Various lives intersect in and around a West Hollywood motel in this kaleidoscopic comedy about sex, love, and the meaning of life.
The Male Gaze is a new series of releases from New Queer Visions that showcases short LGBTQ films from across the world. The first instalment, First Kiss, brings together five shorts that are based around men experiencing romantic and/or sexual interaction with other men for the first time. It takes in films from Sweden, Indonesia, USA, Australia and France giving a rounded look at how similar experiences are depicted across the world. The films are: Naked [Naken] (2013); Pria (2017); Walk With Me (2018), One Night Only (2018); Michel's Mouse [Tapette] (2016).
It's a classic case of opposite attraction: Handsome Ben Bennet is a gay, affluent, stylish attorney at the top of the genteel social set in southern Virginia, while Lee Darcy is a rough-hewn welder with a secret that he nightly tries to blot out with an excess of liquor.
Two self-obsessed businessmen discover they're long-lost identical twins and come together to plot the reunion of their eccentric divorced parents.
Winnie's life is less than wonderful one year after saving her town from a psychotic killer on Christmas Eve. When she wishes she was never born, she finds herself magically transported to a nightmarish parallel universe. With the murderous maniac now back, she must team up with a misfit to identify the culprit and get back to her own reality.
Trisha, a Filipino transgender woman, suddenly dies while being crowned in a beauty pageant. Her last wish was to be presented as a different celebrity on each night of her wake, but her conservative father wants to bury her as a man.
A young man is forced out of his comfort zone when he goes on an unconventional date.
Ootani and Tachibana have been inseparable since high school. Now that they're in college, they live together, they're happy and everything seems prefect. But their little world is disrupted when they meet an old high school friend, Yuki, who seems to have a crush on Tachibana, making Ootani feel jealous and insecure. Will Tachibana really choose him over a pretty girl?
Inspired by true events, Todd Verow’s Tumbledown is an explosive cocktail- an emotional rollercoaster ride through the dark sides of sexuality. A complicated love triangle develops after hunky Jay meets bartender Nick and invites him to spend the weekend with him and his partner in their country cabin. Soon, copious amounts of sex, drugs and alcohol lead to a dark obsession and even darker complications. Always bold and never less than riveting, Tumbledown is sure to leave you breathless.
Six friends (three men, one gay and a woman) gather together in Jason's house outside Beirut for his birthday. Each of them has a very difficult family situation. During a long, intense night, eating, dancing and talking seriously, the young people make an ideal pact of love and friendship in the name of freedom, of a dream, of the hope for a better future. As in a new Decameron, modern rebels against the oppression, traditions, sexism and homophobia that permeate their society. But the violence of the real world breaks in on their splendid isolation. The first Lebanese gay movie, which was censored in its country of origin. This film combines different genres and styles: a Bollywood style format full of songs, choreographies and colours, but also a powerful melodrama, alternating moments of comedy and dramatic elements. A manifesto of liberty and emancipation, with a cast of actors as stunningly beautiful as fashion models.
Shoko and Mutsuki get married to satisfy their worried parents, but she is well past the age at which a 'good' Japanese woman should marry, and he is in love with a young male college student. The film is less a realistic exploration of gay life than a fairy tale of three young Japanese trying to construct an alternative to the sexual and familial roles given to them by a society turning increasingly emotionally barren.
A privileged music student and an off-the-rails youth share an unlikely moment of intimacy with a violin.
Pizza isn't the only thing delivered in this horror-comedy. Zaffo is a pizza-delivery guy who's constantly ridiculed by his friends and co-workers. When a group of teenagers force Zaffo into a homoerotic situation, he finally decides to fight back, enlisting the help of a psychic and an over-the-top gay customer to cast spells on the boys. Once Zaffo has them under his power, he tortures them … one at a time.
Frank, a HIV infected former Lufthansa steward, goes back to Rio from Germany with a film crew to look for Mario, a young man with whom he had a one night stand. Before Mario departed the morning after, he left a message scrawled in soap on the bathroom mirror: 'Welcome to the AIDS club'. Frank and his director hire a fast talking hustler named José (Guilherme di Padua) to help them to find Mario who seems alway to have just left whenever they arrive. Via Appia is the nickname of a Rio district where male prostitutes hang out...
Gi-tae who is going to terminate his military service goes on a road trip with Jun-young by drugging him with a sleeping pill. They learn more about each other and come to terms with their sexuality.
17 year old Jasper lives in a very grey, small town. In his family, he cannot be himself. Jasper's dad is a singer, named Lukkie Luk. All the attention in the family goes to his career. Jasper searches a way to handle this and is faced with the typical questions in the life of an adolescent. Questions that will not be answered when he stays in his own routine.
All manner of family secrets are out when the lawnmower man is invited inside one fateful day.
County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.
Following the tragic death of her teenage son, Manuela travels from Madrid to Barcelona in an attempt to contact the long-estranged father the boy never knew. She reunites with an old friend, an outspoken transgender sex worker, and befriends a troubled actress and a pregnant, HIV-positive nun.
In 1960s Wyoming, two men develop a strong emotional and sexual relationship that endures as a lifelong connection complicating their lives as they get married and start families of their own.