Q Cinema, the Fort Worth gay and lesbian film festival, has announced the first feature film for its 12th annual festival, coming up June 3-6. Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives will make its Southwest premiere, after it debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City in April. Writer-director Israel Luna’s “campy homage to the exploitation films of the ’70s and ’80s” has already stirred up a small storm of blogosphere controversy, the NYTimes reports.  The film follows a group of transgender women who are violently beaten — and then seek revenge as “deadly divas.” Just the listing of the film on Tribeca’s site led to demands that the screening be canceled, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has issued a call to protest the movie: “The film, its title and its marketing misrepresent the lives of transgender women and use grotesque, exploitative depictions of violence against transgender women in ways that make light of the horrific brutality they all too often face.”

Tribeca posted the statement that the filmmakers had “provided a copy of this film to GLAAD in February, and for weeks the organization had been supportive to the filmmakers.” Kyrstal Summers, one of the stars of the film, has also defended it.

On its site, Q Cinema says it’s “proud to offer a forum for audiences to judge for themselves while opening an avenue of discussion between ticked-off typists and the filmmakers and cast.”

And the Dallas Voice interviews local director Luna here:

“I didn’t think that it would be such a topical thing or an issue, but we’ve been getting stuff about the name, the title, and using the word ‘tranny.’ And then there are people who are like, is it right to do an eye-for-an-eye kind of thing?” he says of the film’s critics. “When I was first writing the script, I just wanted to do an old-fashioned revenge movie. This group of people gets bashed. They come back for revenge. Done.”