Queer Cinema(s)

Quiet and introspective Kayako routinely has lunch on a rooftop with three of her friends that attend an all girls high school with her in a seaside town. One day she invites Masami Endo to join the group. As her friendship with Masami grows, she loses contact more and more with the others. She is impressed with Endo’s greater knowledge of music and art, and although Endo proclaims that she is insignificant with no aim in life, Kayako says that she wishes that she could be like her new friend. Their feelings deepen beyond friendship and she proclaims her love for Endo on a lonely beach. The two become physically intimate but when summer comes Masami disappears and Kayako learns that she has gone to Tokyo to meet a married man with whom she had an affair the year before. Read More »

Selection of 14 experimental films of Paul (& Menno) de Nooijer

De Nooijer’s first attempt at filmmaking was in collaboration with his former teacher Frans Zwartjes.From then on he made short experimental films and photos and combined the two.

Paul and Menno (his son) have collaborated on numerous projects to produce video clips, commercials and short films. The autonomous work and the commercial work look similar, and elements used in the first return in the second and vice versa. But the commercial works are more straightforward, less layered in their meaning. Some deal with social (AIDS) or environmental issues (global warming).Read More »

Two married couples make it a foursome when they take an extended holiday in Puerto Rico.Read More »

A series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker’s friends and lovers intercut with a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature.Read More »

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Four youths share a two bedroom apartment in a corner of Tokyo. A series of assault cases occur in the same district. Eighteen year old Satoru, a male prostitute, joins them as a new house mate. Their daily life slowly starts to change.Read More »

The saga of adolescents living on their own as adults was treated as early as 1961 by Triguerinho Neto in this film set in Salvador, Bahia, under the Vargas dictatorship. Tonio has left home, unable to identify with his parents’ community centered around their African-derived religion. But he finds that, as a mulatto, in the outside world he is rejected by whites who see him as black and by blacks who see him as white. Tonio, who prefers the company of marginals who are as indefinable as himself, settles into the protection of a woman old enough to be his mother and befriends local dockworkers who are on strike. Betraying the former to help the latter, he finds himself alone. In his inability to commit, Tonio may be a proletarian version of the rootless character central to early sixties Cinema Novo in such films as São Paulo S/A.Read More »

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Jessica awakens when an alien spacecraft lands nearby. After dispatching a young couple, the alien assumes the identity of the recently dispatched young man. Jessica and her possessive lover Josephine invite “Anders” in when it appears he’s hurt. Soon Jessica becomes suspicious of Josephine’s overbearing ways, and relies more on the alien for support, but his purpose on earth remains unclear.Read More »

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coming-out, coming-of-age tale (from a novel by Jaime Bayly) set within a predominantly homophobic religious Peruvian society, this is by turns sensitive, touching, funny, alarming and, for the most part, very enjoyable. For just under two hours, we witness all the ups and downs of a young man, Joaquin (Magill), struggling to come to terms with his sexuality in a country where being gay is akin to being a leper, and violence towards gays is an almost daily occurrence. Joaquin’s mother is over-bearingly protective and very religious, while his father just wants to see his lad grow up to be a huntin’, shootin’, drinkin’ type. Joaquin, though, is unsure of whether he’s gay or het, and this dilemma stays with him right from the moment he leaves home, through his off-the-rails period as a coked-out dope fiend right up to the – admittedly, mostly unfulfilling – final reel.Read More »

Synopsis
Michele lives and studies in London. They’ve been dreaming of working in fashion since they were a child, and they are now a gender fluid model at an agency. Born a man, Michele feels they are a third sex.
(arte.tv)Read More »