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Ben and Raz are painstakingly pursuing their desire to have a child, and the migrant neighbourhood where this gay couple has set up their new flat is on the up. But a conflict over a newly planted tree in the city brings deep-seated prejudices to light.Read More »
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It’s Harold’s birthday, and his closest friends throw him a party at Michael’s apartment. Among Harold’s presents is “Cowboy”, since Harold may have trouble finding a cute young man on his own now that he’s getting older. As the party progresses the self-deprecating humor of the group takes a nasty turn as the men become drunker. Climaxed by a cruel telephone “game” where each man must call someone and tell him (or her?) of his love for them.Read More »
“I learned and stole a lot from James Broughton…
See this movie!” – Gus Van Sant
Review (from slackerwood.com)
James Broughton’s epitaph says about all you need to know about him: Adventure — not predicament.
For those who want to know more, the splendid documentary Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton is a terrific tribute to the revered poet, writer and pioneering experimental filmmaker.
Born in 1913, Broughton overcame a difficult childhood to have a long, fulfilling career and personal life. His father died when Broughton was five, and his overbearing mother sent him to military school at age 9, hoping to break him of his effeminate tendencies. These experiences no doubt informed his work and his lust for life and love as an adult.Read More »
Three soldiers are ordered to change their gender (via a pill) and are sent on a secret mission (undercover as show girls) to the women only planet of Clitoris’ capital city “Vegas in Space.” Once they arrive, they must maneuver through complex politics and decadent parties, to uncover a plot to disrupt the most important pleasure planet in the Universe. This release from Troma Entertainment is a hilariously camp John Waters-esque sci fi.Read More »
A tangled five-way lesbian dramedy. A moral tale that happens in the bathrooms, the beds and the streets of Barcelona. A film that starts when Zaida returns to the city after a breakup.Read More »
After being fired from her job, Ren, an aspiring writer and mid-twenty-something, accompanies her Canadian-Italian family on vacation. The realities of being a stunted millennial and a trans woman coalesce as Ren struggles to balance the yearning for independence with the comfort of being taken care of.Read More »
Fatima-Zahra and her teenage son Selim move from place to place, forever trying to outrun the latest scandal she’s caught up in. When Selim discovers the truth about their past, his mother vows to make a fresh start. In Tangier, new opportunities promise the legitimacy they each crave, but not without pushing the volatile mother-son relationship to the breaking point. The Damned Don’t Cry combines melodrama and neorealism to tell the story of a mother-son relationship on the fringes, observing the effects of oppression – both economic and affective – in a cut-throat world. Borrowing its title from a 1950s Joan Crawford melodrama, The Damned Don’t Cry employs non-professional actors for its two main actors and almost the entire cast. In his second feature which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, writer-director Fyzal Boulifa manages to avoid pastiche while ‘readily embracing some of the formal elements of melodrama’ as he takes his inspiration from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Le notti di Cabiria.Read More »
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Set over the course of one winter, it revolves around a 17-year-old high school student struggling to get to grips with new challenges posed by death, life, the city and “the temptation of renouncement”. In a bid to regain his momentum, he decides to ditch the lies he has been feeding himself.Read More »
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In the ’50s and ’60s, deep in the American countryside at the foot of the Catskills, a small wooden house with a barn behind it was home to the first clandestine network of cross-dressers.Read More »