Tag: LGBT

Before I Change My Mind

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

We never find a genuine answer to whether Robin (played by non-binary actor Vaughan Murrae) is a boy or a girl. It begins with them walking into their new classroom during a sexual education class: boys on one side, girls on the other. They sit purposefully in the middle, prompting derision from their peers.

The year is 1987. The country is Canada. The state is Alberta. Robin is an odd USA transplant adapting to a new life across the border. And while non-binary and trans people have existed since the beginning of humanity, schools in the era of homophobic John Hughes films and the weird homoeroticism of Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) don’t quite have the language to make Robin seamlessly fit in. When they join the saxophone ensemble, the teacher kindly says they can be whoever they want before handing them yet another saxophone: that’s the only instrument the school has.

Thus begins a coming-of-age story that is fresh in its representation but mostly derivative in every other aspect, a curious Locarno inclusion that would’ve felt much more at home in Berlinale’s generation section. Robin meets both boys and girls, develops intense crushes and gets into fights and gets bullied and fights back and sensitively draws the world around them. This is all shot in pastel colours with a handheld camera, sometimes inserting grainy VCR footage to immerse you in the era. The music is suitable synth-heavy too, although none of the needle cuts (Canadian bands?) are particularly memorable, probably due to budget issues.

And while some films might use their 80s setting of a way of easing you into a particular vibe, from Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, 2016-) to Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2018), Before I Change My Mind embraces its 80s tropes to the point of parody. Take West Edmonton Mall — the coolest 80s place on earth, a land where you can buy your multicoloured hairbands and leggings before going on a rollercoaster. Later, in perhaps a meta-commentary on the film’s music royalty budget, we are treated to a knock-off version of Jesus Christ Superstar — Mary Magdalene Video Star, an irreverent mash-up of 80s tropes that’s painfully cringe while actually surprisingly well-composed.

But this 80s vibe also allows for generic depictions of youth as well: the tree house in the forest, cycling around the suburbs, reading through porno mags, watching a VHS, and other tropes that have been played out hundreds of times. It’s certainly a pleasurable watch, thanks to solid performances from the kids in the film and the sensitivity with which their issues are handled, but nothing ever felt quite urgent or particularly intellectual. Non-binary and trans kids might welcome a film that is finally about them — especially at a time when schools report more children comfortably not slotting into a gender — but on an emotional and aesthetic level, there is nothing too special here.

Before I Change My Mind plays as part of the Concorso Cineasti del presente section of Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Rule 34 (Regra 34)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Who says you can’t do it all? Simone (Sol Miranda) is a young Black bisexual Brazilian woman with two very different professions. During the day she is studying to be a public defender, protecting the most vulnerable in contemporary society; by night, she is a cam girl, performing sex acts on camera for male attention. Just by existing, she is everything Jair Bolsonaro hates.

The title shows that anything is possible, even in a country where culture is under attack by bigots like in Brazil. Rule 34 is an internet rule that if you think of something, there will be a pornographic depiction of it online (feel free to close this browser and try it yourself!). People like Simone, although often neglected, genuinely exist, and they deserve their own cinematic portrait.

The good news is that we get a cracking, sparkling, discursive and compelling character study with Julia Murat’s film, examining the boundaries of consent, what it means to seek pain, and the intersection of systemic oppression and personal choice. Simone herself is on a mission to decolonise her own depiction as a black woman online, arguing that much Black BDSM depiction has connotations of slavery. This is linked to the wider difficulties that Black people face in Brazil, as well as women and minorities.

Instead of a simple polemic however, Murat treats us to a film that pushes back against boundaries, while never settling for easy answers. Discussions between the law students are emboldened and intellectual, with few stupid questions and answers, breaking down simple binaries of black/white, male/female, endlessly looking for the grey areas that the law — by its structural nature — cannot find its way around.

But if the law cannot provide closure or liberation, perhaps sex can. Simone is in a ménage à trois with two of her fellow students, male and female alike, freely showing what can happen when people are informed of what they want to do with their own bodies. Murat makes some bold choices here, displaying full-frontal nudity, asphyxiation, spanking and choking; the likes of which could easily be exploitive in the hands of another director. All the time, however, Simone is looking to push the boundaries, resulting in a spiky feminist film that is both exciting to watch and thought-provoking at the same time.

At the centre is Miranda herself, who has no difficulty holding the attention of the camera as the film intuitively edits between different moments of her life, showing the full, complex spectrum of her character. At one point, she just sits alone and eats what appears to be an onion. It should be a kind of throwaway scene, but in the hands of an actor this assured, it had me strangely compelled. The kind of performance that can change the entire tenor of a film, it’s no wonder Murat chooses to end the film on a close-up. With a face that cinematic, it would be rude not to.

Rule 34 Locarno Film Festival plays as part of the Concorso internazionale at the , running from 3-13th August.

Wet Sand

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

And it all ends in tears. The last film I watched at the joyous Locarno Film Festival is a slow-burn weepie about the price people pay for living in secret. Using a generous two-hour runtime to fully examine the difficulties of living authentically in a small village in Georgia, Wet Sand has a deeply understated yet ultimately rather effective approach to storytelling.

The title refers to a small cafe on the Black Sea, where manly-men tease owner Amnon (Gia Agumava) over his “pisspoor beer.” This is the kind of neighborhood where everyone knows each other to the point where you can’t cough in the distance without somebody commenting upon it. The fault-line that lies behind the generally friendly people is revealed when the local loner Eliko dies by suicide. He is so disliked that nobody wants to bury him, leading to Amnon having to finally step up.

He is joined in his efforts by Moe (Bebe Sesitashvili), who immediately sticks out of place thanks to her ice-white hair. She normally lives in the more liberal Tbilisi, and is struck by how stuck in their ways the people are. The wider context is referred to on TV, reporting on both Family Day celebrations — an Orthodox counteraction to the International Day Against Homophobia — and the effects of climate change, burning forests and polluting the Black Sea. The message is obvious: governments across Europe are cruelly trying to legislate gay lives out of existence — from Russia to Hungary to Georgia — while completely ignoring the fact the Earth is on fire.

No one should have to live in secret, but many do, repressing an essential part of their personality in the process. In depicting this, there is an Ozu-like touch throughout the film, whether it’s the static frames, quiet performances or use of omission, suggesting a wellspring of emotion lingering just beneath the surface. This is a film filled with pregnant pauses, characters taking their time as they think of what to say and how to say it. They simply live in a world where some things are impossible to say out loud, their absence filling the air with a deep, awful sadness.

A timeless feel comes through the camerawork and settings, the film constantly returning us to the relentless waves of the ocean, which gives us all the potential for renewal and rebirth. Director Elene Naveriani is content to simply observe characters as they look at the sea, go for a swim or listen to music; allowing us to see the inner lives of those who must live under such repressive ideas. They also have a masterful command of parallel narratives, creating a tension between the world as it was, as it is, and how it could be in the future. While the film takes a while to come into its own, the intent is exceptionally clear, as is the final powerful message. While it might not light the country on fire like And Then We Danced (Levan Akin, 2019), it’s sure to start some more conversations about the need to treat LGBT people with the dignity they deserve.

Wet Sand plays in Concorso Cineasti del presente at Locarno Film Festival, running from August 4th to 15th.

Cop Secret

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This Scandinavian movie answers one of the most important questions of our time: what if Tango and Cash, from Tango and Cash (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1989), were also lovers? Taking the homoerotic subtext of 80s and 90s buddy cop thrillers and putting it at the heart of the movie, this cop parody posits a new kind of hard-boiled masculinity for the 21st century. While ultimately an uneven take on the beloved genre, Cop Secret is a slick, at time hilarious production that shows off a lighter side to the usually dour and stoically-depicted Nordic nation.

Bussi (Auðunn Blöndal) is the toughest cop in Reykjavik, opening the film with blatant disregard for rules, restrictions and different jurisdictions. He’s your typical alpha-male, unwashed protagonist, a bald, leather-jacketed, jäger-swilling, punch-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy who represents an absolute nightmare for the police HR department.

The Sylvester Stallone to his Kurt Russell is the wealthy, metrosexual, impeccably-groomed, openly polyamorous and proudly pansexual Hördur (Egill Einersson). He’s already rich and speaks 15 languages fluently (it would be sixteen but he chose not to learn Danish on principle). Together they fight for supremacy of Iceland: when meeting at the heart of a robbery Bussi asks if Kenny Rogers is playing while Hördur asks if he’s at a casino. Nonetheless, they are both ultimately respectful of each other’s excellent police work and soon find their personal and professional lives tangling.

Villain Rikki (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) is purposefully Europacorp-satirising Eurotrash, talking in English with an accent that feels like a parody of a Trump parody. Haraladsson’s performance is deeply inspired, deliberately bizarre and filled with pointless anecdotes about animal behaviour. It’s the only part of the movie that feels truly cut loose, channelling that raw energy that makes something like Tango and Cash, a complete mess of a movie that’s nonetheless utterly brilliant as a result, so unique.

The American influences, ranging from Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) to The Other Guys (Adam McKay, 2010) are pretty pronounced, and the overall tone so polished, Dwayne Johnson — recently himself riffing off this same genre with the rather uneven Hobbs and Shaw (David Leitch, 2019)— could turn up and it wouldn’t feel incongruous. Nonetheless, while American cop comedies thrive off gay panic jokes, baiting audiences with subtext before a Mark Wahlberg-type shouts he’s not “really gay” so everyone can understand he’s still a cool Boston cop, Cop Secret actually goes the extra mile, normalising the concept of a an alpha male cop who can be gay while beating the shit out of bad guys.

The ultimate scheme of the bad guys is mostly irrelevant — something to do with hacking, a football game and a gold reserve — and makes little to no ultimate sense. Thankfully, this satire manages to nail the basics of good, clean action choreography, realising that it has to look like the real deal in order to work at all. While the relatively smaller Icelandic budget sometimes shows in rushed CGI backgrounds and the odd awkward edit, director Hannes Þór Halldórsson (who usually spends his time in goal for the Icelandic national team!) has studied the basics of the genre well, resulting in a fun and easy film to kick back to with a couple of drinks in hand.

Cop Secret played in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

Why Not You (Hochwald)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The village of Hochwald is high up in the alps, only accessible by cable car or long, winding car journeys. In a German-speaking and conservative part of South Tyrol, this is a place firmly stuck in its ways. It’s definitely not a great place to be gay. For Mario (Thomas Prenn), who dreams of being a dancer on the television channel Rai 1, the atmosphere in the village — filled with lederhosen and oompah music — stifles his ambition.

It doesn’t help that his best friend Lenz (Noah Saavedra) is more interesting, more handsome, more intelligent and more liked than Mario. Much to Mario’s sadness, he is heading off to Rome, where he has been offered a scholarship. But Mario also sees this as an opportunity: perhaps he can also follow Lenz — with whom he shares a certain sexual tension — and finally realise his dream…

Not in Why Not You. It takes a severely dramatic left-field turn when the two men meet up in a gay club. Inspired by the Bataclan attacks, they are crashed and shot at by a group of fundamental Islamic terrorists. This introduces a third culture clash — not only Italian style versus Austrian conservatism, but both of those things combined against pure terrorist homophobia. Lenz is killed, leaving Mario alone to pick up the pieces and make sense of his life.

Post-traumatic stress disorder manifests itself in a variety of messy ways. It’s up to the creators of a film to try and corral those contradictory feelings into riveting drama. But here, Mario is more or less the same both before and after the accident, making him somewhat of a flat character. His random changes in behaviour, dress and temperament seem to be ways to make the film interesting and create a sense of contrast with his surrounding world, yet they never really manages to get us inside Mario’s head and sympathise with his plight.

The film is about so many different things — class, race, religion, drug addiction and sexual orientation. In trying to combine them all together, it ends up saying little of interest about any of these key conflicts. It’s a shame because there is so much potential in some of these intersecting ideas — especially when Mario takes a sudden interest in the lessons of Islam — but they aren’t picked up and developed in any meaningful way. While its heart seems to be in the right place, especially in its condemnation of hatred, and its nuanced portrayal of Islam, the sheer amount of different conflicts makes the film difficult to get into.

A large part of Why Not You’s ambition rests upon the shoulders of Thomas Prenn, a young actor who doesn’t seem to have the immense range that such a complicated and nuanced role needs. Even if a character’s actions don’t make sense, we at least need them to have a believable screen presence. Mario — who isn’t even a good dancer — never quite pops off the screen; giving this Alpine drama far more valleys than peaks.

Why Not You plays out of competition at the first feature strand of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Poppy Field (Mooniväli)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

A member of the Romanian Gendarmerie faces up to the secrets of his personal life in the LGBT drama Poppy Field, a gripping, minimalist tale from first-time feature director Eugen Jebeleanu. Essentially comprised of two elongated scenes, it subtly refracts upon itself to deliver a fascinating tale of being closeted in a hyper-masculine society.

Cristi (Conrad Mericoffer) is hosting his French Muslim boyfriend Hadi (Radouan Leflahi) at his flat. They cannot keep their hands off each other, almost instantly falling into bed. Life outside of the bedroom isn’t so simple. When Hadi broaches the idea of visiting the mountains for a night, Cristi waves it away with a variety of weak excuses. There is the sense that he is hiding something, boiling over into an awkward encounter when his seemingly well-meaning sister comes over to visit.

The second, longer act of the film puts Cristi’s tortured complexity into context. On the police beat, he is called to the scene of a queer cinema screening that is being blocked by ultra-nationalist protestors. Based on the true story of the 120 BPM being blocked by religious protestors in Romania, we are shown this scene in realistic detail, Jebeleanu creating a sense of chaos and spectacle through handheld framing and overlapping dialogue. When Cristi meets a former lover at that same screening, he quickly spirals out of control, potentially causing controversy when the encounter turns violent.

The film is shot in a classic Romanian New Wave style: stripped of artifice and filled with elliptical dialogue. Cinematographer Marius Panduru employs multiple long, intense takes that don’t call attention to themselves while maintaining a tense and claustrophobic environment. This simple and unadorned approach creates a true sense of authenticity and specificity, allowing us to reflect on the particular environment Cristi is trying, and mostly failing, to navigate, indicting wider Romanian society in the process.

Some viewers may be put off by the single-minded approach of the film, which only uses a couple of locations to convey the conflicted inner state of its main protagonist. I found it absolutely engrossing, especially the way the other cops — who occupy a strange middle-ground between the LGBT friendly theatre-goers and the religious zealots — try and calm Cristi down through the use of monologues that are alternately sad, funny and a little strange. Often shot in just one take, they betrays a great amount of confidence in the cast to carry scenes with words and subtle facial gestures alone. Mericoffer, in particular, is brilliant, able to convey the difficult inner life of his protagonist without relying on any unnecessary or overblown gestures.

Simply put, this is an exciting, morally grey film tackling a complex topic within a country that is still in the process of fully recognising LGBT rights. Stressing realism over didacticism while realising the full humanity of nearly all its players, it’s more proof of the rich and exciting potential of contemporary Romanian film to make fascinating art out of simple premises.

Poppy Field played as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in March, as part of the BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival.

No Hard Feelings (Futur Drei)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Germany has a curious relationship with its non-white residents. You can be third or fourth-generation in the country, and still be referred to as an Ausländer (foreigner). Yet, connecting with your supposed homeland can be a perilous task if you have grown up in Germany your whole life. No Hard Feelings, centring around the experiences of a gay Iranian-German in a small town near Hanover, deftly explores this theme, providing a fresh, intersectional take on the coming-of-age story.

Parvis (Benny Radjaipour) is an aimless young man, who begins in the film in a gay club, stealing a bottle of champagne and hooking up with whoever will have him. His parents, Iranian exiles who run a supermarket, are disappointed in him, not necessarily because he’s homosexual, but because he has no real purpose in life. This changes when he’s suddenly forced to work in a refugee centre.

The job is surprisingly tough. When he is tasked with translating the Farsi of a woman scheduled for deportation, he can barely understand her regional accent. But this experience gives him an eye-opening insight into the plight of his fellow ausländer, who may not have German citizenship but share the discrimination he feels. These feelings come to the fore when he falls for the Iranian refugee Amon (Benny Radjaipour) and makes friends with his sister Banafshe (Banafshe Hourmazdi).

No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings deserves credit for the way it weaves systematic racism within a queer coming-of-age tale. For example, after a refreshingly graphic hook-up with an older white German man, he is immediately singled out by his race — the other man saying that he normally doesn’t go for hairy südlander (a term that usually refers to anyone dark from Balkans, Greece, Turkey and the Middle East), but that Parvis shouldn’t worry, as he “isn’t hairy”. The racist insult rolls off the tongue in such a way that the speaker has no idea that he’s being offensive, showing how embedded and unquestioned such views can be within German culture. Yet, among the refugees, also homophobia runs unchecked within the Arab/Iranian community, director Faraz Shariat skilfully aiming shots at both side of the cultural divide.

Utilising an Instagram friendly aesthetic, with a square frame and a popcorn-pastel colour palette, the style of the movie reflects the expressive nature of its characters. Stagier moments, scored to electronic music, contrast against the hand-held naturalism of dialogue or sex driven-scenes, showing both the world as these young people imagine it (or might stage it on their phone) and the way it really is. Later scenes of intimacy are shot with much more focus on emotion, later giving one of the best contrasts between merely shagging and actually making love.

While the scenes don’t flow together to create maximum effect, with random inserts or fantasy-esque sequences often undercutting the impact of the story, the style of No Hard Feelings asserts the strong sensibility of debut writer-director Shariat.

No Hard Feelings is out on Digital on Monday, December 7th.

The Lawyer (Advokatas)

Posted on by victorfraga

This a moving tale about people coming to terms with themselves. Combining lush photography and poignant social commentary in the background, Romas Zabarauskas’s fourth feature is a slick and potent piece filmmaking rife with both love and grief.

Marius (Eimutis Kvoščiauskas) is a corporate lawyer in Vilnius who is approaching a midlife crisis while contemplating the emptiness of his privileged lifestyle. He longs for a companion but most of all, he longs for something that can give his life meaning. When his estranged father dies, his grieving process sets him on a journey to find Ali (Doğaç Yildiz), a Syrian refugee in Serbia whom he got to know through sex-cam sessions. Their meeting prompts these two very complicated men to achieve some sort of redemption.

The strength of the script, also penned by Zabarauskas, is how it ventures beyond the borders of this deceptively simple plot to tackle many issues surrounding gay life in Eastern Europe. The writer-director is still clearly interested in discussing the homophobia in the region, portraying its LGBT people desire to migrate, and exploring how the contact with someone from another background can be transformational. However, he also finds time to comment on upper-class ennui and the social perception of refugees.

The boldness surfaces in the complex portrayal of Ali. The character is a straight-acting bisexual who feels like he’s not gay-looking enough to meet the criteria for special LGBT refugee initiatives. Against all odds, he misses his homeland and refuses to be seen as a victim. Defiance shapes his interactions with all sorts of people.

For his part, Marius has blinded himself to the pointlessness of his life and there’s enough in Kvoščiauskas’s take on the character to suggest that, in a deep corner of his soul, he has not fully come to terms with who he is. While assessing their predicament in a hotel room in Belgrade, both men realise the only way to move forward is to face their inner demons.

Thanks to DOP Narvydas Naujalis, all of this comes across as a very polished affair, with precise camerawork and vivid colours coalescing into exuberant shots (the fact that the two leads are easy on the eye does not hurt either).

Just like the titular character, The Lawyer keeps posing questions, and leaves people mulling over complex issues during its entire duration of 97 times. You will still be searching for the answers long after the credits roll.

The Lawyer was scheduled to show as part of BFI Flare, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak. Some films, including The Lawyer, were still available to review remotely. Other films are available to watch on BFI Flare at Home (until March 29th).

The top 10 LGBT+ dirty movies on Netflix!

Posted on by victorfraga

Sexual diversity is at the very heart of our vision and mission. Unsurprisingly, in our four years of existence we have come across and helped to promote LGBT+ of all types and from every continent on Earth. Most of these films started on a conventional distribution route, opening in cinemas, then DVD and finally on to the major VoD platforms. Netflix has since grown and taken up many of these dirty gems, which are now an integral part of their selection.

One the films on this list (Isabel Coixet’s Elisa and Marcela; also pictured above) is a full-on Netflix production, meaning that the movie giant was involved in the project from its very conception. This is perhaps a sign that many more LGBT+ films will follow a similar route in the near future. This isn’t good news for traditional distributors with a niche focus, such Peccadillo films.

The films below are listed in alphabetical order. Don’t forget to click on each individual film title in order to accede to our exclusive reviews. These films are available on Netflix UK and Ireland; there may be variations in other countries and regions.

…

.

1. Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017):

It’s New York, it’s Summer and it’s sultry. The tarmac is sizzling, and the pavement scorching hot. And so are the libidos of young men. Frankie (Harris Dickinson) is no exception. The problem is that he is very confused about his sexuality. The extremely attractive young male is dating an equally stunning female called Simone (Madeline Weinstein, who’s not related to the now infamous Harvey), and he hangs out with young straight men of his age. She struggles to have sex with her, and instead fulfils his sexual needs through online gay chat rooms and stealthy sexual encounters with older men.

This sounds like an ordinary predicament, familiar to many gay men. There’s nothing unusual about a teenager grappling with his sexuality. What makes Beach Rats so special is the director’s sensitive gaze, and the very realistic and relatable settings. The young female filmmaker Eliza Hittman, who’s only on her second feature, managed to penetrate (no pun intended) a male and testosterone-fuelled territory to very convincing results.

.

2. Call me by your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017):

Our writer Maysa Moncao argued that Luca Guadagnino twisted Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971), and that he had the right to do so. Times have changed. A queer movie can be treated as a universal love story. Call Me by Your Name was praised by public and the critics at 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

In the summer of 1983 in northern Italy, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a 17-year-old boy, is about to receive a guest in his aristocratic house. He is lending his bed to Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American scholar who has some work to do with Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor specialising in Greco-Roman culture. Elio and Oliver will share the same toilet as well as a desire for each other.

.

3. Elisa and Marcela (Isabel Coixet, 2019):

This is a film about two women in love, and directed by a female. And this is cinema at its most universal. It will move you regardless of whether you are a male or a female, Spanish or British, progressive or conservative, or anything else. This is the real-life tale of two humans being who fell in love and took draconian measures in order in order to remain together, against all odds.

Elisa (Natalia de Molina) first meets Marcela (Greta Fernandez) on the first day of school in 1898. They are immediately fascinated with each other. Their tender affection gradually develops into a full-on homosexual relation. Marcela’s parents intervene and send Marcela away to a boarding school in Madrid for three years. The two women, however, resume their romance as soon as Marcela returns. The residents of the parish of Couso too realise that their share more than a friendship. Elisa is branded a “marimacho”, and the couple become increasingly despised and isolated.

.

4. Girl (Lukhas Dhont, 2018):

This is a remarkable movie for many reasons. First of all, Flemish Director Lucas Dhont was only 26 years old when he finished a film that he first conceived at the age of just 18. The fascination with transgender people is conspicuous nowadays in cinema. Filmmakers want to investigate the saga of transitioning, and how to reconcile it with with the mixed perspective of outsiders. The fluid sexual/gender identity and the intense transformations in both the mind and the body allow for the construction of very interesting characters. There has been no shortage of such films in then past couple of years. But there are still topic areas waiting to be addressed in more detail, and this is exactly what Girl does.

.

5. Handsome Devil (John Butler, 2017):

Ireland is a fast-changing nation. The profoundly Catholic country was the first one in the world to legalise gay marriage by the means of popular vote, despite fierce opposition from the Church. The society has suddenly come out of the closet, and cinema is keeping the closet doors open so that no one is left inside.

But gay marriage isn’t the only issue that matters to LGBT people. Handsome Devil touches is a very touching and moving gay drama, urgent in its simplicity, delving with two woes that remain pandemic: gay bullying in schools and LGBT representation in sports – the latter is often described as the last and most resilient stronghold of homophobia. The movie succeeds to expose both problems and the destructive consequences for the afflicted with a very gentle and effective approach.

.

6. I am Michael (Justin Kelly, 2015):

Executive produced by Gus Van Sant, this is a brave movie for anyone in the US to write, direct or star in given the seemingly irreconcilable positions of openly and happily gay people on the one hand and the bigoted anti-gay sentiments of right-wing fundamentalism on the other. Its starting point is Benoit Denizet-Lewis’ fascinating New York Times magazine article entitled My ex-Gay Friend.

In the article the writer goes to visit his former colleague at San Francisco’s young gay men’s XY magazine Michael Glatze who is now studying at Bible school in Wyoming to become a pastor. The XY period is covered towards the start of the movie while the Bible school episode appears in its last third. In between Michael and partner Bennett (Zachary Quinto) try and build a life together which later becomes a ménage à trois with the addition of Tyler (Charlie Carver).

.

7. Ideal Home (Andrew Fleming, 2018):

The tale of accidental “parenthood” (or, more broadly speaking, of the awkward and unexpected bonding of a child and an adult) is no big novelty. They includes classics such as Central Station (Walter Salles, 1997), Son of Saul (Laszlo Nemes, 2015) and also the more mainstream About a Boy (Chris and Paul Weitz). Ideal Home is a welcome addition to the list, providing a very gay and Camp touch to the subgenre.

Erasmus (Steve Coogan) and his partner Paul (a heavily bearded and mega cuddly version of Paul Rudd) lead a mostly pedestrian life, and bickering seems to be their biggest source of entertainment. Erasmus is an accomplished and respected TV boss, while Paul is some sort of younger househusband. One day, the 10-year-old grandson that Erasmus never knew he had shows up for dinner, and he has nowhere to go. That’s because his father, Erasmus’s estranged son, has been arrested on domestic violence charges. The two men are forced to look after the child (Jack Gore), who refuses to reveal his own name.

.

8. LOEV (Sudhanshu Saria, 2016):

The first gay kiss in Bollywood happened just ten years ago in the movie Dunno Y (Sanjay Sharma), a year after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India. Sadly, the country has now moved backwards and two years ago it recriminalised gay sex. This makes the graphic content of LOEV, which includes a gay kiss and violence, very subversive for current Indian laws and standards.

This is a very unusual Bollywood movie, not just for its audacious content, but also for its narrative and format. The film shuns easy entertainment devices in favour of much more complex personal and social reflections. Also, the film has very little music, which is also memorable for a movie made in Mumbai.

.

9. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan, 2018):

Hitting somewhere between the picaresque brilliance of Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2018) and the corny idealism of Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018), Desiree Akhavan won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance for her second feature, which takes the personally revealing, post-mumble aspects of her first feature film Appropriate Behaviour (2015) and places them within a YA adaptation that retains her touch but is more accessible, simplistic, and perfect for its teenage target audience.

Chloe Grace Moretz plays Cameron Post, who in 1993 is caught with another girl on prom night and shipped off to a gay conversion camp in Montana. There, she finds herself stuck in a ritual of self-blame, repression and increasing hostility as she and the other teenage inmates attempt to quietly subvert the system and survive their miseducation.

.

10. My Days of Mercy (Tali Shalom Ezer, 2019):

Mercy (Kate Mara) is a woman unwilling to offer her own mercy to the criminal who killed her father’s police partner. Across from her, Lucy (Ellen Page) fights for the innocence of her incarcerated father, convinced that he did not end her mother’s life. They meet in a line of picketing protests, where flirtations quickly make way for more romantic endeavours.

This is a profoundly romantic movie also dealing with the impact of grief on our daily lives. Fittingly for a subject on death, it concerns itself on the living and how people live in the face of their mortality. The interchanging lines on the death penalty is strangely hushed at points, Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking (1995) dealt with the subject more abjectly and thoroughly.

Making a guerrilla documentary in ultra-homophobic Chechnya

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

You are unlikely to see a more important documentary made all year than Welcome to Chechnya. A work of investigative journalism depicting an undercover LGBTQ network helping gay men and woman escape from the barbarous Chechen regime, it is a breathtaking, invigorating and necessary work. We sat down with its director David France during the Berlinale, where it played in the Panorama Section, to discuss the making of the film, his thoughts about the region and whether the film may even be released in Russia itself.

Redmond Bacon –How did you gain access to Chechnya? This is a closed-off area…

David France – We had a cover story of why I was in Chechnya. It’s not a place that Americans go to visit or anybody goes to visit. But the World Cup was there so I posed as a wealthy American football fan, especially enamoured with the Egyptian team who had stayed in Chechnya. I hired these people to take me on a tour and they agreed because I was throwing money around. That was our story. I had to study up on football…

RB – What is the atmosphere in Chechnya like?

DF – I had never been in a place that is so closed. I felt watched and studied. There’s something in the air that I’ve never experienced before. I don’t even know how to describe it. I have done war reporting in Central American, Lebanon, Occupied Territories, Western Africa, but I never felt the kind of peril that you felt when you were there even though you didn’t really see it. There were no goons with guns and no military infrastructure in front of you, but you felt it anyway.

RB – What filmmaking techniques did you have to use?

DF – The two women who met with Anya were wearing hijabs. One of them was my DP, and she was shooting with a go-pro. I was across the restaurant with a cellphone, taking selfies or appearing to take selfies. It was guerrilla filmmaking.

RB – What kind of emotions did you feel? Did it feel dangerous?

DF – Not really. We had prepared very well with our security team. But we were detained briefly as we were leaving. That’s the scene in the film where they are reaching for passports. They were reaching for my passport and I had my cellphone between my legs and I was shooting that way. And when they called me out the car I just dropped the phone and walked out. I had a second cellphone that had all of my football fan tourism on it and they were shocked by the story we told them about me needing to come and see the Egyptian football in Chechnya. Eventually they were like: “this guy is way too crazy”. We were heading in the right direction out of the region anyway, so they just threw us back in the car.

RB – Can you talk about the danger for your documentary subjects? For them, this is life or death...

DF – It was especially dangerous for them. That’s why they wanted me there. The video would present an alibi if needed. “What are they doing there? Are they kidnapping this girl? Who are they? Is she consenting?” All of these questions would be disproved by whatever video we were shooting. In a way we were functioning as a failsafe for the activists and the work they were doing.

David France

RB – How did you initially establish contact with the LGBT network?

DF – I had read an interview with Olga Baranova, who is running the main shelter in Moscow. She had spoken publicly about her work. I was introduced to her and proposed that we make a documentary. She was interested at first, but there were the questions of security and protecting the identities of people within the shelter. We worked that all out quickly. Within three days I was there shooting.

RB – How did you come up with the idea to obscure their faces digitally while still allowing the audience to see their emotions? What was the rationale behind it?

DF – I had to make the argument to people who were on the run that we needed to see their faces in order to generate empathy. I needed to know what it was like to be them, to have been tortured so terribly, to have barely escaped, to be so dislocated from everyone, even your family, and to know that even your family has joined the hunt for you.

I promised everybody I would disguise them in some way although I didn’t know how yet. And yet they still agreed to let me do this. I had in my release form a question asking if they needed to be covered, or if they needed their voices to be disguised. And they would check those boxes and everybody on the run checked those boxes. I promised that I would return to them with my solution for their approval. I think they realised it was going to be a breakthrough film in this respect.

Once we began the work of research and development to find ways to cover them we began to worry very seriously that we had a movie that we would never be able to release.

Thankfully it worked and it’s been recognised as major new tool for documentary filmmakers. It gives back the power to people to tell their own stories. It gives them back their humanity.

RB – Did you worry that the film may have blown the network’s cover?

DF – They had a trade-off that they were weighing and that was their need to get the world to pay attention to what they’re doing. This was also the reason for the activists to appear with their real faces. Due to the increasing physical risk to them and to their safety, they believed that their notoriety from this film will add to their level of protection. David Isteev, for example, expects to do his work in some way. Of course, he’s not going to travel in and out of Chechnya after the film comes out. But he does believe that after passing that torch to others, he will be able to continue living the life he had before.

RB – What can Vladimir Putin do to successfully intervene in Chechnya? The region is volatile, and known for its two wars with Russia…

DF – Putin could tell Ramzan Kadyrov to stop it and Kadyrov could stop it just like that. Why isn’t he telling him? Because I believe that what’s happening in Chechnya is the extension of Putin’s policies for the last ten, fifteen years.

He has been systematically rolling back a cultural acceptance of the LGBT community in Russia. He did it by passing only one law. And that’s what they call the anti-gay propaganda law. This law makes it illegal to say anything in the presence of a minor that might be construed as suggesting the normalcy of LGBT folks.

It is legal to be gay in Russia. There are also no laws against gay sex in Russia, but there are no protections either. But Putin’s campaign in the last fifteen years is to create an appetite for traditional values and to rebuild the role of the Church in society after the collapse of communism. What he has done is weaponised homophobia to consolidate his power. And the logical extension of that is what’s happening in Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia, and numerous other republics in the South and creeping throughout Russia. We’ve seen other explosions of extreme anti-queer violence in Russia.

What shocked me the most is the fact that I didn’t think that homophobia could be weaponised again the way it was in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. I thought that would be impossible. In almost every society we have celebrities who are queer, we have politicians running governments who are queer, we have people who are out in the industry and we have people marrying left and right.

But we also currently have the first place and first time since Hitler that a top-down government-sponsored campaign exists to round up LGBTQ people for execution. This hasn’t happened since the 30s.

RB – How challenging was it for you to show these shocking images? What was the reasoning behind them?

DF – It was not a hard decision at all. This is an ongoing crime against humanity that no one is paying attention to.

Without knowing what this persecution looks like, it makes people in the shelter’s journeys dismissible. We wanted to show the grotesqueness of what is happening there and what they are escaping.

RB – Can you talk about the film as a work of investigative journalism. After all, reporting out of Chechnya is scarce.

DF – The biggest failure is the failure of the news media. It was a Russian-based independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, that broke the story.

They’re the only paper in the world that’s been aggressive about reporting this story. The news cycle throughout the world, and throughout the West especially, has become inexcusably shallow. The economy is not there to continue investigative research and reporting, especially the way we knew it in the past. I’m an investigative journalist myself, I came to filmmaking through that. This film is a piece of investigative work of the sort that newspapers should be doing.

The idea for the movie is to get the story back in the headlines. Then people in the news media can amplify a call for justice from the audience, which will put pressure on governments around the world to bring effective pressure on Putin. Currently the only global leader who has taken him to task on this is Angela Merkel. There’s been nothing out of the United States.

RB – I’m so glad the film also shoots scenes of the refugee Maxim Lapunov and his boyfriend together in the bath and then playing by the beach. Because those are such tender, lovely moments in a film which is mostly very harrowing. Did you feel that you needed to include those love scenes?

DF – I’ve realised very early on that this is a film about love. Not just romantic love, but love in a much larger way. I thought I was making a film about hate but having spent time in the underground network I saw a remarkable expression of love.

I spent so much time with those guys that we, as filmmakers, disappeared. We were able to watch them really without them having any sense of us watching them. But yes, when I crawled into the bathroom they did notice.

RB – Will it play in a few independent cinemas in Moscow or St Petersburg perhaps?

DF – We are in genuine conversations with people at the Moscow Film Festival, and there are additional conversations with another festival in St.Petersburg. We believe that we will be invited there. But in Russia, in order to show a film, it needs a license by the Kremlin.

So whether the Kremlin give a license for this film is certainly an open question. I’m not the one negotiating these deals. We have an agent for foreign sales, who did tell me last night that they are deep in conversation about official commercial distribution in Russia. Will it happen? I don’t know. But I would love to see it happen.

The picture at the top of this article is from David France at the 70th Berlinale, where this interview was conducted, while the other two are from ‘Welcome to Chechnya’

Are You Proud?

Posted on by victorfraga

Are you proud? Are you proud to be gay, to be queer, to be lesbian, to be bisexual, to be transgender, to be non-binary, to be gender dysphoric, to be asexual, to be intersex, to be… whatever you wish? This question is dividing the contemporary LGBTQ+ community on campuses, in academia, on the streets, in the bars and wherever we gather, and it probably will be evident enough at the forthcoming Gay Pride in London on July 6. In short, the community in the United Kingdom is very much in the same place as such communities in many privileged part of the globe and this documentary fully chronicles and surveys this.

Ashley Joiner’s new documentary Are You Proud? describes, firstly historically and then issue by issue, the journey of the LGBTQ+ community in Britain from first tentative attempts at legal reform to the full panoply of the challenges that we now face. This includes the attack of Clause 28, the Aids/HIV crisis, the backlash from the police after the initial legalisation to the fevered debate nowadays, the meaning of sexual identity is and how it relates to all the other identities that are found in the LGBTQ+ community (racism being a prominent topic).

We are given an account of the life of one man who, from his days involved in WWII, to a pretended marriage, producing children, came out years after he knew he was gay. We are treated to charming footage of men dancing together shortly after homosexual acts in private between men aged 21 and over were made legal, looking so conventional it is comic. We see interesting footage about an early demonstration on Highbury Fields. Michael Cashman movingly describes how gay men who had died of Aids related symptoms were “reclaimed” by their conventional families, their gay identities were whitewashed away, and they disappeared suddenly without explanation from the gay community.

The UK community suffered the particular insult of Clause 28 from its own government in which schools discussing sexual issues with pupils were forbidden to “intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”. The absurd assumption that homosexuality could be “promoted” demonstrated how nasty establishment residual prejudice could be.

Having climbed out from under the rock of oppression and the description as filthy, dirty, perverted and dangerous, the LGBTQ+ community has constantly sought to claim its own narrative as proud and out. This has led to, especially under the influence of sexual and gender identity politics, initially so valuable in getting rid of insulting narratives, to an obsession with identities, sexualities and life-style and the interactions between them. I think this is a pity, but we are going to be detained in this place for some time yet.

This documentary does full justice to the situation of the LGBTQ+ community, including some of the downsides such as the commercialisation of Pride, and it deserves to be seen widely. I wonder what the situation will be the situation in 50 years’ time.

Are You Proud? is out in cinemas on Friday, July 26th. On VoD Friday, September 20th.