This year's week-long Sundance Film Festival, which opens on Thursday January 28th, will run digitally via a custom-designed online platform (festival.sundance.org) alongside drive-ins, screenings at independent arthouses, and a network of local community partnerships. All films in the program will be available online in the United States, with certain titles opting for global availability. The... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: David Färdmar on his gay breakup movie Are We Lost Forever “I wanted to challenge viewers to think for themselves”
Breaking up is hard to do as Swedish filmmaker David Färdmar explores in his brooding bittersweet debut feature Are We Lost Forever premiering in the UK and Ireland via Peccadillo Pictures on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital on Monday January 18th. When we first meet protagonists Adrian (Björn Elgerd) and Hampus (Jonathan Andersson) they're sitting up... Continue Reading →
Sundance 2021: B. Ruby Rich to host Barbed Wire Kisses Redux panel with LGBTQ+ filmmakers
The Sundance Film Festival, which runs January 28th to February 3rd, has just announced this year's series of talks, panels, and events including the lineup for The Big Conversation, discussions that explore what's fuelling the imaginations of today’s independent artists. Among the program is Barbed Wire Kisses Redux which will see film scholar B. Ruby... Continue Reading →
DOC NYC 2020 Film Review: Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker ★★★★★
In examining the life of artist, photographer, writer, actor, musician, filmmaker, and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, using his own words, imagery, and music, director Chris McKim (Freedia Got a Gun, Out of Iraq) has created a rich and riveting work that captures Wojnarowicz's unapologetically queer spirit, and serves as a testimony to the enduring power... Continue Reading →
Film Review: Ammonite ★★★★
Writer-director Francis Lee's follow up to his stunning 2017 debut feature God's Own Country, immerses us in the imagined day-to-day life of an often overlooked historical figure, English fossil collector and palaeontologist Mary Anning, in the absorbing, exquisitely crafted Ammonite. Mary (Kate Winslet) shares a humble but well-kept home with her ailing widowed mother Molly... Continue Reading →
NewFest 2020 Film Review: Tahara ★★★1/2
Following the suicide of one of their peers, best friends Carrie (Madeline Grey DeFreece) and Hannah (Rachel Sennott) are forced to spend the afternoon at their upstate New York Hebrew school reflecting on the passing of a classmate they apparently hardly knew in this queer dark comedy. Unfurling compellingly more or less in real time,... Continue Reading →
NewFest 2020 Film Review: Sublet ★★★★
Veteran Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox's outstanding new feature Sublet, co-written with Itay Segal, opens with the arrival of a jetlagged and disorientated fifty something gay man, Michael (The Inheritance's John Benjamin Hickey) to bustling Tel Aviv. He's a travel writer for The New York Times who has come to uncover the "real" city over a... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: Stephen Kijak showrunner of HBO Max’s LGBTQ+ rights docu-series Equal “there was queer history in the image making as well as the actual storytelling”
The Max original LGBTQ+ civil rights docu-series Equal premieres on HBO Max today, Thursday October 22nd. Dynamically and stylishly breathing life and potent emotion into queer history, the series recontextualises the Stonewall riots in the final episode, having set out in the previous three episodes the long, often hidden, fight for equality that came before... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: filmmaker Vivian Kleiman & curator Ashley Clark on Race, Sex & Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs
This month, the Criterion Channel is celebrating the groundbreaking work and enduring legacy of the late queer Black filmmaker, activist, poet and educator Marlon Riggs. Race, Sex & Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs features a complete retrospective of his still searingly urgent, provocative, nuanced, and beautifully crafted video work exploring Black identity and representation,... Continue Reading →
Exclusive Interview: queer film historian, archivist & filmmaker Jenni Olson “it’s kind of an amazing achievement to make a sexy 16mm urban landscape film”
This month sees the work of queer experiential filmmaker Jenni Olson celebrated on the Criterion Channel, with a five film retrospective, plus a new insightful interview. Included in the collection are Olson's two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015), which both world premiered at Sundance. These, along with her 1998... Continue Reading →