|
The
launch party is followed by the Opening
Film, the gender-bending detective comedy about
alternative families, Gaudí
Afternoon. Directed
by Susan
Seidelman,
who gave Madonna her first movie role in Desperately
Seeking Susan,
and starring Judy Davis as the reluctant private eye and
Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden as the enigmatic femme
fatale, Frankie, Gaudí
Afternoon is a delight.
In
a year when queer filmmakers are mining new genres,
thrillers and tales of the city abound.
Features
include Australian Samantha Lang’s thriller The
Monkey’s Mask, which
stars Susie Porter as the hard-boiled private eye who
gets up close and personal with dykon Kelly McGillis.
The butch-femme drama of Sande Zeig’s The
Girl continues
the noir
tradition of Bound
while in Urbania,
Jon Shear’s pacy tale of urban desire and violence, the
city itself reflects the hero’s fractured emotional
world.
Coming
out now means coming of age in gay movies, such as two
strong and sexually explicit films in our programme, Krampack
and Presque Rien.
And for side-splitting comedy you can’t do better
than The Iron
Ladies, in which a supremely unmasculine Thai
volleyball team makes it to the national finals…
We
have two very strong shorts
programmes, and our Retrospective
of films by queer activist and radical film-maker Derek
Jarman
includes his acclaimed Edward
II; the exquisiteThe
Garden; his own favourite,The
Angelic Conversation; Blue
and the documentary There
We Are, John. The
Retrospective is programmed by Michael Cronin, who is also
organizing this year’s Film
Forum, which focuses on Jarman’s
work.
We
are proud to present short
films made this year by
three Irish film-makers, Colette Cullen, Barry Dignam
and Jim Lowther. We
also present two outstanding documentaries.
In Paragraph
175, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Common
Threads, The
Celluloid Closet) some of the men who wore the Pink
Triangle tell their own stories, stories of courage and
resistance as well as brutality and injustice. Escape
to Life is a biopic of two other people who lived
through those appalling years – Erika and Klaus, queer
offspring of author Thomas Mann.
Following
last year’s runaway hit, Cineoke,
we are delighted to present as our Closing
Gala the fabulous Movieoke,
programmed by Brian Finnegan. Come
and watch our Hostess with the Mostest Shirley Temple-Bar
coax audience members down to sing along with the stars to
your favorite moments in cinema musical history!
|
