A poetic, abstract tribute to classic children’s fantasy films, “Down Down the Deep River” was conceived as a visual song and written and directed by Will Sheff, lead singer and writer for Okkervil River. The film was shot in Sheff’s hometown in rural New Hampshire and stars local actors.
L’échappée sauvage 2017
16min | Short, Drama, Music | 7 June 2017 (France)
Storyline:
On a warm and clear summer day in the 50s, a proud and graceful city boy meets two mischievous, free country kids. It opens up a window on a whole new world; his journey under the sun will bring him closer to nature and the harbingers of love.
Los Placeres Ocultos 1977
1h 35min | Drama | April 1986 (USA)
Storyline:
A closeted banker, middle-aged and successful, falls madly in love with a poor but handsome 18-year-old student with devastating consequences for the young man. An updating of Death in Venice.
Proud 2018
Fiertés (original title) Drama | TV Mini-Series (2018– )
User review:
First, this is so safe and timid, one has to wonder why this was produced and aired on Arte and not France 2. Let’s admit they tried (very clumsily) to embrace a large audience. Still, if the third episode wasn’t set in 2013, you could swear this was produced in the 90’s. Fiertés (what a badly chosen title, considering the result) only is the mostly joyless depiction of the many pains that a gay man has to go through – as if a gay life was only a life of pain. But the worse part is that this limited series (pun intended) almost always choses the side of the heterosexual characters over the gay ones. As if asking for empathy from a straight audience toward gay men was impossible. Finally, the pace is severely lacking, everything is toned down to the point of total blandness, and the depiction of the working class is laughable. A serious misfire.
Love, Simon 2018
PG-13 | 1h 50min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 16 March 2018 (USA)
Storyline:
A young coming-of-age tale about a teenage boy, Simon Spier, goes through a different kind of Romeo and Juliet story. Simon has a love connection with a boy, Blue, by email, but the only problem is that Simon has no idea who he’s talking to. Simon must discover who that boy is–who Blue is. Along the way, he tries to find himself as well.
Gabriel 2014
Not Rated | 22min | Short, Drama, Family | 23 August 2014 (Canada)
Storyline:
Gabriel, a 32-year-old Spanish man lives in Germany with his boyfriend Lars, far away from his conservative family. Time and again he remembers his childhood in daydreams.
Patrick Melrose 2018
1h | Drama | TV Mini-Series (2018)
Storyline:
This five-part limited series based on the acclaimed novels by Edward St. Aubyn, tracks Patrick Melrose (Benedict Cumberbatch) from a privileged but deeply traumatic childhood in the South of France, through severe substance abuse in his twenties in New York and, ultimately, toward recovery back home in Britain.
Hao became a male masseur to make ends meet and pay for his grandmother’s costly medication caused by her recent stroke and her Alzheimer’s. The job forced him to deal with his previously suppressed sexual urges for men. Hao begins to lose the balance he once had with family, work, and himself.
Wittgenstein 1993
1h 12min | Biography, Comedy, Drama | 17 September 1993 (USA)
Storyline:
A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the first World War, to his eventual Cambridge professorship and association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The emphasis in these sketches is on the exposition of the ideas of Wittgenstein, a homosexual, and an intuitive, moody, proud, and perfectionistic thinker generally regarded as a genius.