2015 Is Shaping Up To Be A Great Year In Queer Cinema

2014 saw its fair share of fine queer-themed films like Love is Strange, Pride, and even the Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game, but 2015 is shaping up to be an even better year to see non-hetero characters and relationships on film. Queerty (link below) has compiled an extensive list of queer films being released this year, and here are some of the highlights...

We'll go ahead and skip I Am Michael, since we've covered an awful lot of that film's production already, and the first film that grabbed my attention was Peter Greenaway's new film Eisenstein in Guanajuato. If you're unfamiliar with Sergei Eisenstein, or the father of the montage, this doesn't sound like the film to enlighten you about the director's career, but it does sound like an interesting story that Greenaway will no doubt infuse with his sardonic style.

In his dazzling and giddy glitter-bomb of a film, the always inventive British-born director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; The Draughtsman’s Contract) imagines what might have happened to the great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein during a pivotal period of artistic and sexual awakening while sojourning in Mexico in 1931 to shoot a film he nearly couldn’t finish. Using gleeful “watch me do this!” feats of camera movement, set design, and montage that rival the Soviet master himself, Greenaway stages a kind of “ten days that shook Sergei Eisenstein”: the frenetic, frizzy-haired Russian director (Finnish actor Elmer Bäck in a bravura comic performance) finds himself captivated by his studly Mexican guide Palomino Cañedo (suave Luis Alberti), who initiates the brooding Russian into unknown pleasures of the body and soul, opening him (in every way) to profound discoveries.

The Thai film How to Win at Checkers (Every Time) also sounds compelling, and it's always interesting to see queer relationships Asian films, where old world customs are constantly at war with a progressive society. Sounds heavy, but definitely worth a look...

Each year in Thailand, all 21-year-old males must appear for the draft lottery at their local Buddhist temple — where drawing red means military service and drawing black means being excused. As his own draft day approaches, Oat looks back on the time he did all in his power to keep his beloved older brother Ek close to home and out of the service. Hoping that love and luck will be enough, the 11-year-old Oat unwittingly sets in motion events that lay bare the limited options facing Thailand’s working poor. Since losing both parents, the brothers have lived with their aunt and young cousin. Between Ek’s bartending and Auntie’s house cleaning, the family scrapes by in a village practically owned by black-marketeers. Still, they have each other and want to keep it that way. Like many other things in their lives, the lottery results are meant to be accepted as the luck of the draw. But as Ek, his wealthy boyfriend Jai, and their trans friend Kitty face the draft in their own ways, their differences grow increasingly apparent and threaten simpler bonds of love and friendship.

Here is one I'm positively giddy for. David McGillivray's new documentary Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn features de Rome's last interviews prior to his death last June. 

Born in France and raised in prewar England, a sexually curious boy named Peter de Rome found a way to marry his two great loves: cinema and men. He captured the sexual adventures of friends and strangers alike on his Super 8 camera (remarkable in an age before cell phones and webcams); he then started showing his offbeat, playful, sex-positive underground films at house parties and private screenings in the early 1960s. These films’ groundbreaking erotic images soon made him a significant figure in underground cinema and a pioneering voice in the emergence of gay porn. Courtly and puckish at nearly 90 years old when the documentary catches up with him, de Rome shares decadent, funny tales about admirers such as David Hockney, William S. Burroughs, and Andy Warhol — and reveals how his feature-length adult film Adam & Yves managed to capture the final screen cameo of Greta Garbo. Grandfather of Gay Porn is chock-full of both soft-core and explicit clips from his artful short films (which span three decades), many of which have recently been archived by the British Film Institute for preservation.

Another documentary, Do I Sound Gay?, seeks to get to the root of the so-called "gay voice" and find out what it is that prompts people to think that someone sounds gay...

Is it the sibilant “s,” or is it the drawn-out vowels? Is it the two-dollar vocabulary, or is it a certain theatrical quality acquired after too many viewings of All About Eve orMean Girls? Whatever it is, we know it when we hear it: “gay voice”—a tone and way of speaking that, if you believe the stereotype, announce homosexuality. Documentarian David Thorpe has gay voice. And after a breakup and an early-forties crisis of confidence, he decides that his voice is preventing him from finding happiness. Where did it come from? And how can he get rid of it? With these questions, he visits numerous speech therapists and delves into his own past. This lighthearted (and often hilarious), taboo-busting film features great commentary from celebrities like George Takei, Dan Savage, Tim Gunn and David Sedaris, as well as illustrative footage of Paul Lynde, Liberace, Truman Capote and others. Linguists and cultural historians provide insight into gay speech patterns, code-switching, and what it means to “sound gay.”

You can find close to a dozen more over at Queerty, though none of them involve gay cowboys eating pudding, so that's progress, right?

Via Queerty