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Roze Filmdagen (Gay and Lesbian Film Festival)
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|  |  | | by Editorial Staff, in Events & Agenda , posted 08 March 2010 |
The festival is based around a diverse selection of high quality films (motion pictures, documentaries and many short films. With over 100 titles from 30 countries in 80 sessions the festival offers a great overview of what’s happening in gay cinema all over the world. The Roze Filmdagen presents many premiers of the best recent gay productions; popular as well as small-scale alternative work. The program is as divers as our community, every taste will be catered to.
www.rozefilmdagen.nl
A selection from the program:
General Program:
As usual the festival presents a few ‘blockbusters’ that should not be missed, like the Swedish feel-good movie PATRIK, AGE 1.5, in which a gay couple moves to the suburbs because their adoption request has been honored. But then the agency turns out to have made a little mistake and their new son happens to be 15 years old instead of 1.5... and homophobe as well!!
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NEWCASTLE, which will close the festival has lots of eye-candy on offer: a bunch of scantily clad testosterone busting Australian surfers take to the waves. One of them is struggling with his homosexuality on top of the usual adolescent turmoil.
CLAPHAM JUNCTION is about 36 hours in the lives of a number of men in Clapham, London. At times moving, very entertaining and sometimes even sultry. The movie portrays numerous relevant subjects in the lives of gay men: loyalty, living in fear, prejudice, secrecy, cruising, pedophilia, voyeurism, aids, drug use and anti gay violence.
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For the peeping Toms amongst us there’s COLLEGE BOYS LIVE: a documentary on a number of boys living together in a ‘big brother’ style house with 32 camera’s filming them 24/7. They chat with paying viewers and even have sex with each other. Most boys have a troubled past and are in search of a family. They sort of find this too but when the neighbors find out what’s going on next door, the shit hits the fan.
HOUSE OF BOYS is a Luxemburg production but is set in Amsterdam in the eighties. This beautiful love-story is about young Frank leaving his suffocating family in Luxemburg for the liberal city of Amsterdam. Things don’t go exactly as planned and while looking for work and a place to stay he walks into a boys club.
Before he realizes what’s happening he’s hired by Madame and falls in love with Jake, one of the other boys working there in the cabaret / sex club. Jake however, claims to be straight. By the time Jake surrenders to Franks love he’s showing symptoms of a ‘mysterious disease’ like so many around that time. A moving story about real love. |
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The Dutch documentary OUD & OUT contains interviews with ten men between 60 and 87 years old, who’ve all come out in their own distinct style. Some have had cliché professions like hairdresser and interior designer, but others were dentist, reverend or in the military. Some of them are well known, like Barry Stevens and Henk van Ulsen. They tell captivatingly about what it was like to come out in those days, about sexual intimidation by clerics and teachers, about the nightlife, colleagues, religious views and sneaking around in the army. They also express their interesting and sometimes surprising view on today's youth.
Besides the extended general program with wildly varying subjects and disciplines, the festival also presents a special theme: Grenzen verschuiven (Shifting borders).
“Shifting borders / identity”
The gay and lesbian community is as varied as society as a whole. Still, we often work with, sometimes self-imposed, fixed identities, as if there’s such a thing as the gay man or lesbian woman. Those labels are less and less applicable.
It’s mainly youngsters that lead the way. They initiate friendships and relationships with other young people irrespective of sexual identity (gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual) or gender (man, woman, transgender). The difference between gay and straight is fading and young people today have different images of what these words mean. Is this just a trend with the ‘whatever generation’ or are things really shifting?
TRU LOVED makes for a good example: a feel-good school comedy, in which the new student Tru starts up a Gay-Straight Alliance because she wants to change the conservative atmosphere in school. There are a lot of prejudices that need to be conquered. Black/white, gay/straight, everything needs to be addressed. And that super handsome boy Tru is in love with, is he in the closet or what?
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AN ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK is about the last years in the life of a flamboyant performer and king of social commentary: Quentin Crisp. His biography already inspired the award winning tv movie The Naked Civil Servant. This moving follow-up, with again the inimitable John Hurt playing Quentin Crisp, Crisp has left England and still refuses to follow the rules, even within the emerging gay culture of the seventies and eighties in New York.
Writing film reviews and a one-man show results in much coveted attention but his sharp tongue also causes commotion. In the sixties it was the straight society being shocked, but now it’s the gay community taking offense.
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LES CHANSONS D’AMOUR is of a completely different kind. This typically French movie shows a quest for identity via musical routes. The main character Ismael has a girlfriend and a second wife turns this into a happy trio. But when tragedy hits Ismael finds love in the arms of a boy. In one of the most romantic balcony scenes since Romeo and Julia the boys sing about their love.
Searching for one’s identity is often paired with lots of doubts and DARE (based on a short movie with the same title, shown during the Filmdagen in 2006) shows this beautifully. This is a triptych about three high school seniors: an aspiring actress, her best friend, who’s an outsider in school, and a loner. They’re both attracted to this mysterious but beautiful boy. They get tangled in an intimate, very erotic but complicated relationship.
“Shifting border / The world”
For a long time emancipation of the gay and lesbian community seemed to move along national borders: a progressive Northwestern Europe and partially North America and other parts of the world lagging far behind. This was also apparent in the cinematographic products and sometimes this resulted in movies that seemed to focus on the sentiment: look how bad the gays and lesbians have it over there.
Things have indeed been shifting however, mass migration to the West, but also from the countryside towards the city, has resulted in an almost kaleidoscopic situation, in which all over the world poor, rich, progressive and conservative enclaves appeared, sometimes not more than a street apart. A world in which the opinion on gays and lesbians don’t differ per country but per heritage, social class, religion and generation.
This has also resulted in a much more diverse ‘world cinema’ away from clichés. From China we see a nice family drama, in which the repressed party is a broke Swiss tourist totally dependent on his Chinese friend. Teenagers in Brazil and Argentina, as clumsy as in Holland and the countryside of Belgium can be more puzzling than city-life in Manila.
This cinema shows us a fully-fledged, not just sugarcoated image: gay and lesbian experiences worldwide are part of an array of social experiences and conflicts. Social standing, city, country side, young, old age are defining the views of gender and sexual identity much more so than the division of ‘us in the West’ and ‘the others’.
In the poetic SOUNDLESS WIND CHIME a Swiss man strikes up a relationship with the Asian Ricky in Hong Kong, but is it real love or mutual dependency that binds them?
END OF LOVE is also Asian but looks remarkably Western. Ming is in a Christian re-education camp and looks back upon a life filled with (paid) sex and drugs.
In the sultry his girlfriend dumps PLAN B Bruno. He wants revenge and thinks up a plan to ruin the new relationship of his ex: he becomes the new lover’s best friend. The chemistry between the two men results in new possibilities, much more effective even, but what about Bruno’s own sexuality?
Of course we also have the popular blocks with themed shorts: SCHOOLJONGENS (School Boys), ADVENTURES IN DATING – MEN, FUN IN BOY’ SHORTS and SECRET DESIRES show the best short movies of the past year, amongst which a few jewels that have been awarded already.
When young JAMES finally confides in his teacher about his feelings, the response is not what he had hoped for.
Some anonymous dates can turn into a traumatic experience, as we can see in the Swedish MY NAME IS LOVE. The unexpected meeting of Love and Sebastian has far reaching consequences.
We can see other horror dates in WEAK SPECIES , but I would advice people with a weak stomach to avoid this one.
In the intense AWAKENING a boy falls in love with the father of his boyfriend: the awakening of unknown sentiments. BAPTEME DE FEU shows that being a member of the mafia and being gay is not an easy combination. It’s not all misery and sadness in the hilarious MOTHER KNOWS BEST: Nanna thinks no woman is good enough for her son Gudni and she’ll do anything to chase them out of the house, but when Gudni comes out of the closet everything changes. In A MATE straight Per asks his best friend to try out something sexually exciting and the two Korean boys in BOY MEETS BOY are assisted in their search for love by a karaoke-fairy…. |
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