some sympathetic, many not.

“Love Is All You Need?” began life as a short film in 2011 and won awards at several film festivals. At the same time, Shields received hate mail for it, and she flew to Florida at one point to defend a teacher who had come under fire for showing it in his classroom.

Even before Shields completed the short version of her story, she had her sights on a full-length one as well. That version, which bears the same title as the short, will feature as the Friday Night Spotlight this week at the Regency South Coast Village in Santa Ana.

“It’s not something we’ve really seen before, and I think it’s really good for an audience to see a film like this, from this perspective,” said Sarah Sleeger, the festival’s director of programming.

“Love Is All You Need?” tracks the intertwining stories of several characters, including a female quarterback whose romance with a boy incites furor. (Girls in the film play football too.) Meanwhile, a younger girl endures savage bullying when her preference for males becomes apparent, and a drama teacher shocks parents by teaching Shakespeare’s same-sex romance “Romeo and Julio” the way it was “originally written”: as an Elizabethan boy-girl love story.

The film’s scenario reverses reality in some ways, but not in others. While characters with opposite-sex attraction are jeered as “ros” (short for “heteros”), they are also referred to as “gay” and other less-printable but familiar terms. As for the logical question of how a society can survive with only same-sex couples, the film makes mention of “breeding season,” in which men and women momentarily pair off for the sake of prolonging the human race.

Then there’s the film’s prime villain — the wicked evangelist Reverend Rachel, whose calls for her followers to do “God’s work” provoke violence by the film’s end. Shields, who is Catholic, stressed that her film was not intended as anti-religion; the embattled football player attends church regularly and even quotes scripture to the reverend during a climactic confrontation scene.

Whatever her detractors say, the filmmaker pays most attention to the messages she gets from viewers who thank her for making “Love Is All You Need?” One girl recently wrote to her explaining that after seeing the film, she had stopped cutting herself.

“What my film does is create empathy — to feel what someone has gone through, to feel that prejudice and hatred,” Shields said. “That’s why that film has become my mission.”

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IF YOU GO

What: “Love Is All You Need?”

Where: Regency South Coast Village, 1561 W. Sunflower Ave., Santa Ana

When: 7:15 p.m. Friday

Cost: $25 for film only, $65 for film and after-party

Information: (949) 253-2880; newportbeachfilmfest.com

It will also screen at 2:15 p.m. April 28 at Edwards Big Newport 6, 300 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach. Tickets are $15.

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