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image caption The Dying Gaul

The Dying Gaul

United States | Directed by Craig Lucas

Jeffrey Tishop is one of Hollywood’s most influential studio managers. He lives in a sedate residence high up in the Malibu Hills. His wife, Elaine, once wrote screenplays. She and her husband have now moved up to the upper echelons of Hollywood society. Having given up writing, Elaine now tends to the running of the villa, the household staff and their two well-turned-out children. One day, a screenplay lands on Jeffrey’s desk from Hollywood. Je...
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image caption The Event

Winner

The Event

Canada | Directed by Thom Fitzgerald

A series of suicides followed by the swift cremation of the deceased arouses the suspicions of a young public prosecutor named Nick Di Vivo. She begins investigations following the death of Matt Shapiro – allegedly another suicide victim. Her inquiries take her to the heart of Manhattan’s upmarket Chelsea district. Matt’s circle of friends are extremely distant towards the young attorney. Nevertheless, her conversations with them enable her to pi...
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image caption The Feast Of Stephen

Winner

The Feast Of Stephen

United States | Directed by James Franco

Stephen watches a group of boys playing basketball. The look in his eyes betrays his sexual interests. When the boys realize, he becomes a victim of their homophobia. Or does it only seem so?
THE FEAST OF STEPHEN is based on a poem by the same title, written by american poet Anthony Hecht. The peom stayed with James Franco since he read it for the first time. In order to visualize the feelings that had been triggered in him, Franco was geared to K...
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image caption © Liam Daniel - BasiliskCommunications - EditionSalzgeber

The Garden

Great Britain | Directed by Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman had two gardens. One was in Dungeness, he started to work on it after being diagnosed with HIV. ''The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end,'' he wrote in his journal. The other one, this film, opens with images of a man sleeping on a desk, his face resting on an open notebook as a voice proclaims ''I want to share this emptiness with you,'' before a series of vignette...
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image caption Charles Boyer, Marlene Dietrich; source: George Eastman House, Rochester, © Disney

The Garden of Allah

(german) Der Garten Allahs

United States | Directed by Richard Boleslawski

Domini Enfilden, who was raised in a convent, withdraws to North Africa after the death of her father to try to find herself. There, at the edge of the Sahara, she takes up with the Russian-French Boris Androvsky. They go riding together in the desert, fall in love, and even get married. But their happiness is abruptly interrupted when Boris reveals the secret he’s been keeping; he was a monk, who fled his Trappist monastery after suffering a crisis...
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image caption The Glow Of White Women

The Glow Of White Women

South Africa | Directed by Yunus Vally

Sex and politics are the themes of this humorous and entertaining film that looks at white women in the Dark Continent and focuses on the forbidden sexual desires of both black and white men under Apartheid. The film’s director, Yunus Vally, was raised in a Muslim family; as young man he attended the mosque five times a day and hoped to reach paradise one day. Growing up under a system which proclaimed that white is beautiful, Yunus was convinced ...
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image caption The Good American

The Good American

(german) Der gute Amerikaner

Germany | Directed by Jochen Hick

Jochen Hick’s new film portrays Tom Weise, one of the initiators of HustlaBall – an event originally created in order to encourage the acceptance of male prostitutes, but also to launch a rent boy website.
After his parents split and, having lost all contact with them, this slightly-built former student of politics decides to go to New York at the beginning of the 1990s. Being HIV-positive, he is obliged to live in the USA illegally. In fact, acco...
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image caption Filmstill "The Happy Prince" © Wilhelm Moser

The Happy Prince

(german) The Happy Prince

Germany, Belgium, Italy | Directed by Rupert Everett

At the end of the 19th century, dandy Oscar Wilde is the darling of London society – witty, humorous and scandalous. However, his open homosexuality is too much for the times in which he lives and he is sent to prison. Impoverished and stricken by ill health at the time of his release, he goes into exile in Paris. After a half-hearted attempt to reconcile with his wife, he resumes his relationship with the young Lord Douglas, which plunges him i...
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image caption Filmstill "The Intervention"

Winner

The Intervention

(german) Die Einmischung

United States | Directed by Jay Duplass

All Steve’s friends know about his big problem and provide him with emotional support when it comes to learning the truth about Bill Parcels, the New York Giant’s coach...
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image caption Filmstill "The Island"

The Island

(german) Die Insel

Canada | Directed by Trevor Anderson

THE ISLAND tries to cross the mechanism of homophobia with a big smile. The homosexual filmmaker has received ”fan mail“: Why don´t all the homosexual people leave society and move to an island to infect each other with AIDS. Lost in thought the director wanders through the Canadian snow desert and creates a possible setting for such an island. An animated, essayistic narrative film.
At ”Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival“ ...
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image caption Filmstill "The Kids Are All Right"

Winner

The Kids Are All Right

United States, France | Directed by Lisa Cholodenko

Nic and Jules have been together for a long time and are well acquainted with all the highs and lows of a long-term relationship. Her stressful job at her practice has made her somewhat neglectful of her partner. Jules feels underchallenged in her role as a mother and would dearly like to open a garden landscaping business, but Nic isn’t much good at providing advice on such things. Their daughter Joni is a model pupil who will embark on her stud...
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THE LAMPS

United States | Directed by Shelly Silver

“All who want me would like to eat me up. But I am too expansive and am open to all sides, desire this here and that there.” The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven “The Baroness is not a futurist. She is the future.” Marcel Duchamp “The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, née Plötz, was an unsung member of the New York Dada Movement. She was a poet, artist, vaudeville performer, runaway, rabble-rouser, cross-dresser, and all around public ...
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image caption Filmstill "The Last Of England"

Winner

The Last of England

Great Britain, Great Britain | Directed by Derek Jarman

It is a poetic, rather than realistic, depiction of what Jarman felt was the loss of traditional English culture in the 1980s. It is named after a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown.
Jarman wrote a book to accompany the film, which deals more explicitly with the relationship he had with his father, who was a Lancaster bomber pilot in the Second World War. Jarman used the impact of his father's despair, depression and violence...
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image caption Ken McDougall | © ZDF / ED-Distribution/Harald Bachmann

Winner

The Last Supper

(german) Das letzte Abendmahl

Canada | Directed by Cynthia Roberts

The subject of this film may be highly disturbing to some viewers. This dark, Canadian film, based on the award winning Toronto play, graphically chronicles the last days and doctor-assisted suicide of Chris, a fictional dancer and choreographer with AIDS. This picture was shot in real time and focuses upon the last meal Chris shares with his lover, Val before the doctor administers a lethal injection. Four days after this film was finished, Ken ...
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image caption Filmstill "The Living End: Remixed and Remastered"

The Living End: Remixed and Remastered

United States | Directed by Gregg Araki

Shown in the Panorama section of the Berlinale in 1992, Gregg Araki’s gay road movie THE LIVING END has become a classic example of queer new wave cinema that is also an enduring record of the post-punk era.
The film’s first image – the words “fuck the world” scrawled on a graffiti-covered wall – is an apt description of the frame of mind of the film’s two protagonists Jon and Luke, two HIV positive men. Luke is a sexy drifter; Jon a disoriented no...
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image caption The Long Good Friday, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren © 2020 Handmade Films

The Long Good Friday

Great Britain | Directed by John Mackenzie

Cockney gang boss Harold Shand wants to go legit and make London the “capital of Europe” by building an Olympic stadium in the Docklands. He is hoping to persuade the New York mafia to invest in the venture. But no sooner have its representatives arrived before Harold runs into problems. Two members of his gang have been murdered and he himself is almost killed by a bomb. To save face with the Americans, he needs to find the culprits right away ...
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image caption Filmstill "The Mad Half Hour"

The Mad Half Hour

Argentina, Denmark | Directed by Leonardo Brzezicki

Once a day, domestic cats go completely mad. A total burst of energy. It’s all over within half an hour. No one knows why. That’s just how it is.Juan is rather similar. He doesn’t know why, it just seizes him. The loss of commitment. Why should he bother to hit a ball over the net and wait for it to be returned, while making sure it stays within the white line? Does he still love Pedro, no, perhaps yes? Pedro is used to it and takes him by the hand....
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image caption Filmstill "The Making of Monsters"

The Making of Monsters

Canada | Directed by John Greyson

In 1985, gay teacher Kenneth Zellers was murdered by five teenage boys in High Park, Toronto. In his experimental musical, John Greyson, enfant terrible of Canadian cinema, undertakes a comprehensive, activist’s analysis of the case. Employing Brecht’s strategies of defamiliarisation and an exuberant dose of provocation, Greyson reconstructs both the course of events and the media hype surrounding them in the form of a fictitious documentary that...
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image caption The Man that Got Away

The Man that Got Away

Canada | Directed by Trevor Anderson

Director's statement:
A musical. A life. My family almost forgot to tell me about my great-uncle Jimmy. True story, or so I'm told. Jimmy grew up on a farm, on the Canadian prairies, in the Rosebud Valley, during the Great Depression. His older brothers were teenage mechanics, or outfielders on the local baseball team. But not Jimmy. At ten years old, Jimmy was Georgie Kempt's star pupil in tap dance and acrobatics.
Jimmy: "O the sky...
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The Man Who Drove With Mandela

Great Britain, Netherlands, South Africa, United States | Directed by Greta Schiller

In 1962, at the height of oppression in apartheid South Africa, a gay white theatre Director was arrested with Nelson Mandela. His name was Cecil Williams. This is his story. This film is an unusually revealing portrait of one of the historic figures behind Nelson Mandela’s long struggle for freedom in South Africa. In the early 60s, Mandela traveled incognito across South Africa, orgainizing armed rebellion against the apartheid regime. Driving ...