Opening the celluloid closet

With an international programme of 11 feature films, nine documentaries and two compliations of short films - plus an open-air screening of Cabaret - the Fifth

Dublin Lesbian & Gay Film Festival runs at the IFC in Dublin for five days from

Thursday next.

There are some notable omissions - of such high-profile recent movies as

Bent, Kiss Me Guido, Happy Together, East Palace, West Palace, Love! Valour!

Compassion! and Love And Death On Long Island - which the organisers failed to secure, mostly because of print availability problems. And some of the movies included in primetime slots already have been seen at the Dublin Film Festival -

Alive And Kicking, Female Perversions, Skin And Bone and johns - but that does not detract from their aptness in the specific context of a gay/lesbian festival. The event opens next Thursday night with Kelli Herd's comedy, It's In

The Water, set in the affluent Texan town of Azalea Springs, where the sharp turnabout in the sexual preferences of the locals is attributed to some form of contamination in the water supply.

Documentaries on the programme include Paul Monette: The Brink Of Summer's

End, a portrait of the writer who died of AIDS two years ago; Stanley Kwan's

Yang Yin: Gender In Chinese Cinema, which was thrown away in a middle-of-the-

night slot by Channel 4 recently; Mum's The Word, a picture of four French-

Canadian mothers involved in lesbian relationships; You Don't Know Dick, which charts the experiences of trans-sexual men; and Licensed To Kill, in which a gay man, the victim of a violent attack, visits men serving prison sentences for the murder of gay men.

Among the new and recent feature films showing are:

Scott Silver's episodic, edgy and touching johns, with David Arquette as a sexually ambivalent young man living on his wits as a male prostitute in a seedy

Los Angeles milieu, where - in echoes of My Own Private Idaho - he is loved secretly by a young man (Lukas Haas) whose doctor father threw him out because he was gay.

Su Freidrich's Hide and Seek, which explores lesbian adolescence in the

1960s through the story of a 12-yearold tomboy who is horrified to discover that her best friend is taking an interest in boys.

Jeff Harmon's "campy, trampy and irreverent" Isle Of Lesbos, in which the hapless April Pfferpot escapes a life of endless Tupperware parties and a loveless marriage when she is hurled into a lesbian version of The Wizard Of Oz.

The Canadian movie, The Escort, directed by Daniel Langlois, in which the passionless relationship of two gay lovers is transformed by the arrival of a young rent boy.

The festival closes on Monday, August 4th with Nancy Meckler's Indian Summer, an earnest and well-intentioned, if heavy-handed, drama scripted by the playwright of Bent, Martin Sherman. It is redeemed by a good cast, led by Jason

Flemyng as a gay ballet dancer who is HIV-positive, and Antony Sher as the older, hard-drinking therapist who falls in love with him.