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The programme for this year's London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the National Film
Theatre with main sponsors OutUK and pinkfinance.com has been announced. Over 70
new feature films along with shorts, documentaries, archive screenings and special events
are being shown over the two-week Festival between 3-17 April.
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Then Festival highlights will tour a record
39 towns and cities across the UK and Ireland between June and September 2002. You can find full details of every
film, together with booking information, on our special LLGFF
website, but here's
our gay boys' pick of this year's Festival. |
Major Screenings |
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The Festival opens with L.I.E., a bold and intelligent debut feature by director
Michael Cuesta, starring Brian Cox as an older man who befriends an inexperienced gay teenager.
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Duncan Roy’s latest film AKA will have its world premiere as a Festival centrepiece screening. This is an exciting story of 1980s Britain, where mistaken identity
results in addictive exposure to the fast-lane life of aristocrats and rentboys.
Filmed in triple-screen, the cast includes Diana Quick and Lindsey Coulson - Carol Jackson in
EastEnders. | 
L.I.E.
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There’s plenty more sex and drugs on offer in Circuit and When Boys
Fly, two dramatic features set in the world of muscle-boys who like to party,
while the hedonistic pleasures of Web Cam Boys explore sex on the
internet, and Kristiene Clarke’s The Truth About Gay Sex may shatter a
few misconceptions. |
Documentary
There’s a very strong range of major documentaries on offer: Bruce Weber’s Chop Suey
is a stunningly beautiful account of a four-year
photographic love affair with a boy wrestler, which turns into a meditation on
art, love and life.The
Cockettes, hot from the Sundance Film Festival, featuring Divine,
Sylvester and a cast of San Francisco drug-fuelled cross-dressing highkicking
hippies, in a rapturous celebration of an extraordinary period in
history.
Sandi Simcha Dubowski’s brilliant documentary Trembling Before G-D explores
the possibilities for Jewish gays and lesbians to find a spiritual home in the
Orthodox and Hassidic communities.
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Bruce Weber's Chop Suey
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Joe Balass’ doc The Devil in
the Holy Water documents the collision of World Pride in Rome during the
Pope’s Holy Year Jubilee, showing how the battle lines between gays and
Roman Catholicism are still there. Scout’s Honor charts the
amazing campaign of a 12 year old straight boy scout against the
homophobia of the Boy Scouts of America.
Queer History
Reclaiming our history has long been an important theme and Barbara
Hammer offers an alternative view in History Lessons using found footage
to queer the record; Hope Along the Wind: The Story of Harry Hay
profiles the founder of the US Mattachine Society and an inspiring veteran
campaigner. Out of the Closet, Off the Screen uncovers the proudly gay life of matinee idol
William Haines, once the highest paid actor in the MGM stable and the
toast of tinseltown in the roaring Twenties.
Special Events
The festival will showcase an exciting programme of talks and live events.
Professor Richard Dyer will deliver a lecture on The Cinema of Queers,
reflecting on changes in the world of gay cinema since his own season
Images of Homosexuality presented 25 years ago at the NFT. Sarah
Waters, cult, best-selling lesbian novelist will discuss the forthcoming BBC
adaptation of her first novel Tipping the Velvet, with Andrew Davies
(Middlemarch, Bridget Jones’ Diary) in a Script Factory event.
Strange and Tortured
Strange and Tortured, the Festival's archive programme, looks at the representation of
lesbian and gay characters in the 1960s, a time when gay wasn’t always
happy: choose from Cher as Chastity, Marlon Brando in Reflections in a
Golden Eye, Liberace and friends in The Loved One to the more
empowering vision of Fellini-Satyricon.
Bavo Defurne is back with a retrospective of his entrancing visions of boys,
a cross between Pierre et Gilles and Cocteau. Jim Hubbard, co-founder
of MIX, the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival will
visit with a programme entitled Collection Action from an exhibition he
guest-curated at the Guggeheim Museum in New York which reveals AIDS
activist video as a key cultural response to the epidemic.
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OutUK's Sponsorship |
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Here at OutUK we're tremendously excited to be closely involved in making the Festival possible.
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At the Festival launch OutUK MD Guy Hornsby said "We're proud to support a
festival which has made such a contribution to enhancing the lives of
thousands of people in bringing the best of lesbian and gay cinema to our
screens." | 
The Truth About Gay Sex
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Don't forget you can check out full details of all the events on our special
LLGFF website and watch OutUK for exclusive competitions too.
LLGFF PROGRAMMERS INTERVIEW
ALEXIS ARQUETTE INTERVIEW
WEBCAM BOYS FILM PREVIEW
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