POUTFEST 2012Triskel Christchurch, Cork Sun-Wed http://triskelarts centre.ie/cinema
POUT started life four years ago as a London-based LGBT festival before hitting the road as a travelling programme for the UK and Ireland. The lucky patrons of Cork’s Triskel Christchurch can look forward to a globetrotting chocolate box of delights from July 29th, brought to us in association with Cork LGBT Pride Festival and Peccadillo Pictures.
Maryam Keshavarz’s keenly anticipated Circumstance (pictured) isn’t always subtle in its methodology (Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, anyone?) but the film’s daring subject matter calls for something hard-hitting.
Well-heeled Tehran teen Atafeh is in love with left- leaning Shireen, a Sapphic crush that takes the girls underground, into an illicit world of house parties and ecstasy. Will Atafeh’s brother Mehran, a recovering drug addict turned devout Muslim, blab to the mullahs?
Keshavarz’s politically charged premise pivots on the tensions between modernity and theocracy; Mehran attempts to spy on the girls with cameras hooked up to a Mac Book Pro; a shot of a hijab-wearing woman serving tea to men in Speedos provides a shocking portrait of sexual inequality.
Transgendered youth Miriam – now Lukas – is in the final stages of his metamorphosis in Sabine Bernardi’s winningly cheeky Romeos. Our hero identifies himself as a gay man but is still months away from a mastectomy when he meets dreamy Fabio. Can Lukas hide his pre-op status? Or will dirty pillows, to borrow Piper Laurie’s phrase, come between him and the object of his affections?
Daydreamer Pim lives with his accordionist mum and pines for Gino next door in North Sea Texas. Lush cinematography and lovely natural performances add to the charms of Bavo Defurne’s 1970s-set Belgian drama.
We heart Sheldon Larry’s African-American musical Leave It on the Floor, a low-budget extravaganza about a gay teen who loses a disapproving family and gains a flutter of LA drag queens. Can you really afford to miss out on such glitzy infectious musical numbers as Justin’s Gonna Call, an ode to Mr Timberlake? The final show-stopping funeral sequence puts recent Hollywood genre efforts Nine and Moulin Rouge to shame.
