In a quietly intense family psychodrama, adolescent Eduarda (“Eddie”) decides to give nature a helping hand in her quest for the boy next door, by popping a few of mum's hormone pills. In the meantime, brother Kai, is helping himself! Part of the Kinderwhores: The Best of Lesbian Short Filmmaking programme at the 2003 London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Joe, a young man in his early twenties is on the "edge" of his youth. He’s been given a film camera by his older lover (who is leaving town for the summer) and Joe decides to utilise the camera in order to find himself "the perfect summer boyfriend". The first part of the film is a joyous, comic summer exploration of Church Street, Toronto and the gay ghetto, where young Joe searches cheerily for a boyfriend, finally discovering Chris. They fall in love. Next, during a party scene in which we meet Joe’s friends, Joe talks about his problems with his new lover Chris and we meet typical members of the sexual and drug underground in Toronto – such as a stripper Ima Chicken, hooker Dick Large and heroin addict Marvette. Joe meets Chris’s mother, Miriam, and a kind of Chekhovian scene ensues. Miriam fear she is dying of AIDS (but is actually just addicted to diuretics). In the final scenes of the film, Joe invites Chris to have dinner with his lesbian sex worker friends Lotta Dish and Ima Chicken, but instead, Chris leaves. The summer is over.

Tom is an “experimental” feature-length documentary made almost entirely of found footage. This is cinema as déjà vu, or déjà voodoo. The history of a city, New York City, the most photographed city in the world, operates as a backdrop for the life of Tom Chomont, a key member of the New York underground, a notorious video artist, AIDS sufferer, raconteur. His fantastical stories punctuate the weave of pictures, recounting infanticide, a mobster’s love, incest, and a rare white light, which he imagines as both the beginning and end of all life. As the decades roll past, excerpts from hundreds of films – some archival documents, some well-known Hollywood moments – stream past in a hypnotic rush, offering a subject whose skin is cinema, whose flesh and blood has been remade into the picture plane.

Charming, cute and the captain of the swimming team, Vincent seemingly has it all, his life a sweet dream with apparently no rough water in sight. Yet, after failed attempts at sleeping with a girl, dealing with a hostile brother and finally meeting and kissing another gay boy after school, Vincent’s quickly finds himself in the deep end. Ostracised from the gym by boys who were previously only too happy to whip down his trunks, he is forced to face his demons (and the vacuous nature of the gay scene) with the support of his coach and best friend.

Class Queers begins mid-way through the school year, as the viewer is introduced to the Triangle Program, an alternative high school classroom for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans youth. Located in the basement of a church in downtown Toronto, it serves as a life raft for the kids who are lucky enough to find their way there. The film follows three of these students:
Adina, 15, the daughter of a prominent Conservative Rabbi, struggles with the unwavering expectations of her family and a Jewish community that cannot understand the changes she is going through. She is a strong-willed and brilliant fifteen-year-old who has aspirations of being the first Jewish Dyke Prime Minister of Canada. She longs for the approval of her father but at the same time is defiant of his wishes when she shaves her head and refuses to wear dresses.
Adam is a middle class seventeen-year-old who has a loving, supportive family. But this love does not save him from being constantly targeted on the streets for his effeminate nature. As early as grade four the other kids harassed Adam. After he faced years of threats and mockery from both students and teachers at his massive suburban high school Adam finally decided to go to the Triangle Program. In many ways he is a normal teenager, worried about his appearance and finding a boyfriend. Yet his biggest struggle is finding a place for himself in a world that prefers he hide who he is.
Richard, 17, is the son of a single mother who is intolerant of anything GAY. She hates the “fag” school that he attends and lets him know it. They live with her homophobic boyfriend in a chaotic, filthy, one-bedroom apartment in a working class neighbourhood where Richard has no privacy. While he tries to love his mother, he also struggles with the reality of his situation as she continually disappoints him. Meanwhile he is in love with his first serious boyfriend and has big plans for them to move in together. However things are never what they seem. Eventually for Richard school takes a back seat to survival.
Class Queers will take the viewer into the seldom-seen world of queer teens, experience their triumphs, witness their disappointments and understand the day to day struggles that they are forced to confront. Though many people have wanted to make a documentary about the students at Triangle, this is the first production that has been granted permission to bring cameras into the classroom.

In the Technicolor daydream Bingebabes at the Truckstop, two baby lesbians give boring old Papa the slip. Part of the Kinderwhores: The Best of Lesbian Short Filmmaking programme at the 2003 London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Over the years conventional wisdom on homosexuality has changed dramatically and a more liberal attitude of acceptance and tolerance has evolved. But no-one seems to have told the Durham Catholic School Board in the province of Ontario…
"I am writing to request that the school board reverse the policy taken to deny me the opportunity to attend my school prom with the person of my choice, my boyfriend. That’s all I want: to go to the prom with my date, like everybody else, and to make sure that no other student of the Durham Catholic School Board will never have to face what I have over the last few weeks.” March 25, 2002.

What began as a simple request turned into a media frenzy, pitting the church against a Canadian Charter of Human Rights, a community against a school board, and a family against its faith. In the process Marc’s story made news across Canada, brought interview requests from as far away as Australia and appearances on TV series Lofter and Queer as Folk.
Prom Fight is a compelling story of an outrageous gay 17-year-old that attracted enormous community support and debate. But though this is a story with a happy ending, it comes with a price for a family dealing with the grief of suicide, rejection and unconditional love.

When Leonard Christian du Plooy was born on the 18^th of March 1919 to a mixed-race (“coloured”) working class family, he embodied all the contradictions of a country ruled by racism and hypocrisy. The first part of his life was spent in his hometown of Kimberley, and then Durban, as a teacher. Then he changed his mind (and his skin colour…)

In his fifties he moved to Johannesburg, where he became the city’s most famous clubber and drag queen. Due to a skin condition, he was now able to pass himself off as white, which held many advantages in Apartheid South Africa. Outfitting himself with outrageous costumes, feather boas, heavy make-up and a retinue of young admirers, the pensioner transformed himself and became “Granny Lee” – Queen of the Discos.

Even in death, Granny Lee continued to flaunt the rules, mistakenly being the first “non-white” buried in a “whites only” cemetery in Johannesburg.

This documentary is very much about the notion of “created identity” – how the erstwhile Leonard du Plooy created a new persona, gender, and even race for himself, making the legend of Granny Lee a living, breathing reality.

Question is do you have a big enough member to win Golders Green’s “two-can challenge” and are these boys really truly hetero? Fear not. All will be revealed (missus).

Can a gay male couple sustain long-term monogamy? Or is non-monogamy inevitable? Take a look inside the world of these open, committed relationships. Three couples open up their lives on camera and share the tensions, the delights and upsets of promiscuous sex and its impact on their own lives.

This documentary offers a glimpse into the domestic life of a German family with two dads. Christian and Matthias are the proud adoptive parents of Paul and Anhelm and for four weeks a film crew moved into their home to follow their daily lives. Interview situations turn into after-dinner debates as the filming process highlights the sense of obligation that Christian and Matthias still feel to prove that same-sex parenting is no different from heterosexual parenting. The artificial intimacy of the filming process also brought its own problems as the two dads buckle under the pressure of being on camera all the time.

2000 Canada 56 minutes

Documentary

Director: Carole Bonstein

Based on newly discovered archive material, this first film about Annemarie Schwarzenbach draws a portrait of a woman who comes from one of the biggest fortunes of Zurich – a family with open inclinations towards the Nazi order. Writer, journalist, photographer, she travelled around the world and denounced European fascism as well as the exploitation of American workers. Hers was a fast-moving destiny, a never-ending quest for identity, love of the far and distant Elsewhere, where she could get lost and find herself at the same time.
Deceived homosexual loves, drugs, radical political positions, suicide attempts… Who was Annemarie Schwarzenbach after all? A model of courage and lucidity? An eternally uprooted woman? To each his own truth.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach took hers with her, one day in 1942, at the age of 34

I Love You Baby, a new romantic comedy from Albacete & Menkes after Sobreviviré, explores all different concepts of love and the disguises that many of us use to present ourselves to the ones we love.

The quiet life of a tidy seamstress is thrown out of balance when a mermaid crosses her path…