At 18, a young man commits to 17 years in the military. Inside the system, he witnesses things he hadn't thought possible.
Between the end of the Second World War and the abolition of the "offence of homosexuality" in 1982, 10,000 sentences were handed down in France. Sentences in correctional courts, fines and sometimes imprisonment, the convictions were mainly against men. The last witnesses of this period speak out and tell of four decades of clandestine life, just before the tragedy of AIDS.
Queer Boys and Girls on the Shinkansen brings together ten filmmakers and artists who consistently affirm what it means to be gay or lesbian in their work. Habakari chose ten filmmakers to make a five-minute work each, developed around a gay or lesbian theme, and compiled the resulting shorts in random order to create this omnibus film. The result is a queer film, by queer filmmakers, for a queer audience. Each short is its own short story, and the styles range from drama and experimental film and animation. (2024 complete version includes all eleven films, 65 mins.)
An association takes in young LGBT people made homeless by their families. Behind the apparent comedy, the excesses, the desire to assert themselves, lie shattered lives. They all have this furious desire to exist, to find their place in society. Here, they have six months to find a job, a place to live and accept themselves as they are. It's a race against time, during which Noëlle, who runs the association, and Alex, who helps her in her mission, are also forced to face up to their own failings and question their motivation for helping others.
It took a hundred queer years for Lola Perla to be finally recognized by a government that never really took notice of the likes of her. But that’s okay, because along with the president’s anti-climactic, and in many ways, almost insincere recognition is a fat envelope containing Php100,000 (USD$2,000). For Perla, this is more than enough money to transcend her idea of a lifetime legacy. Today is the day Lola Perla confronts her long-standing personal covenant: to bail an ex-lover’s son out of jail. Meeting fifty-someting Nanding transforms into a reunion, then, a communion of her present self, with an old love.
Stripped of his military pension when he was outed thirty years earlier, Henry now works as a cleaner. When he meets a young ex-soldier, Jake, he learns he may be able to have his pension reinstated. Suffering from PTSD, Henry is not sure he has the strength to fight another battle, but when his former boyfriend Benji needs a place to live, the three men learn how to live, love, and be a team.
An emotional coming-of-age drama centered around Andou Jun, a gay student who is not out. He accepts a confession from his fujoshi classmate Miura Sae and they start dating. However, Jun is also seeing Makoto, but fails to tell Sae about his male lover.
Old college chums get together for a weekend reunion that is bound to open old wounds and perhaps heal them. New romances find a spark while old ones rekindle.
A man spends 15 minutes waiting for the results of a Rapid HIV Test.
An adventurous love story between two young women of different social and economic backgrounds who find themselves going through all the typical struggles of a new romance.
Paris, summer 2019. Marcio is a young Brazilian who recently moved to the French capital, hoping to find a better life there. However, reality catches up with him when he ends up broke and homeless. Without hope of integrating the working world, he survives by joining a pimping network, until a man, much more mature than him, decides to take him under his wing.
Paris, in the early 1990s: a group of young activists is desperately tied to finding the cure against an unknown lethal disease. They target the pharmaceutical labs that are retaining potential cures, and multiply direct actions, with the hope of saving their lives as well as the ones of future generations.
Chloé, a fragile young woman, falls in love with her psychoanalyst, Paul. A few months later she moves in with him, but soon discovers that her lover is concealing a part of his identity.
15-year-old Beni falls in love with Fögi, a singer in a Rock band. As Fögi seduces him, he is only willing to follow him where ever Fögi wants to. But Fögi is a drug addict and pulls Beni deeper and deeper into the hell of drug addiction.
Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl, an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become head of the Secret Police only to become ensnared in political deception.
On a chilly Sunday morning, a man awakens to the mischievous stare of a unicorn that seems to have come straight out of his dreams. Carried along by an early morning sensuality, his fantasies transform his lonely apartment into a garden of delights, in which this young creature can freely reap the fruits of his desires.
Suffering from acute kidney failure, Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave—the birthplace of his first life.
Bin Glitter captures Midge's attempt to hold onto the memories she made with her best friend Sue in their final week together. This coming-of-age story explores female sexuality and feminine identity against the backdrop of the super eight film Midge and Sue decided to create together.
Paris, 1984. A group of friends contend with the first outbreak of the AIDS epidemic.
It's San Francisco in 1957, and an American masterpiece is put on trial. Howl, the film, recounts this dark moment using three interwoven threads: the tumultuous life events that led a young Allen Ginsberg to find his true voice as an artist, society's reaction (the obscenity trial), and mind-expanding animation that echoes the startling originality of the poem itself. All three coalesce in a genre-bending hybrid that brilliantly captures a pivotal moment-the birth of a counterculture.