Oficial Section
Les Amours Imaginaires
Off Beat
Gigola
Broderskab
Break my fall
Romeos
*** Inaugural session ***
Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats)
Canada, 2010
Direction: Xavier Dolan
Production: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm
Starring: Xavier Dolan, Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider
Genre: Drama/Romance
Feature Film. Fiction
95'
Official Program "Un certain regard" Festival de Cannes
Première in Spain
Xavier Dolan became the revelation of the last Cannes Festival edition. For his youth (23 years old), his narrative, and overwhelming creative energy. After surprising us at the previous edition of La Mostra with "I killed my mother", the Québécois director returns with Heartbeats, an unsatisfied triangle of love and lust, an obsessive and unhealthy duel, full of ambiguous and destructive behaviours in order to get the object desired.
Francis and Marie will question their close friendship when they fall in love with the same person, Nicolas, a youngster with raging presence in a fable full of humour, silences and fantasy scenes. His incredible technique with the colour, forms, frames, and textures, leave Dolan’s trademark in a story of pain and joy of young relationships. A fresh and fascinating film.
Attention! To enter for free to the session of June the 28th, you have to send your petition with your name at:
confirmacio@lambda.cat
* * *
Off Beat
Switzerland, 2011
Direction: Jan Gassmann
Production: Diagonal
Starring: Hans-Jakob Mühlethaler, Domenico Pecoraio, Manuel Neuburger,
Genre: Drama/Musical
95’
Première in Spain
Rap musical scene has never been combined with a love story and other drugs as it is in Off Beat, the first movie by Jan Gassmann with the outstanding collaboration of the Mundartisten collective in its soundtrack, where family relations, love and music are part of the dramatic plot.
Lukas is an idealistic and sensitive musician trapped in a destructive emotional triangle that involves his youngest brother Sami, his manager and lover Mischa and his own insecurity that leads him inevitably to a creative decadence accelerated by drug abuse. Coiled up in this emotional and melancholic collage, secrets and loyalties will force Lukas to take decisions that will mark him for the rest of his life.
Off Beat was one of the revelations of the Teddy section in the last year’s Berlin Festival with an amazing and unusual atmosphere treated with harshness and realism. Amateur actors from Swiss rap scene make this movie even more authentic. One of the more modern movies of the Mostra 2011.
* * *
Gigola
France, 2010
Direction: Laure Charpentier
Production: Marie-Amélie Productions
Starring: Lou Doillon, Eduardo Noriega, Rossy de Palma, Marisa Paredes, Marisa Berenson
Genre: Drama/Book adaptation
102’
Première in Barcelona
More than 30 years have passed before seeing the first cinematographic adaptation of the novel “Gigola” de Laure Charpentier, censored previously, which arrives finally to our screens thanks to the own author, describing a erotic Sapphic story, which major filmic virtue corresponds to bring luxuriously the atmosphere of the happy 60’s in the Pigalle district of Paris.
Drags, prostitutes, gangsters and other undesirable characters inhabit the night reigned by women without taboos that cheer up city’s life. Georgia -Lou Doillon, daughter of Jane Birkin and Jacques Doillon- is a young dandy, refined and with authoritarian attitude, attracted by women preferably rich and beautiful. Still tormented by the suicide of her first lover, heals her wounds driving love crazy Cora, a young trainer, and Odette –Marisa Paredes-, a rich bourgeois. Always dress up as a man, only seen by night in gay bars and cabarets of the city, Gigola shows us a capricious and dangerous way to face her own lost in thought reality. The story of a legend.
* * *
Broderskab
Denmark, 2009
Direction: Nicolo Donato
Production: Asta Films
Starring: Nicolas Bro, David Dencik, Claus Flygare
Genre: Political Drama
90’
Best Film at the International Rome Film Festival
Première in Spain
The surge of political extremist in some northern European countries almost makes this film a news report. The love story of two young men in a neo Nazi group, and how a hostile atmosphere can destroy this love, where love is not accepted.
With this, the director, point out to the oppression of a man and the group in an extreme and profound homophobic context, homosexuality and the neo Nazi movement, which is still an historical taboo. He also makes reference to a recent documentary about a well-known German neo Nazi leader’s death from AIDS after years of sexual prowling in Hamburg’s gay club scene.
The need to understand the search for self-identity in such a closed and oppressive world as the neo Nazi’s, has driven Donato to write the complex and ferocious of Lars and Jimmy, two Danish youngsters in a tragic relationship that goes from hostility to admiration, and from friendship to passion.
* * *
Break my fall
U.K., 2011
Direction: Kanci Wichmann
Production: Break my Films
Starring: Kat Redstone, Sophie Anderson, Kai Brandon Ly
Genre: Drama/Musical
107’
Première in Spain
Break my fall is becoming a cult film in London’s film experts world. A provocative manifesto about the “24 hour party people” of London’s East End. Music stores, squatters parties, and nights full of drugs and alcohol fill the lives four friends that share during three days friendship, sex and love.
Liza and Sally, a chaotic and charismatic couple, live a violent relationship between jealousy and the desire while fighting for the survival of their relationship and keeping their jobs. There are part of a pop band and through it the show us their crazy and dark lives. Sally seem to head for a disaster, while Liza fights to face it with the support of the friends Vin, the adorable rent boy, and Jaime, the solid rock character in the middle of this mess.
A contemporary drama where the rhythm is marked by the sound track, in which have participated some of the best London’s underground musicians such as Plug, Numbers, and Peggy Sue. One of the most refreshing films of this edition of FIRE!!
* * *
Romeos
Germany, 2011
Direction: Sabine Bernardi
Production: Enigma Film, Boogiefilm
Starring: Rick Okon, Maximilian Befort, Liv Lisa Fries
Genre: Genre drama
94’
Première in Spain
Romeos shows us as it is rarely revealed on film, the identity vision through transgender showing the courage and bravery of a youngster of our days that wants to live accordingly to his feelings and needs, seeking truth and happiness; a love story that shows us that own identity at the end lies insides ourselves.
Lukas, a 20 year-old youngster born female but in the middle of a sex change process, lives puberty in the context of a nowadays big city, integrated in society, but at the same time, trapped in a wrong social compartment. It will be his best friend Ine, who will allow him to know the Cologne gay scene and then, his first encounter with the indescribable Fabio building a relationship between them that goes from attraction to rejection and from friendship to desire but in any case implying an inner liberation for Lukas.
The value of Romeos dares to give an unusual vision of the transgender world with a sense of humour and in a natural manner, being able to keep a distance from conventionalisms related to it. With a simple story of love, friendship and sexual awakening, it presents as a movie about diversity and respect.
