The seventh Dublin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival opens at the IFC next Thursday night with Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, Tommy O'Haver's film in which Billy, an out-of-work photographer, is smitten by the handsome Gabriel (Brad Rowe), a musician of indefinable sexuality.
The festival, which runs over the bank holiday weekend, closes on August 2nd with Better Than Chocolate, the acclaimed new film from the Canadian director Anne Wheeler, in which a young college drop-out's lesbian relationship with an artist becomes complicated when her mother and brother move in with them.
One of the festival's strongest presentations is the gritty Australian drama, Head On, which charts an eventful and often traumatic 24 hours in the life of Ari (Alex Dimitriades), a handsome and voraciously sexually active 19-yearold coming to terms with his homosexuality and his rigidly conservative Greek immigrant parents. The festival's highlights also include Tanya Wexler's US film, Finding North; from Spain, the new Ventura Pons movie, Beloved/Friend; all six episodes of a controversial Israeli soap opera, Florentene; and four films directed by Robert Aldrich, including the lesbian drama, The Killing of Sister George, which was banned in Ireland.