Michael Dwyerpreviews the upcoming Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
GOING into its 15th year, the annual Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival has a new name (Gaze) and a new director (Michele Devlin, who programmes the Belfast Film Festival). The five-day event remains in its regular slot, across the August bank holiday weekend at the Irish Film Institute, where it registered more than 3,500 admissions last year. Here are some highlights.
GALA SCREENINGS
The opening film, A Four Letter Word, pitched as "a surprisingly romantic gay Sex and the City", follows a flamboyantly gay young man who works at a Manhattan adult bookstore and leads a promiscuous lifestyle until faced with the prospect of true love.
Israeli writer-director Eytan Fox, whose Walk On Waterand Yossi & Jaggerwere former hits at the festival, made the closing film, The Bubble. Set in present-day Tel Aviv, it charts the romantic complications of three flatmates. One is on military service when he falls for a young Palestinian man he meets at a checkpoint.
NEW INTERNATIONAL FEATURES
The pick of the films I've seen already is Four Minutes, a compelling German drama with striking performances from Monica Bleibtreu as a stern piano teacher who gives lessons at a penitentiary, and Hannah Herzsprung as her young protege, a convicted killer.
From the US, The Gymnastcrackles with sexual tension when an unhappily married former Olympics athlete devises an aerial act with a younger Asian woman.
In the well-regarded Outing Riley, a gay Irish-American architect (played by writer-director Pete Jones) finally comes out to his brothers, one of them a priest, another played by Nathan Fillion.
Puccini for Beginnersis a screwball comedy in which an opera-loving neurotic writer (Elizabeth Reaser) gets involved with a Columbia professor (Justin Kirk) and another woman (Gretchen Mol).
The weakest of the films I've seen is The Picture of Dorian Gray, Duncan Roy's shrill, nasty and pretentious updating of the Oscar Wilde classic. The portrait of the original is replaced by a video installation in which the homicidal, narcissistic Gray (David Gallagher) ages.
DOCUMENTARIES
Here to Staydeals with life in Ireland for Fidel Taguinod, a gay Filipino nurse. Queering the Pitchcharts the fortunes of the Emerald Warriors, a gay Irish rugby team, as they meet and overcome obstacles in their path.
Follow My Voice: With the Music of Hedwigdeals with the recording of a benefit album featuring songs from Hedwig and the Angry Inchand sessions involving that movie's writer-director-star, John Cameron Mitchell, along with Rufus Wainright, Yoko Ono, Yo La Tengo and Polyphonic Spree.
Alexis Arquette: She's My Brotherattempts to explore how and why the eponymous actor (and sibling of Rosanna, Patricia and David Arquette) began to live his life as a woman shortly after turning 30. In Red Without Blue, identical twin brothers, one of whom decides to change sex, and their divorced parents all come to terms with each other.
And John Waters, who directed the original Hairspray, lets rip with his thoughts on everything from personal experiences to popular culture in This Filthy World, a reputedly highly entertaining film of his one-man stage show.
SPECIAL EVENT
Audience participation will be welcomed - and expected - at Cineoke 3: Back With a Vengeance, which is described in the programme as "kind of a mass musical karaoke session" (and as "a cinematic feast of fabulous fagginess"). Clips from popular musicals will be screened with the lyrics on the screen.
Advance booking is now open at the IFI (www.gaze.ie). Puccini for Beginners is one of seven films on tour from the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and showing at Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast from for a week beginning today.
www.queensfilmtheatre.com
