A solid international programme has been assembled for the Sixth Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, which will be launched by Jim Sheridan next Thursday evening and will run at both cinemas in the IFC until Monday week, August 3rd. The opening film will be Brian Sloan's American screwball comedy, I Think I Do, in which six college friends reunite for a wedding, with disastrous results. The cast included Alexis Arquette. It will be preceded on opening night by the Irish short film, Home, directed by Colette Cullen.
Closing the festival, fresh from its Galway Film Fleadh screening, is Jimmy Smallhorne's controversial picture of young Irish-immigrants in New York, which stars Smallhorne himself and received the cinematography award at the Sundance festival earlier this year for Declan Quinn.
Jimmy Smallhorne will be at the festival to discuss his film with the audience. So, too, will Donna Deitch, the director of the landmark lesbian love story, Desert Hearts, who will introduce her latest film, Angel On Her Shoulder, which deals with the terminal illness of her actress friend, Gwen Welles; Welles died in 1992.
The zany New York comedian, Reno, will travel to Dublin with her docu-drama, Reno Finds Her Mom, which recounts her search for her birth-mother and features cameos from Mary Tyler Moore and Lily Tomlin. Reno, who has been described as "Bette Midler on acid" (if such can be imagined), will perform her stage show as a fringe festival event during her visit to Dublin. The American features on the programme also include Kiss Me Guido and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, along with Love! Valour! Compassion!, Terrence McNally's Tony-winning play filmed by Joe Manatello, who directed it on Broadway. A Boys In The Band for the AIDS era, it is set over three long weekends over the same summer and brings together eight mostly middle-aged and middle-class gay men at the upstate New York country house of a dancer and his blind young lover. The fly in the ointment is the only non-white, the lusty, strutting young Latino played by Randy Becker.
In the Italian-Turkish production Hammam - The Turkish Bath, directed by Ferzan Ozpetek, a young Italian man whose marriage is falling apart heads for Istanbul when he inherits one of the city's last surviving traditional Turkish baths - and finds himself attracted to the son of the family which runs the baths.
From the Philippines comes Carlos Siguin-Renya's The Man In Her Life, in which a woman escapes her abusive husband and lecherous uncle by starting a new life for herself as a teacher in a small town where she befriends the gay headmaster. From Britain come the film of Martin Sherman's play, Bent, with Clive Owen and Lothaire Bluteau as gay prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp; and Paul Ormeland's Like It Is, which follows the experiences of a young boxer when he comes to London and features Roger Daltrey and Dani Behr.
The Sunday matinee will be a screening of Douglas Kirk's stunning, emotionally wrenching 1959 melodrama, Imitation Of Life, featuring Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, Susan Kohner and Sandra Dee. Its theme of the need for emotional honesty makes it an apposite inclusion on the programme. From the former East Germany there is the 1989 Coming Out, which had its premiere on the day the Berlin wall came down, and there will be an opportunity to catch the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder's picture of duplicity and exploitation within the gay scene in the 1975 Fox and His Friends.
For further information contact the festival office at 6 South William Street, Dublin 2. Tel: (01) 492-0597. The festival brochure and advance booking are available at the IFC from today. Tel: (01) 679-3477.
