Film

This rather enchanting Brazilian dramedy is about three smart urban professionals who are not only best friends, but also neighbors in a trendy São Paulo apartment building.  As they are also very self-absorbed, it is no-wonder that all three of them are having relationship issues with their partners.

Julia (Maria Laura Nogueira) hates confrontations and so has chosen to ignore the fact that her boyfriend has been two-timing her for years, until she is left with no other option than dump him when she catches him red-handed, but by then she is pregnant with his child. Her unhappiness is also exasperated by the fact that although she loves her job assisting a famous fashion designer, she is the last one to accept that she has no talent at all even after her employer fires her.

Diego (Brazilian rock star Thago Pethit in his first acting role) is a DJ who likes to party as much as he can and even though he has the sweetest boyfriend who he adores, he still cannot keep stop playing the field every time a handsome man comes onto his radar.

On the other hand Micaela (Renata Gaspar) wants to move her year-old relationship with her bisexual actress girlfriend up to the next level, but self-centered Maria cares much more about keeping strictly in the closet because of her career and her friends.

The three of them spend most of their spare time together drinking copious amounts of alcohol and trying to advise each other how to move their lives forward.  After she has dumped her boyfriend and before she discovers she is pregnant, Julia has a night of wild passion with one of Diego’s DJ friends which puts a big smile back on her face until she discovers he already has a girlfriend. Diego is studiously avoiding the phone as his estranged family are trying to reach him as the father he loathes is dying. Then to top it all when he gives his patient boyfriend an ultimatum to accept him as he is or leave, he is devastated when the boy choses the latter.  Meanwhile Micaela is banging her head against a brick wall until she eventually realizes that she has given Maria one to many last chances, and that she will never publicly recognize her as a girlfriend.

This very contemporary and entertaining story adeptly handles how through all the trials and tribulations with our romantic relationships …. as well as our paternal ones too…. our very close friendships not only sustain us, but are so often the richest element of our lives too. This intriguing story is an impressive directorial debut from writer Vera Egito who has the good sense to resolve all the strands of the story to give them all a very welcome happy conclusions.

Even as queer cinema continues to keep evolving it is still something of a surprise to discover yet another new barrier has been broken with the first movie from an unexpected provenance. Writer/director Adam Garnet Jones has done just that by setting and actually making his feature film, a very tender coming-of-age drama, in a First Nation reservation in the North of Canada where he also hails from, with an entire cast of indigenous locals.

His story centers around Shane (a very talentedAndrew Martin) a bright teenager who wants to seize the opportunity to go to study in Toronto, and escape the confines of living on the reservation, but there are several factors holding him back. Destiny (Morteesha Chickekoo-Bannon) his younger sister committed suicide just six weeks ago, and his mother is so grief stricken that she refuses to leave the girl’s bedroom, let alone the house. Shane wants to keep Tara his girlfriend happy without having to commit to having sex with her, as he really only wants to do that with David his boyfriend(Harley Legarde-Beacham) who is the closeted grandson of a tribal leader.  There is also the problem of money too, as the cash left to him by his father when he died was meant to pay his college tuition, but his mother desperately needs to replace the leaky roof of their family home.

Shane puts enormous pressure on himself with his desire to try and keep everyone happy, especially in this very remote depressed region where no-body seems to have much good going for them.  A community social worker insists that all the young people of the village meet regularly to discuss Destiny’s death as it seems that her suicide is not a rare occurrence.

Shane’s struggle with his own sexuality is also because these native people do not always look too kindly on what people they call ‘two spirited’ which is essentially how they describe those who have both a masculine side and a feminine side. Shane needs to persuade not just himself, but also David, that they both need to come clean and accept the fact that they are gay.  Before he can reach this part, he will make some bad calls of judgement and then be left trying to extract himself out of the messes that he has created.

This is a very compelling resolute tale that sheds a light on a community that we rarely see as the setting for a ‘gay drama’ , and what is equally refreshing it is devoid of any of the usual queer stereotypes. Finding your own path as a young person in this tough environment is far from easy, and adding confusions about sexuality to the mix, certainly doesn’t help.

Garnet Jones’s authentic and completely fascinating movie is an impressive achievement, and although it is very much a First Nation story, it is however one that will resound with teens coming-of-age everywhere.

Teenage Miguel (Diego Calva) has two major passions in his life.  His boyfriend Johnny (Eduardo Eliseo Martinez) who just happens to be the son of his wealthy family’s maid, and skateboarding. Whilst Johnny may share these passions ….. well, definitely the latter …. he also has a very jealous girlfriend too.  They all live in Mexico City albeit in quite opposite settings as Johnny is living rough on the streets and always on the look out to make some easy money.

These two young men jump at the chance of getting involved with some petty criminal plot that involves rounding up some desperately poor people off the streets to illegally donate blood to some drug gangsters. There is good money to be made, but on this particular occasion the deal goes horribly wrong when armed thugs suddenly herd the donors into a truck and just simply drive them away never to be heard off again.

When the boys go off to search for an explanation from the middle man who set the deal up, things go from bad to worse as they take matters into their own hands, and then Johnny betrays his one-time boyfriend and subsequently is left with no other choice than to immediately hot-foot it out of town.

This attempt by Guatemalan-Mexican writer-director Julio Hernandez Cordon to make a cool and edgy street drama with these young skateboarders ……one of whom likes nothing more than demonstrate his skills on the board whilst totally naked ….falls very flat on it’s face.  Whilst it started off by insinuating itself as a potential gay romance it instead unfolds into a ill-conceived and rather messy crime noir drama that fizzles out with a most unimaginative ending.

The cast made of up of total amateurs that Hernandez recruited via the pages of Facebook add a welcome rawness to the piece that at least has a very visual stylish look to it, but that alone is not enough to redeem it.  I Promise You Anarchy …..but what a pity he didn’t promise us a more interesting movie too.

It took the members of G-Voice South Korea’s oldest gay male choir a long time and a great deal of discussions before all the members agreed to this documentary to be made. Most gay Koreans are by nature quite conservative and they are usually reticence to talk about their sexuality, but in this instance as Lee Dong-ha the filmmaker was also a member of the choir, they let their guards down more than normal and seemed to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the project.

Since 2003 G-Voice has been meeting in Seoul every weekend to rehearse. In some cases their enthusiasm far exceeds their musical talents and after listening to some of the scenes of painful caterwauling, it is quite remarkable that somehow they manage to pull off such polished public performances in the end.  The music is of course not the main reason that they enjoy being part of the group, as it gives them all a welcoming and enjoyable social experience which helps counterbalance all the general homophobia of Korean society.

What strikes you from the start is all the infectious good humor and joy especially as they give accounts of all their dating experiences, several of which occur within the choir’s ranks. They seemed somewhat childishly innocent and so are visibly shocked when their cosy life as a group gets a rude awakening when they are being pelted with bags of human faeces whilst performing  at Korea’s first gay wedding.  (Their assailant is a Christian Pastor which is the least shocking part of the whole  incident).

In the second part of the documentary the choir’s political awareness steps up a notch or two and they go and sing in support of a steel workers strike.  Then when their attempts to be part of the 15th Korea Queer Festival Parade are halted by hoards of very angry Evangelical Christians defiantly sitting down in the streets of their route blocking they way, they are resigned and annoyed.  What is remarkable here is that despite the hours they stand there unable to proceed, and  with non-stop vitriolic abuse hurled at them, there is not even a hint of retaliatory violence which would probably occurred in western countries faced with a similar situation.

The point of the film is to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Choir with a spectacular concert which turns out to be quite a magnificent event albeit a very camp extravaganza.  They proudly write and produce all their own music and sing enthusiastically ‘dream the undreamable, reach the unreachable,’ and  I think they’ll manage to do that quite easily.

P.S. The movie won a Audience Award at the Berlinale earlier this year

Some people wait an awful long time before they start to come to terms with the fact there were born with the wrong gender, or indeed have the wherewithal to deal with it.  Gloria Stein is one such person as she waited until she was 66 years old until she transitioned.  In this slightly stranger-than-fiction story we learn that one of the main reasons that prompted her to start the process then was that as Bernard “Butch” Rosichan he wanted to avoid being sent to jail for not making his alimony payments to his second wife. To be fair to Gloria, this wasn’t the only deciding factor, but it was the pivotal point to carry through something she had been working towards for a very long time.

Butch had been an aggressive loud-mouthed Jewish macho owner of a South Florida auto-wrecking company. Balding, pot-bellied and hardly attractive but evidently he was quite the ladies man.  In fact in this new documentary on her life, Gloria kept emphasizing that Butch loved women so much he thought he may just as well become one.  A slight simplification for what was obviously more her more profound reasons, nevertheless Gloria’s goal in her transitioning was to become the woman that Butch would have wanted to marry.

Gloria’s fascinating tale is one of the most unexpected and surprising journeys of a fiercely determined woman with a very infectious high-spirited personality whose transitioning also enabled her to come to terms with some of her past life choices that she made as Butch and which she now regretted.  Her nephew Stephen who had served time in prison for his drug addiction somewhat bitterly testified how obnoxious his Uncle had treated him in the past. In fact at the beginning of this film, which had been shot over a couple of years, he was adamantly refusing to reunite with Gloria.  They did however affect a happy reconciliation. but to everyone’s regret they couldn’t manage one with Gloria’s two sons that she hasn’t seen for decades.

Gloria had named herself after her two idols – Gloria Estefan and Gloria Steinem, and starting her life all over as a senior citizen simply empowered her to do whatever she wanted too. After her sex realignment surgery she even became a dominatrix for some time, and then to her complete surprise fell in love with Dan a rather timid  FTM transgender man who obviously totally adores her.  However what gives this rather inspirational and very compelling story a particularly happy ending is that Gloria has used her experience to now become an leading activist for the transgender community. As an outreach speaker to youth groups in Florida she tells her story and always encourages her young audiences with her very simple creed “if you want to do something, do it now because tomorrow may never come.”

Written and directed by Emmy Award Winning filmmaker Robyn Symon

Beatrice (Juliet Stevenson) and her 15 year old son Elliot (Alex Lawther) have arrived at their family’s getaway vacation home in the South of France for one last time.  As the house is now to be sold as Beatrice and her husband are finally getting a divorce, they are there to pack up all its contents.   After flailing around for decades in a marriage for which she confides to her neighbor never ever really brought her much joy, it is time to move on.  Not that she looks any happier at the thought of a fresh start as she always appears so thoroughly depressed and about to burst into tears.

Her humor is not helped by the fact that she has spoilt her only son to such an extent that he is a self-absorbed prig who cannot bear to be in the house with her let alone, actually help with the arduous task of sorting all the possessions out. When he is out having fun just wandering around the countryside he comes across a semi-naked slightly older extremely handsome boy about to go for a swim in the reservoir.  Clément (Phénix Brossard) is also here a visitor to the area but when we discover his dark secret we realize that he is certainly not on vacation.

Clément is however quite bemused when he spots how a very earnest Elliot is immediately infatuated with him.  They have totally different natures and in fact Clément teases his new very wordy admirer for being a budding poet ‘such a cliche’ he says. Nevertheless they take to hanging together at Elliot’s house and it does at least mean that Beatrice has finally got a helping pair of hands with all the packing, and someone who is finally nice to her.

On an outing to the nearby town it is in fact Beatrice that steals a kiss from Clément, an incident that Elliot manages to witness, but later on he gets his new friend alone and he is finally permitted to go even further.  By then Elliot’s father (Finbar Lynch) has arrived to ostensibly sign the Sale papers for the house, but before he does that, more family secrets are revealed, and Beatrice gets even more unhappy.

This very gentle drama from Brit theater and TV director Andrew Steggall unfolds at a very languid pace and but somehow it never totally engages you or quite fulfills its promise.  Despite a valiant performance from Lawther (last seen on our screens as the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game) it is difficult to warm to such an insufferable character, and even harder to appreciate why these two totally opposite young men really would become friends. Stevenson, one on the Uk’s most talented actresses, has been given little to grasp onto as her character is too one dimensional, although at least she doesn’t have to repeat her campy performance of a newly divorced mother of a gay boy that she gave in ‘Food of Love’.

Beautifully photographed and with a delightful soundtrack which does make up for it a little.