Productions from Ireland, Britain, America, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, Spain, France and Germany are included in the impressively wide-ranging programme of the 7th Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, which opens at the IFC next Thursday night and continues over the August bank holiday weekend. In their introduction to the festival brochure, programmers Deborah Ballard and Brian Finnegan comment that selecting films for the festival started very late this year, but regardless of the circumstances, they have assembled a strong programme featuring many key recent movies. The festival's opening attraction next Thursday night is Tommy O'Haver's US indie, Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, in which Sean P. Hayes plays an out-of-work photographer smitten by his new model (Brad Rowe), a musician of indefinable sexuality. The event closes on August 2nd with Better Than Chocolate, the acclaimed new film from the Canadian director, Anne Wheeler, in which a young college dropout's lesbian relationship with an artist becomes complicated when the student's mother and brother move in with them.
Potentially the most powerful film in the festival is the provocative Australian movie aptly titled Head On and directed by the Greek-Australian former solicitor, Ana Kokkinos, who made an auspicious film debut with the short 1995 lesbian feature, Only the Brave.
Set in Melbourne, Head On charts an eventful and often traumatic 24 hours in the life of a handsome and voraciously sexually active 19-year-old (Alex Dimitriades) coming to terms with his homosexuality and his rigidly conservative Greek immigrant parents. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the landmark Stonewall riots in New York, the festival is showing three films - two documentaries by John Scagliotti, Be- fore Stonewall and After Stonewall, and the late Nigel Finch's feature, Stonewall, in which an impressionable young man from middle America arrives in Manhattan around the time of the riots in 1969.
The festival is screening four films directed by Robert Aldrich, "for no reason," say the programmers, "other than the sheer fabulousness of his films and the pleasure of watching them in a large audience of queers". The movies are Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, both featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, along with The Legend of Lylah Clare, starring Kim Novak and Peter Finch, and the risibly dated lesbian drama, The Killing of Sister George, which was banned in Ireland.
Showing over two parts in the festival will be all six episodes in the Tel Aviv-set soap opera, Florentene, described in the programme as "Israel's answer to This Life", which has courted controversy with its explicit portrayal of the lives, loves and lusts of twentysomethings.
New and recent international feature films on the programme include Beloved/ Friend, the latest film from the veteran Catalan director, Ventura Pons; Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan's coming-out movie, Hold You Tight; and from Canada, Gerald L'Ecuyer's The Grace of God, with a cameo from David Cronenberg as a psychiatrist, and Thom Fitzgerald's docudrama of the 1950s male physique magazine world in Beefcake.
From Germany, Kutlug Ataman's Lola and Bilidikid deals with a 16-year-old Turkish gay living in Berlin with his bullying, homophobic brother, and Hermine Huntgeburth's The Trio explores a menage a trois with a bisexual male criminal at its centre. The US films on show include Tanya Wexler's Finding North, in which a young woman teams up with a suicidal gay man; another chance to see the recently released High Art; and Jim Fall's critically well-regarded current American release, Trick, which will be shown with Barry Dignam's Dream Kitchen, winner of the Tiernan McBride Award for best Irish short film at this month's Galway Film Fleadh.
For further information, contact the festival at 6 South William Street, Dublin 2. Tel: (01) 672-7211. Website: www.iftn.ie/dublingayfest. Membership and advance booking are available at the IFC box-office.
