Queer Cinema(s)

Antoine’s future is all mapped out. A student at France’s top business college, some day he’ll slip into his father’s shoes at the head of a booming company.

Antoine is brilliant, but he’s bored. As a game or a challenge, to prove to himself he’s not on a one-way street, he agrees to play the lead in a film in preparation. It’s a scandal. The more Antoine delves into the unknown, the more he finds himself alone, misunderstood, torn between the wounded love of his parents and his lady director’s voracious passionRead More »

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More a dream about than a dramatisation of Genet’s novel, this is glorious and infuriating in equal parts. The port of Brest is built and lit more like one of Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night, murderous deity Querelle’s ambisexual encounters are suffused with a sweaty, tangible eroticism, and Fassbinder’s ‘version’ stays faithful to Genet’s nightmare poetry. But its narrative detachment, weighty monologues, Resnais-like anachronisms, and (most irritating of all) listless rationale turn it into a lurid hymn to teenybop nihilism. All in all, perhaps an entirely appropriate parting shot from a drug-crazed German faggot. – TimeOut LondonRead More »

“In [Sonbert’s] best work, behind the mask of unalloyed visual pleasure lurks a dramatic intensity and trajectory, not just of personal concerns or protracted journeys but of massive social upheavals, the melding or collision of distinct cultural rituals of crisis, cessation, renewal.” – Paul Arthur

(Descriptions below are online program notes written by Jon Gartenberg)

SHORT FUSE is informed by Sonbert’s awareness of his own mortality, once he was diagnosed with HIV. As film critic Steven Holden astutely noted, in SHORT FUSE, “an undercurrent of rage seeps through the cracks of its ebullient surface.” The opening of the film explodes with a sea of turbulent emotions, underscored by the gripping sound track from Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto. Shifting musical passages collide against images of leisure, war, and protest.Read More »

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One of France’s most unpredictable writer-directors, Christophe Honoré (Dans Paris, Love Songs) offers an audacious, erotically upfront re-reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, enacted by a fearless cast of (largely unknown) young actors in contemporary French settings. Kicking off with a startling take on the story of Diana and Actaeon, Honoré’s film follows the wanderings of Europa (Akili), a high-school student who encounters a marauding truck driver – none other than Jupiter (Hirel), father of the gods. Streams of stories within stories bring the old transformation myths a modern-day slant – Narcissus as an arrogant teenage heart-throb, Orpheus as a charismatic housing-estate preacher – and add a multi-racial, polysexual perspective, teasing out the perversity, violence and rapture of classical legend. You may detect shades of Borowczyk, Pasolini, Rohmer and Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, but this savage, rhapsodic, moving film is something entirely its own. A fabulous soundtrack completes the wayward beauty –BFIRead More »

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A revealing peek into the lives of young lesbians in Los Angeles, who through interviews and poetry, share their experiences and insight about life, love and everything in between.Read More »

Two women, who are dissatisfied with the dishonesty they see in dating and relationships, decide to make a pact to spend 24 hours together hoping to find a new way to create intimacy.Read More »

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In 1969, following an anti-establishment path blazed famously by Bonnie and Clyde, then-X-rated Midnight Cowboy lumbered into the cinema consciousness and swiped the Best Picture Oscar. While Hollywood was producing Hello, Dolly! (also nominated that year), Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight and director John Schlesinger were chronicling the bizarre tale of a wannabe male prostitute and a sickly cripple trying to survive together on the New York City streets.Read More »

After twenty years, Nina’s marriage to Wojtek is going nowhere, partly because of their failed attempts to have children. When they meet a young woman, Magda, they decide to propose that she become a surrogate mother for their child. But things get more complicated when Nina suddenly feels attracted to Magda.
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A stylish, sexy film about a young man’s journey into an unusual form of escort work, set in an imaginary vision of London’s Soho.Read More »