Eighth Portland Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
dir. Various
Oct 22-31
Cinema 21
Let’s face it: there are only so many gay films you can watch. Problem is, the Eighth Portland Lesbian & Gay Film Festival has a huge number of films, all of them overflowing with gayness–so here’s a quick rundown of this week’s selections. (Other films that play this week–including Goldfish Memory, Slutty Summer, Inescapable, My Mother Likes Women, Boys Shorts, Girls Shorts, and Grand Ecole–are noted in our Film Shorts pages, while perhaps the most anticipated of the films, Tarnation, is reviewed on page 45.)
Friday kicks off with Walk on Water, about a heterosexual hit man (Lior Ashkenazi) who’s on the trail of an ex-Nazi officer. Drama strikes when he befriends the officer’s gay grandson (Knut Berger). Water is directed by Eytan Fox, whose last film, Yossi & Jagger, was engrossing and beautiful.
Saturday features Road to Love, in which an Algerian sociologist (Karim Tarek) producing a documentary on Islamic homosexuals falls in love with one of his subjects (Farid Tali). Saturday also has shorts from David Weissman (The Cockettes)–expect drag queens, heinous musicals, and public service announcements–and The Raspberry Reich, in which sexual revolutionaries liberate a wealthy businessman’s son from his heterosexuality.
Sunday boasts two documentaries: Masha Mom, about a woman who chose to live in Moscow so she could be a lesbian mother, and Freedom to Marry, about the same-sex marriage storm in San Francisco last February. Also on Sunday is Harry and Max, a drama in which a burned-out boy band idol (Bryce Johnson) takes his younger brother (Cole Williams) on a camping trip… and complex sexual relationships come to the fore.
Monday has Beautiful Boxer, a true story-inspired tale of Nong Toom (Asanee Suwan), a Thai kickboxing star who dominated the country’s most masculine and brutal sport while pursuing his desire to become a woman. Tuesday features Clara’s Summer, which follows two virgin French girls (Selma Brook and Stephanie Sokolinski) as they come of age at summer camp–expect an amusing mix of emotional distress and ennui that defines most French gay coming-of-age films.