PROMISING a packed programme of movies from around the world, the 4th Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival opens at the IFC next Thursday night with one of the acclaimed discoveries of this year's Cannes Film Festival - Hettie McDonald's film of Jonathan Harvey's play, Beautiful Thing, a coming of age and coming out story of two teenage boys (played by Glen Berry and Scott Neal) who fall in love during a long hot summer on a London housing estate. Both Scott Neal and Hettie McDonald will be in Dublin for the screening.
The event, which continues for eight days, features a wide ranging international line up of 36 feature films and two programmes of shorts. Howard Schuman, the articulate presenter of the excellent Moving Pictures on BBC 2, will travel to Dublin on August 3rd for the screening of Nervous Energy, which he wrote and which deals with a gay love affair in which one partner has AIDS.
Another highlight is Angela Pope's harrowing and moving contemporary drama, Hollow Reed, which tackles a complex case. a doctor (Martin Donovan) has left his wife (Joely Richardson) for another man (Ian Hart), and he learns that her new lover (Jason Flemyng) is physically abusing their young son, (Sam Bould), apparently with the mother's complicity.
From the US come such notable recent independent productions as Lie Down With Dogs, which follows, the sexual fortunes of a young Manhattan man in the gay mecca of Provincetown, Gregg Araki's homoerotic picture of nihilistic young Los Angeles drifters as they get deeper into crime in The Doom Generation; Peter Reed's family drama, Under Heat, featuring Lee Giant as a woman with two sons, one of whom reveals that he is gay; and the first Irish cinema screening of John Singleton's campus unrest movie, Higher Learning, featuring Jennifer Connelly as a lesbian student.
From Australia comes Feed Them to the Cannibals, a documentary on the flamboyant gay and lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney, while Life is a Woman is the first film from Kajastan to show lesbian love scenes. From the German director Greta Schiller comes Paris Was a Woman, a portrait of the mostly lesbian women writers and artists who flocked to the Left Bank of Paris between the two World Wars.
The programme also includes a daily afternoon slot titled Retro Queer, which presents gay and lesbian images from cinema's history from Orphee, Un Chant d'Amour, The Children's Hour and Some Like It Hot, to the more recent Querelle, The Hunger and the notorious Taxi zum Klo. Each film will be prefaced by an introduction placing them in context.
The event closes on a high note on August 8th with the breezy, intricately plotted and hilariously funny comedy of snowballing confusions and mishaps, Flirting With Disaster, directed by David O. Russell and featuring Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, Mary Tyler Moore and Alan Alda. In this fast and free wheeling entertainment, there is a rare casualness to the revelation that some of its characters are gay.
Meanwhile, Burn, the British Film Institute's touring festival of lesbian and gay cinema, arrives at Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast today for a week and includes a number of the titles screening in Dublin, among them Boyfriends, The Midwife's Tale, Man of the Year and Parallel Sons. Full details are available from QFT.
