Queer Cinema(s)

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Early accolades can be a curse to an artist’s career. Directors whose first features meet with critical hallelujahs are often harshly scrutinized for subsequent efforts. Few debuts have enjoyed the delirious reception afforded Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère. Dolans second film, Les amours imaginaires, one of the most eagerly anticipated films to emerge from Quebec in some time, is an exhilarating exception to the sophomore jinx. It’s as good as its predecessor – maybe even better – and best of all it is radically different.

Les amours imaginaires centres on two fast friends: Marie (Monia Chokri), a supremely confident and sexually aggressive combination of Bette Davis, Carmen Maura and Anna Karina; and the cherubic, acerbic Francis (Dolan), who has managed to manoeuvre through multiple affairs without ever getting too attached. Like the aristocrats of Dangerous Liaisons transported to contemporary Montreal, Marie and Francis spend their time being fabulous, condescending and bitchy.Read More »

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Marina, a trans woman, is a singer and waitress. She has just moved in with her lover, Orlando. One night, Orlando wakes up feeling very unwell. Unable to stand up, he collapses and falls down a staircase. Marina rushes him to a hospital, but Orlando dies, apparently from a brain aneurysm. Marina is viewed with suspicion both by the doctors and Orlando’s family. A detective comes to the restaurant where Marina works, and asks Marina questions suggesting that Orlando’s death had resulted from a physical altercation between the two of them. Meanwhile, Orlando’s ex-wife and Orlando’s son forbids Marina from attending the wake or the funeral. Marina struggles for the right to be herself in spite of the allegations. And to make matters worse, the exclusions might have more to do with her identity rather than the death of Orlando.Read More »

The Louise Brooks Society: wrote:
Beggars of Life is a terse drama about a girl (Louise Brooks) dressed as a boy who flees the law after killing her abusive stepfather. With the help of a young hobo, she rides the rails through a male dominated underworld in which danger is close at hand.

Kevin Brownlow wrote:
Beggars of Life, with Louise Brooks and Richard Arlen, is a story of tramps, by the hobo writer Jim Tully. The customary freshness and unstudied casualness of most American silent films is replaced here by a dignified, carefully studied style, suggestive of the European cinema, and indicating a conscious striving toward artistry.Read More »

Synopsis:
Compilation of archive footage from 1919 to the present, from both documentary and fictional sources, set to music, illustrating the huge changes in LGBTQ life in Britain (mainly England) over the 20th century.

Review:
Sensitive, cheeky and enriched with a healthy shot of self-awareness, Daisy Asquith’s kaleidoscopic Queerama is as much a reflection on the shifting status of LGBTQ people within the UK pop culture landscape – as both subjects and creators – as an ambitious summation of the corresponding societal changes in the last century or so. A loosely structured montage of decades-spanning archive footage, it’s perhaps of little surprise that the film doesn’t have a whole lot new to say but the empathy and energy by which these images and ideas are edited together into a single piece make Queerama an entertaining and often poignant tribute to the progress made, as well as an implicit acknowledgement of the progress yet to be made.
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Brimming with sex and violence, The Wound is an exploration of tradition and sexuality set amid South Africa s Xhosa culture. Every year, the tribe s young men are brought to the mountains of the Eastern Cape to participate in an ancient coming-of-age ritual. Xolani, a quiet and sensitive factory worker (played by openly gay musician Nakhane Touré), is assigned to guide Kwanda, a city boy from Johannesburg sent by his father to be toughened up, through this rite of passage into manhood. As Kwanda defiantly negotiates his queer identity within this masculine environment, he quickly recognizes the nature of Xolani s relationship with fellow guide Vija. The three men commence a dangerous dance with each other and their own desires and, soon, the threat of exposure elevates the tension to breaking point.Read More »

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When August suggests a suicide pact to his lover Beto, the skater soul mates emerge to defiantly ride through one final Los Angeles day punctuated by moments of lyricism, chaos, and contention. How far can love take you? To the very end? On their final night, August and Beto will discover an unpredictable environment and a unique cast of characters as they skate toward a certain end. As dawn rises on their final morning, the only question remaining will be…who ends it first?Read More »

The title refers to Madrid’s central square (from which all distances within Spain are measured). Zero may also describe the state of the lives of 14 strangers. The stories of these fourteen collide at this meeting point on a sultry August afternoon. Mistaken identities and second chances are among the results of this comedy of errors featuring, among other characters, a horny & gay university student, an internet-love seeker flamenco dancer, a macho but lovelorn gigolo, an actress, and a businessman starved for new sexual experiences.Read More »

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An aimless teenager on the outer edges of Brooklyn struggles to escape his bleak home life and navigate questions of self-identity, as he balances his time between his delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online.Read More »

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Three emotionally abused people from the fringes of society get locked in a convoluted love triangle. Yuu, a Catholic boy searching for true love ends up taking erotic photographs of women in public until he discovers Yoko, whom he sees as his Virgin Mary. Yoko, an antifamily, misandristic girl finds that her foster mother will be marrying Yuu’s father. Koike, an “original sinner”, coordinates a plan to convert Yuu’s family to her cult. Under her careful direction, their lives come crashing together in one fateful street fight.Read More »