Gay Cinema

[tfferg]

Sounds GREAT Tony!! I'll check YT for it.......thanks! 

It is great, John. I hope you can see it.

[tfferg]

Gay Australian theatre director Samuel Van Grinsven's debut feature film, Sequin in a Blue Room, portrays the erotic story of 16 year-old student Sequin (played by gay actor Conor Leach in his film debut). Sequin is absolutely obsessed, almost 24/7, with using a hook-up app to arrange sexual encounters with anonymous older men who he blocks immediately afterwards. He is distant and uncommunicative with his loving and increasingly anxious single father (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) and at school with classmates.

There are scenes of Sequin in the back seat in class. He spends the whole time scrolling through and messaging on the hook-up app on his phone held under the desk. Ironically, the unaware and unseen teacher is giving lessons on romance in literature. (I think it is another quiet gay student who mentions Brokeback Mountain as an example.) I was concentrating on keeping up with the rapid flow of messages on Sequin's phone.

Sequin is invited via the app to a sex party - the labyrinthine Blue Room, where the rules demand anonymity and forbid any talking. He is disturbed when he runs into B (Ed Wightman) a 46 year-old hook-up he has had sex with before and then blocked. He is very anxious to avoid him.

Sequin is attracted to a very handsome young adult with a lovely smile (Sierra Leone-born Samuel Barrie) who seems to be good-hearted and genuine. Intuiting Sequin's predicament and checking it with him, he shields him from B behind drapes as the two young men fulfil their desire for each other in a way that seems different from Sequin's previous encounters. The young man leaves, but breaking the rules, he says, "Find me out there" while obeying the rule of complete anonymity.

For the first time, Sequin wants to establish a relationship and, desperately trying to find out the mystery man's name and track him down, he embarks on a very risky course of action and the film becomes a thriller. The director wanted to go beyond what he says has become the mainstream queer coming-of-age genre people are becoming tired of.

I found the film intriguing. The fine-boned, red-haired Conor Leach is a very expressive actor who portrays Sequin in an authentically gay, unstereotypical way. Another fine performance is given by Anthony Brandon Wong as Virginia, an older drag queen Sequin first meets as a hook-up. They come to play a crucial role as a mentor for Sequin. It's his first really human relationship with a member of the gay community. Simon Croker plays Tommy, the quiet, awkward gay classmate who just wants to date Sequin (who leaves him in the lurch). He doesn't resort to hook-up apps as he doesn't want anonymous one-night stands. His character serves to avoid the film stereotyping all younger generation gays.

Erotic and provocative as the story is, it is restrained. I assume Conor Leach is of age. He has quite a mature baritone voice in real life. Most of the sexual encounters are filmed in close-ups of the actors' faces or from behind. Similarly, the film avoids fear-mongering about hook-up apps.

Cinematically and technically, the film is very well crafted indeed. It was the director's final project to qualify for his Master's degree at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney.

Highly recommended.

[tfferg]

Out gay Argentinian director Lucio Castro's 2019m debut feature, Fin de siglo (End of the Century) left me feeling puzzled,

Ocho (Juan Barberini), a New York-based poet, arrives in Barcelona on holiday. After a lonely few days where he doesn't talk with anyone, he hooks up with Javi (Ramon Pujol), a Berlin-based Catalan children's TV series director visiting family in the building next door to Ocho's Airbnb apartment.

After an intense sexual encounter, with a comic interruption before consummation, they meet again in the late afternoon and have a long conversation over wine and cheese on Ocho's rooftop overlooking the city. They talks about their lives and experience as gay men and discuss the challenges of a long-term relationship, fatherhood and children, the allure of personal freedom and loneliness until Javi says something which plunges the film into a flashback to 20 years ago.

A third act is set in an undefined time that might be the future, a dream or a wish-fulfilment fantasy before apparently returning to the present and an Antonioniesque sequence of alienation.

In the three different time periods, Ocho and Javi look the same despite a 20-year gap, which made it difficult to know when things were happening.

The performances by Juan Barberini, Ramon Pujol and Mia Mestre are very good. The photography of Barcelona is mostly beautiful as we see Ocho walking and dining in the streets, going to a deserted beach and walking in parks and woods. One day, Javi takes him (and the viewer) around the city showing things he, as a local, thinks he should see. There are no scenes in Las Ramblas or la Sagrada Familia or other Gaudi points of interest.

The vaunted erotic charge of the film comes in four scenes, but otherwise, the film didn't take me to any emotional highs.

The three acts portray something of the ways life has changed and ways it has stayed the same for gay men over the last two decades.

The key to the film and the viewer's response may lie in a passage from David Wojnarowicz's book Close to the Knives. Ocho finds it in his friend Sonia's bookcase and reads it while he is sick in bed for a few days. He is terrified he may have been infected with HIV. (The writer died of AIDS). Javi finds the book open on Ocho's bed after he leaves. He reads a passage about periods of transition and being disconnected and in an unfamiliar state. The writer prefers this state to being at a destination which he equates to a loss of freedom.

Lucio Castro suggests that gay men inherently feel a sense of freedom while "being controlled by their sexual lives". He asserts that choosing and committing to a partner is "less free in some ways".

The film doesn't seem to resolve the tension between a radically free way of living and domesticity, though the final scenes feel lonely.

After the credits roll, a dedication appears on screen "a Josh", Lucio Castro's husband.

[tfferg]

Indonesian director Garin Nugroho's 2018 feature Memories of My Body/ Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku intrigued me.

The MIFF synopsis read it "dances through gender stereotypes, societal oppression and his homeland's recent political history" and refers to a boy finding "a new life with a traditional [Javanese] lengger dance company, warming to its graceful movements while embracing its complicated approach to masculinity. In the group's performances, male dancers take on female roles, opening [his] eyes to the fluidity of gender, sexuality and sensuality and the struggle that can stem from being different, including within himself."

The film was inspired by Garin's experience of collaborating as dramaturge in a dance production by Rianto, a dancer and choreographer who was born into a poor farming family in the Banyumas area of Java. He is now based in Japan where he works and lives with his Japanese wife. The collaboration was part of Garin's investigation of the fact of gender diversity among various ethnic groups in Indonesia.

In recent years, Indonesia has become increasingly anti-LGBT although same-sex relationships are legal except in Aceh where sharia law is in force. The laws prohibiting pornography, including "body movements" are used to persecute LGBTIQ people as Islamists have become more powerful and politicians across the spectrum used anti-LGBT policies in their campaigns for the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections, claiming LGBT behaviour is a Western import.

Garin's film does not defend or judge the not-stereotypically-straight characters or their actions. Rianto says "My home is my body." The teenager's elderly uncle (Fajar Suharno) advises him, "Your body can take you anywhere, but bodies carry traumas. You must love your body." The film is intended as an invitation to dialogue among the audience.

The film is a fictionalised version of Rianto's boyhood and adolescence. It opens with the real-life Rianto as himself addressing viewers as he stands in front of a simple bamboo house in a remote village. It is the first of a few short monologues between four episodic chapters.

Rianto speaks of his experiences becoming part of his body. His dance moves, some androgynously graceful, some vigorously masculine, include muscle memory and the embodiment of powerful emotions, some happy, others conflicted and traumatic. He develops his art as a vehicle of catharsis.

In the opening scene, the camera moves away to focus on his avatar Jono as a little boy (Raditya Evandra) and in the later episodes as a teenager (Muhammad Khan).

Juno's mother named him Wahyu Jono (Vision of Arjuna). Arjuna is the refined, compassionate warrior in the Javanese wayang kulit (shadow play) based on the Mahabharata epic.

Abandoned by his traumatised father, Jono mostly fends for himself before his aunt takes him in. We see him eyeing a poster of David Bowie in a village market.

He happens on a group rehearsing lengger and spies on them through a hole in a wall. He is caught by the old dance teacher (Sujiwo Tejo) who tells him that leng means "hole" and shows him his wife's genitalia snd that ngger means "cock's comb) and challenges him, though the boy has not reached puberty. The dance originated many centuries ago as a fertility ritual but was  (is?) customarily performed at weddings and other celebrations by local Muslim villagers.

In this and later episodes, Jono suffers because he is different and witnesses the violent ill-treatment of poor villagers including a handsome boxer (Randy Pangalila) who he is fascinated by as a teenager when he delivers traditional wedding clothes for him and his bride. The boxer treats him with surprising intimacy.

Jono is conflicted as he grows more attracted to dancing lengger in a female role in the troupe that recruited him tome their costumes.

The adolescent Jono is willy-nilly involved in political conflict during a re-election campaign after the fall of the dictatorial Suharto regime by a married regent (Teuku Rifnu Wikuna) who lusts after him and a local reactionary Muslim faction who press for the lengger troupe to be expelled. The regent's campaign includes a lengger performance and a performance of the spectacularly dramatic reog dance from Ponogoro.

The Suharto regime promoted these traditional arts to bolster popular support, but "straightened" them by replacing the handsome young male and cross-dressed dancers with young women.

The Tantric ascetic Warok strongman (Whani Darmawa) who performs the reog lion dance dangerously challenges this by adopting Juno as hs gemblak and moves him into his house as his companion and provider of domestic services. The warok carries the gemblak on his shoulders as he dances holding a towering mask in his teeth. The gemblak was believed to make the warok invulnerable.

Both Raditya and Muhammad are good looking. Raditya does not play cute. The two actors' portrayal is subtle and nuanced. There are beautiful and ugly scenes. Although there are scenes of emotional intimacy, there are no sex scenes.

After a dramatic crisis, the film ends on a optimistic note.

It has won international awards. It was passed by the Indonesian censors, but when the trailer was released in Indonesia a few months ago, reactionary religious groups orchestrated a moral panic against it as blasphemous and a danger to the young. It was banned by some local government authorities and Garin has received death threats. Only three cinemas in Jakarta screened it.

It is a fascinating film.

[Sara B]

Another film I found moving is A Moment in the Reeds, directed by Mikko Mäkelä, apparently the first full-length Finnish gay romantic drama.

Some people are comparing it with God's Own Country, but the only common features of the two films are the rural settings and the exploration of a loving relationship between a local man and an immigrant. Their characters and the way the relationship develops are different. A Moment in the Reeds interweaves themes of the experience of gay lives in the face of homophobia, emigration and refugee settlement and treatment, and father-son relationships.

A Moment in the Reeds is set in woods on the shores of beautiful Lake Saimaa in Finland. Leevi (Janne Puustinen) comes back just for the summer from Paris where he is free to live as a gay man. He is working on a thesis comparing gay Finnish poet Kaarlo Sarkia with Arthur Rimbaud. He is there to help his grumpy, homophobic, xenophobic widowed father Jouko (Mika Melender) renovate the family's summer cabin which he is preparing to sell to refinance and update his failing timber transport business in town. There are unresolved issues related to the death of Leevi's mother.

Jouko is angry when the handyman arranged by an agency to work on the renovations with him turns out to be a recently arrived Syrian architect. Partly because he can't speak Finnish,Tareq (Boodi Kabbani) can't find work in his field and he has been kept waiting for the opportunity to enrol in the Finnish language course he applied for some time ago. He hasn't been able to make friends with any Finns who he finds very reserved. He has a complex relationship with his conservative parents still stranded in war-torn Syria.

When Jouko has to stay in town on business, Leevi and Tareq are left alone in the isolated cabin. Tareq continues working, but the two spend time together in the sauna, at the lake and drink Jouko's beers on the verandah in the evening. They chat together tactfully about their lives in tentative English, establishing an intimacy which starts with deeper feelings than simple lust, though it becomes very warmly sexy. The dialogue in these beautiful scenes is improvised by the actors.

On a drive in the country where they anxiously discuss their hoped-for futures, the lovers are confronted with a crisis when Leevi gets mobile phone calls from an angry Jouko who has returned to find them absent on a work day.

I’m always amazed that “Search” actually works. But not amazed that Tony has already, a year and a half ago, seen and beautifully reviewed A Moment in the Reeds, which I have just watched and liked, not least for the lovely and tranquil scenery..

I loved the slowly growing relationship between two men of very different backgrounds (though the Syrian immigrant Tareq was an architect in his own country, and his conversation is cultured.) Leevi, the blond Finn studying literature in Paris, is perhaps slightly too preoccupied with his future as a writer, and you can see why his father might be rather irritated by him! Also, he is so overwhemed by his passionate encounters with Tareq, which for both seems to be something more than sex, that he doesn’t seem to realise how important keeping this job (working for L’s father) is for Tareq’s future plans, and is a little insensitive to his feelings. But Leevi is still an attractive character, and I cared very much what happened to them both.

It is available on YouTube at the moment https://youtu.be/si0oJQW_Joc but sadly there are no subtitles, and Leevi and his father talk in Finnish - though the bulk of the dialogue, between Leevi and Tareq, is in their lingua franca, English. The dvd which I watched had subtitles only for the Finnish, and there were times when I could have done with them for the English too. But I should think that the YouTube version would be worth watching, especially if you read a few Amazon reviews first.

[tfferg]

Thank you for the compliment, Sara.

I'm so glad you enjoyed the film.

[oilgun]

The film featured on two sold-out Saturday night screenings at MQFF last month was the 2018 French production  Sauvage (Wild), the first directed by Camille Vidal-Naquet. It attracted some notoriety after many people walked out of the premiere at Cannes when the central character, a 22 year-old  male prostitute is shown in a scene being treated in a graphically dehumanising way by a two male clients in their apartment.

Sauvage is a very sexually frank film. The director says he began by imagining the character of the young man and later decided to make him a prostitute. To make the film as authentic as possible, he joined an outreach organisation working with male prostitutes in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris and interviewed them over three years.

There is a range of different explicit sex scenes with different clients. They are not erotic or titillating, but depicted as work, sometimes with humour. Some of Leo's interactions are just impersonal, anonymous transactions, some are exploitative, one very violent one is not shown onscreen. But Leo enjoys sex and can be tender and loving with certain clients.

Leo (whose name is never mentioned in the film) is one member of a number of groups of hustlers who work a wooded park in Strasbourg. They are both fraternally supportive and fiercely competitive. They are not shown as stereotypes.

Leo is a complex gay character who is driven by his need for freedom and to be loved. He is hopelessly in love with another hustler, Ahd (who is also never named in the film). There is one scene where they work together to service a disabled client, though Ahd (Eric Bernard) cheats Leo of his share of the bonus he does more to earn. Ahd is sometimes affectionate and protective and even physically fights for Leo, but violently rejects him, insisting he is only gay for pay.

Scruffy Leo sleeps rough, uses hard drugs, eats poorly, gets hurt and develops a dangerously worsening cough, but he never becomes bitter, cynical or materialistic. He accepts the consequences of his choices without complaint.  The film tells nothing of his back story. The director did not discuss the characters' psychology with the actors but employed a choreographer to develop their ways of moving to portray their feelings.

The film has what seem to be two different endings until it finally concludes with a third one.

The central role is played by Felix Maritaud, who first appeared in the supporting role of Max in 120 Battements Par Minute, Robin Campillo's film about ACT-UP in Paris. His acting in Sauvage is intense, heightened by the handheld camera and zoom shots, so that viewers are increasingly drawn to Leo in a non-erotic way and worry about him. Maritaud won the Louis Roederer Rising Star Award at Cannes for his performance. The actor who has described himself as a faggot and as bisexual in different interviews says Sauvage is not about homosexuality, but about tenderness between men.

Certainly it is about emotions and a conception of freedom.

I finally saw Sauvage tonight, at a special screening. I had fairly high expectations but I was still blown away. It's a graphic, disturbing and very affecting film. Félix Maritaud's performance is heart-wrenching. I highly recommend it!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8307082/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_12

[gattaca]

^^^^ added to my must watch listing!   V.

[Paul029]

Home movies footage offers a rare glimpse of gay life in St Louis in 1945

In April of 1994, photographer and filmmaker Geoff Story went to an estate sale at a mansion on Lindell Boulevard in St. Louis.

In the attic he found a canister containing two old 8mm home movie reels. One of the reels was simply titled ‘Picnic,” while the other bore the label “a gay party.” Given the apparent age of the film, he wondered whether “gay” meant “homosexual” or simply “merry.”

It didn’t take long for him to get an answer—the decades-old films turned out to contain 25 minutes of colour footage of a gay pool party, showing dozens of seemingly carefree men sunbathing and splashing at a swimming pool in a remote Missouri location. Some are shirtless, while others appear in drag attire and military uniforms. Several pair off to dance, sip beer and even share a kiss.

A brief 17-seconds’ clip from the digitized Pool Party footage is on Vimeo here.

After only a few viewings, and for fear of damaging the movies in the projector, Geoff Story shelved them for 20 years, until in 2017 he digitized the films, turned his bedroom into a makeshift theater, and ran private screenings for friends and acquaintances in hopes of learning more about the men in the footage.

One of those viewers was health care researcher Beth Prusaczyk, who also found herself grappling with the unanswered questions posed by the reels and, like Story, felt the films could form the basis of a potential documentary. The two have since joined forces for a documentary project to incorporate the original footage as well as new findings.

Thanks to beer labels, gas ration stickers and even markers on a military uniform, Story said he and Prusaczyk have determined that the footage must have been shot around 1945. At present, they’re able to identify five of the men seen in the film, which they’ve learned was spliced together from multiple parties.

Among them is celebrity hairstylist Buddy Walton, widely known as St Louis’ “hairdresser to the stars,” a favorite of society ladies, stage and screen stars, and national and international political figures, and Sam Micatto, Walton’s partner, who owned the Lindell Boulevard home in which the films were found. The pair were known for their lavish summer gatherings by the pool on a Hillsboro property owned by the Micatto family.

Story began learning about that world when he found Buddy Walton’s niece, Susie Seagraves, through a journey to locate anyone who appears in the films, or their relatives. Describing her uncle in an article on St Louis Public Radio in January last year, she said, “Queens and president’s wives and movie stars—he was always around fancy places and fancy things. From Eleanore Roosevelt to Ethel Merman, whenever celebrities and dignitaries came to town, they all went to Walton’s salon at The Chase,” Seagraves said, adding, “He had a beautiful life.”

Story and Prusaczyk have found several family members besides Seagraves but so far no living pool-party guests.

While Walton and Micotto are deceased, any surviving subjects would be in their late 80s and early 90s today. So Story and Prusaczyk have created an online gallery of 52 still images of those they still hope to identify.

Several people who aren’t in the home movies can testify to what it was like to be gay in mid-century St. Louis. Among those is Richard Eaton of Soulard, who grew up in the 1940s and '50s, who talks briefly about what life was like at the time on YouTube here.

With Prusaczyk as co-producer and director of research, the proposed documentary, titled Gay Home Movie, is now in production, and the pair is currently interviewing the families and friends of the men in the films, and continue to search for anyone who can speak about what gay life was like in rural Missouri during the film’s World War II time period, where invisibility was imperative for survival.

The two stress that their intention is not to “out” any of the film’s subjects, and they are cognizant of the fact that some may be less enthusiastic about recalling personal affairs.

Still, the filmmakers have proceeded with caution, cognizant of the moral pitfalls of outing even dead men. Some of the party-goers were filmed wearing wedding rings, suggesting the trips to what they referred to as "the farm" were a clandestine departure from another life.

But Story and Prusaczyk say they have been encouraged by the surviving connections—relatives and friends who have supported the in-progress documentary as a tribute to their loved ones and the nuances of their lives.

The finished product, which is currently aiming for a 2020 film festival release, will also be telling in what it doesn’t show―for one thing, people of color are noticeably scarce.

[Sara B]

Intriguing story, Paul - and poignant.

[ingmarnicebbmt]

1945, wow! Amazing.

[Paul029]

Thank you both for your comments, Sara and Ingmar. 
I feel the documentary will be quite a moving experience, especially so after seeing the images of the 52 men involved.

[gattaca]

^^^ WOW.  That could really open a can of snakes.  In Missouri, 1945, the deep south!   In many ways, most in the photos are probably are deceased or with 70+ years of aging no-one, short of immediate family, might even recognize them - if then.   Check out the web site links if you have not.  The other gotcha is many / most of their contemporaries, who might recognize them, are of the same era.  Interesting project.  I hope to see it when it completed and released.  Much of this will be lost to time...unless we get some story like "MIAOS" or a box of old letters.  Thanks for sharing!  V.

[Paul029]

Two videos about the Tom of Finland 2017 film.

I doubt they might be NSFW, but I guess it depends on where one works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9kjTvQPRk8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD3k7XSVIRo

My apologies if previously posted by another member.

[tfferg]

Speaking of gay history, Circus of Books is an unusual "slice of LGBTQ culture and history" in the US.

In her new documentary, director Rachel Mason tries to make sense of how and why her heterosexually-married parents, Karen and Barry Mason came to acquire and run an adult bookshop in West Hollywood for 37 years until a few months ago. As well as books and magazines that included books on LGBTQ subjects and gay literature, the shop had an over-18 section at the back full of hard-core gay pornography and sex aids.

Karen is a strict observant Jewish woman who took her children to the synagogue. Some of the footage shows her standing over one of her sons as he squirms reading the Torah there. Barry is easy-going, always smiling and not religious.

The exact nature of the bookshop was kept a closely-guarded secret from the children and friends. Whenever the children had to be taken to the shop, they were under strict orders to look at the ground. They were not aware of their parents' long drawn-out battle against criminal charges for distributing pornograhy over state lines.

The film is a family story with old photos and family home movies. Karen upbraids Rachel for posing probing personal questions and even for making the film about the bookshop, the interior of which she films. There are interviews with Rachel's adult brothers Micah and Josh, whose story reduces her to tears.

Other people who speak to the camera include Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler and other magazines, whose advertisement for a distributor Karen and Barry answered; famous former gay porn star Jeff Stryker; LGBTQ employees including drag star Alaska Thunderfuck. Most interesting is activist Alexei Romanoff, one of the last survivors of the galvanising raid on the Black Cat Tavern on New Years Day 1967, two years before Stonewall.

They testify  to the way that Circus of Books became a life-saving, liberating haven for the LGBTQ community, activists and closeted married men. Gay people met there, learnt about their sexuality and knew they were not alone.

Although Karen and Barry had nothing to do with it, behind the shop here was a very busy homosexual beat known as  "Vaseline Alley".

Karen and Barry supported HIV-infected gay employees. Barry visited young men dying of AIDS in hospital and was deeply shocked by families who refused to visit them.

It seems that despite the fact that they ran a major gay pornography business and even produced and distributed hard core gay videos, neither Karen nor Barry looked at or watched them. There is quite a comical scene of Karen ordering stock at a huge wholesale venue and trying not to look closely at a colourful wall display of dildos and cockrings.

Karen and Barry treated their business from a purely commercial perspective as a means of supporting and funding the education of their three children, they don't seem to have given thought to their own attitudes toward gays until a revelation shocked Karen. She responded badly. The second half of the films documents her evolving attitude up to the present.

The film shows Karen and Barry working to close the shop. The Internet, free online porn, dating apps and social and legal developments have made Circus of Books redundant.

Netflix has bought the rights to the film