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This year's London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is the 25th but this year it's just a week long, which the
organisers blame on cuts to the arts budgets. However there's still a lot worth seeing in the programme, writes OutUK's Mike Gray,
which this year mixes new releases from around the world with a look back at a quarter century of festival history.
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Kaboom opens the Festival on March 31st and it's the latest from Gregg Araki.
This sci-fi thriller comedy stars Thomas Dekker as a regular horny teenage art
student who after witnessing the murder of a mysterious red-haired girl finds himself embroiled in a cataclysmic mystery that not only turns his life upside
down but could even signal the end of the world. |
Kaboom
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Gregg Araki has directed some of gay cinemas's most exciting films including Mysterious Skin and The Living End
and he'll be introducing the screening which opens this year's festival.
There are a number of interesting documentaries chronicling gay life over the past 25 tears. Making The Boys is a full-length documentary about the making of one of the most famous
gay films of the 1960s The Boys In The Band based on Mart Crowley's groundbreaking off-Broadway play. Rent Boys takes an unflinching look at the lives of Berlin's
young male sex workers. Rosa von Prauheim's film allows them to tell their own stories and gives a disturning insight into a hidden world.
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David Weissman, director of an LLGFF festival favourite The Cockettes,
returns with a powerful account of the development of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco in the 1980's. We Were Here builds a rich and moving account of
how people's lives were changed and their peers were affected.
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Rent Boys Die Jungs Vom Bahnhof Zoo
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The impact of AIDS also features in a number of dramas too. The world premiere of Heart Breaks Open is a Seattle-based story about a queer activist and community
advocate who has been cheating on his long term partner. When he finds he is positive he attempts suicide, but then meets a drag queen nun who helps him reassess his priorities, relationships and future.
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House Of Boys is set in 1984 and is about a young German teen who runs away from home and finds work in an Amsterdam bar and male brothel. The shadow of AIDS starts to cast its long shadow over
the staff and clients and an outstanding cast includes Stephen Fry who plays a pioneering doctor.
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House Of Boys
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Homme Au Bain Man At Bath from Love Songs director Christophe Honore is a new French film is a tense examination of love &and desire with some stunning photography which celebrates porn star Francois Sagat's sculpted body.
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Booking Info
The LLGFF is based around the BFI on London's South Bank and there's a host of special events and club nights coinciding with the festival.
You can get full details of every film at bfi.org.uk/llgff where you can also book online. There's also a free brochure available.
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Homme Au Bain Man At Bath
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