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REINVENTING MARVIN – The Origins

Though “Marvin” was inspired by “The End of Eddy” by Edouard Louis, your Marvin is not an adaptation of that book. Tell us how the film was born.

I felt a very strong connection to the hero of the book by Edouard Louis, and I almost immediately felt like I wanted to make his story my own. I wanted to invent a new destiny for him. Explore the way he had to reconstruct himself after such a difficult separation from that family, and that subculture of France, socially and culturally disinherited. Dream up the crucial influences of his teenage years. In short, adapt it so liberally that “Marvin” could no longer be considered an adaptation, though the book was powerful.

How do you explain the connection that you feel with this character?

I like the idea that powerful people can escape what they are born into, that nothing is ever predestined or doomed, and that it’s possible to transform obstacles into strengths. That is what has always guided me. How do we manage to do that? How do we succeed in transcending difficulties? Those are questions that I, as a completely self-made person, can identify with. Marvin’s journey fascinated me as much as Coco Chanel’s. She, too, was able to invent herself, though she came from an extremely disadvantaged background.

Marvin also has to deal with being different. Having nothing in common with his family or classmates, he is totally alone.

Yes. You’d think he came from another planet. He has the face of an angel, and it’s as if his beauty stimulates the cruelty of others. He is an object of sadistic treatment to his classmates and an object of shame to his family. But that grace, that expression of femininity he carries within him – which is the cause of all that violence – is precisely what will feed his creativity and allow him to find his own path.

Your characterization of the family is never insulting; it even lends them certain humanity.

I felt it was important not to disparage those characters and pin them down like butterfly specimens. It’s their subculture that gave them those often terrifying phrases they say. They do it almost despite themselves; they think from where they stand, with their close-minded languaging. My co-author Pierre Trividic and I didn’t want to judge them.

Despite his ideas, the father is almost touching.

He says “faggots are awful… it’s a disease.” He is obsessed with the norm, but you can tell he is not mean. He has never hit his children, which is already progress by comparison to the previous generation. He is never outright violent. He even makes an effort when he takes Marvin to the train station and gives him money to buy Coca-Cola. He tries to be interested, and that makes him moving because we know full well that he doesn’t care about theater. That’s somewhere else, in another world.

You make him, as well as the character of Marvin’s mother, truly poetic.

There is something theatrical about the father. He makes a show of who he is. He’s not a hick, as his daughter points out. Strangely enough, there is love in that family. It’s lively and complex. Marvin can feed off of that material.

Which feeds them in return?

Yes. In the end, the father manages to say the word “gay” and talk about homosexual marriage. He has opened a door.

The older brother ends up being the only one in the family who is unreachable.

That is also a possible truth of that subculture: the incredible violence that suddenly breaks out from nothing, from the fact that their little brother was hiding in the church to eat candy. Combined with alcohol and his vision of Marvin (a representation of homosexuality), it triggers in Gerald an irrepressible urge to bash. It’s a horrible scene. Dramatically, it was important for the parents to step in. But I wouldn’t say that Gerald is “unreachable.” None of their destinies are set in stone.

You have never delved into that community.

Not being from it myself, I did question my own legitimacy. But I brushed that away pretty quickly. You don’t have to be in it to talk about it. What is essential is to feel things. And I knew them, in a certain way, through one of my grandmothers, who ran a small business under very tough living conditions and who was culturally very close to the Bijou family –

anti-homo, anti-black, anti-everything. As a kid, that intellectual poverty struck me deeply. But she was also a generous woman with amazing humanity. I loved that grandma and got inspiration from her, of course. Just as I got inspiration from the families I met in the area around Epinal – people who are forgotten, living on the edge in incredible poverty and often very close to the Front National. I really settled into the region and stay put. That was the best way to understand it from the inside. Though I’m not obsessed by the documentary aspect, what I showed had to ring true.

Being DISCREET with director Travis Mathews

We caught up with director Travis Mathews to talk about the origins of DISCREET his chilling new thriller that is being distributed by Peccadillo.

What was the genesis of this project?

Late in the summer of 2015, I had just stepped away from a much-delayed project and needed to do something that felt urgent and unafraid.

I dropped into my surroundings and listened to what was going on around me. At the time, I was driving around central Texas in a borrowed van that was a radio/cassette situation, so I indulged in
talk radio. Having grown up in rural Ohio, I was familiar with the A.M. dial, but what I heard sounded noticeably different, like the drumbeat to war. There was an unhinged desperation in these
voices and the rumbling sounds of the “alt-right”.

If these conservative voices were to be believed, some justifiable violence against “outsiders” seemed imminent. White, rural America was prepared to make their country great again!

The zeitgeist was so thick with unease, I wanted to write something that embodied this kind of “nation on the edge” anxiety. I set out to write a story that explored the ways in which populist insecurities about losing power intersected with, and informed, individual views on masculinity and sexuality. Alex, the hero in the film, is a distillation of this caustic soup. He’s unwell, to put it mildly.

As Alex’s mental state came into focus, every creative and editorial choice was made to service his cinematic representation. For me, this is one of the most exciting parts of the process. As a character comes into view, especially one as complicated as Alex, there’s a real joy in discovering what visual or sound expressions would most represent him. It’s also a process that brings real cohesion to the filmmaking team because we start to share ownership of this vision.

How does this film comment on contemporary gay male sexuality?

In Texas towns, both big and small, I turned on gay hookup apps like Grindr and Hornet to see how 2015 was translating among locals. I expected to find closeted guys, but I wasn’t prepared for the degree of racism, internalized homophobia, and the general fear of being seen, that was rampant. What fascinated me most were the profiles labeled discreet, and the men hiding behind black boxes in lieu of faces or even anonymous torsos. Shame was feeding the darkness, amplifying mythologized ideas of what a real man should be. It was the same wholesome mythology being propagated by rural -assumed straight- white conservatives.

Many of these guys on the apps are no different than the men on conservative radio. They’re both terrified of being outed as a lesser version of this kind of a Marlboro man ideal. It’s fear of being emasculated. And as demographics shift, turning America more brown, more tolerant, more fluid and more urban, their entire way of life is felt as under attack. This is how I understand the right’s
perverse and draconian actions and also the black boxes men hide behind.

This film delves deeply into one man’s brutal psyche – what was your cinematic process to create and visualise his internal world?

I think in all my work I’ve put a premium on men who express vulnerabilities very candidly. I’ve
explored this with sex and intimacy, but also in terms of loneliness and isolation. In Discreet, these same themes are explored with Alex, while I’ve also tried to make him an amplified reflection of the zeitgeist. As we all know, it’s pretty damn dark out there. But to be honest, Alex initially entered my head much more innocently. I was at Barton Springs in Austin with one of my producers, just riffing off of each other in the water. It was a little like a Richard Linklater moment, which I think is hilarious, thinking back. Anyway, my producer tells me about this Texas guy who films construction sites, dump truck videos more specifically, and has millions of views. It’s just one camera set up, one shot, for hours. He has all sorts of videos that take distinct sounds and/or images and puts them on a multi-hour loop. An early favorite of mine is a looping 8-hour video of bacon frying. Something really clicked with that one, so I started imagining the kind of person who would think to film this. That’s where my exploration of Alex started, before I knew anything else about him. He could have had a quirky romantic comedy in front of him, but it didn’t turn out that way.

His videos were my first entry point, and where I let my mind wander. When it clicked that his videos were actually a strange attempt to find calm, control, and some sort of psychic peace, it started to make sense with the zeitgeist and his character started to emerge. All around us, there’s the sense that something bad is coming, it feels like dread, like the setup to a dystopian thriller or a horror movie. And it’s only gotten worse since I wrote the early drafts of Discreet. This kind of madness in the air had a real impact on the evolution and the final outcome of the film. Initially, the story was more overtly political, more linear and more violent. But as months passed between the summer of 2015 up to the weeks following the US presidential election, the story of Alex started to take on a more surreal and restrained kind of internal horror. He – like most of us – was trying to survive this onslaught of crazy the best he knew how.

Jonny Mars’ central performance as Alex anchors the film – what was your collaborative process like?

Jonny and I were introduced by the filmmaker, and mutual friend, Kat Kandler. She and Jonny had worked together on Kat’s great Hellion short, where Jonny plays an aging heavy-metal God trying to do right in the world. That was my introduction to Jonny Mars. And when I started to share the bigger ideas of who I thought Alex was, and could be, almost everyone suggested that I connect with him. We were in different cities at the time, so before meeting, we spent a lot of long phone calls just deep diving into politics. Jonny’s really smart, and fully committed to his strong moral compass. He’s also up to do virtually anything on film, if it’s a smart choice that’s right for the character. This was reassuring because I knew from the start that “Alex” would be in some fucked up situations and head spaces.

Jonny jumped into the pool and we became fast friends. We also shared the same sense of urgency about making a film that would speak to this moment. It quickly made sense to bring Jonny even closer, and to have his involvement as a producer. Jonny, myself, and Don Swaynos – our tireless lead producer – were at the center of constructing Alex all the way through, and despite the heavy nature of the film, we tempered it with a lot of playfulness. Both Don and Jonny wore a lot of hats. Jonny, in particular, was somehow able to deliver these gutting performances then switch on a dime with production notes for something unrelated, and happening on another day. I also think that because we were independent, we had the creative freedom to go bold, which is what was required for this story to work. It’s that kind of creative freedom that allows a cohesive team to purr.

What does your film say about technology as something that is alienating society?

There’s a lot of isolation and long-distance attempts at intimacy via strange uses of technology in the Discreet world. It’s almost like traditional coping methods and ideas of intimacy have been proven to be ineffective and Alex is trying out new ones with imperfect results. The connections in Discreet seem transactional, based on primal needs for survival. It’s as if simple desire has become
so scarce that it’s maybe not to be trusted. And you see how that tug of war over desire plays out in Alex’s head. He’s tortured by it and distrustful of it.

As a country, I see us increasingly moving in this protectionist direction, which drives personal isolation and nativist tendencies. There’s the sense that things aren’t good out there, so close the borders, close your doors and just sit with your phones. What’s real, who can you trust? A lot of rational minds feel like we’ve entered a new epoch, and it has the smell of 1984 or Brave New World. There’s so much free-floating anxiety in America right now, that many people’s impulse is to cave inward and to isolate. Alex is a manifestation of all this.

What are your cinematic / aesthetic influences for this film?

Early on we were quite attuned to the Travis Bickle Taxi Driver nature of Alex. I also took deep dives into psychological thrillers like Polanski’s apartment trilogy, and horror, e.g., The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While I was writing, I binge-watched How to Make a Murderer. Many of my initial dream locations came from freeze frames in that series. The rural community it depicts has a perverse loyalty to maintaining power at any cost, even at the risk of destroying lives. It’s a theme echoed in Discreet.

Unrelated to movies, I was obsessed with the freeways in Texas. Beyond being synonymous with America, the Texas freeways (the interchanges especially) always seemed unnecessarily jumbo-sized. As someone who lives in San Francisco and hasn’t owned a car in almost 20 years, I’m sure it was amplified for me, but it all seemed a little ridiculous. Because Alex is a drifter who lives out of his van, always on the road, it made sense to pay more attention to the freeways in the film’s world. Here are these man-made monsters, an expression of Texas muscularity, that Alex can’t get away from. In almost every location in the film, the freeways are always looming or threatening to strangle.

DISCREET can be seen as both a timely and timeless statement not only one man’s violent internal struggle, but an allegory on social strife in America and even the world. What are your thoughts on this viewing of your film?

By now, we all know that there are populist movements happening around the world, especially in Europe. Right wing nationalists are securing power with the rabid support of voters who feel pushed out by globalization. And this is so often done by appealing to people’s base desire for scapegoats, simple, answers, and fairytales about reverting back to a “more pure” time. From Texas to France, these are mythologies about national muscularity, brute masculinity that doesn’t
answer to anyone.

So, despite the film’s focused critique of America, with few changes Alex could be a Frenchman or an Englishman struggling with the same issues. These “patriarchy on the run” mythologies are not the exclusive domain of America.

Travis Mathews

MARIO a revealing look at homosexuality in The Beautiful Game.

No matter who I talk to, hardly anyone understands why it should be a problem to be an openly gay professional football player in 2018. As early as 2013, many German politicians as well as high-ranking club functionaries and representatives of professional associations took a stand and signed the “Berlin Declaration” – a position paper against homophobia in sport. We know that there are gay football players, and club-internally they receive professional guidance and management. But towards the outside, the silence is maintained.

Coming out in professional football is still a taboo. The blame for this is passed back and forth. Some say reactionary fan groups are the problem. Others point to the sponsors, who could bail out. Or individual players from chauvinistic cultures who would not be able to deal with the situation. Corny Littmann, former President of the St. Pauli football club in Hamburg, Germany, and gay himself, gave an interview on the topic in 2012. Asked why not a single player had come out as gay yet, he answered that this would be stupid. “Only a fool would do that.” Littmann regards the world of football as a professional field lacking the social competencies to deal with a coming-out.

Homophobic clichés and small-mindedness are still widespread, according to him. On average, a football player can pursue his career for 16 years and changes clubs every two to three years. He is a commodity, bought and sold again as lucratively as possible. An openly gay player would, however, encounter problems when trying to find a new club. He would be seen as “difficult”, even if his athletic performance were high. Coming out would therefore destroy his market value – and with it his entire career. So is everything, as so often in our society, a question of money?

In 2018 the FIFA World Cup will be carried out in Russia, a country that discriminates against and ostracises homosexuals. 2022 will see the World Cup in Qatar, a country that punishes homosexuality with five years’ imprisonment or 90 whiplashes. As we know, football is big business, and FIFA will make sure that nothing comes in the way of that – least of all the gay question. And we will follow both cups with excitement, and we will pay to see the games. In the end, the current status quo regarding homosexuality in professional football is a contract we have all entered into. But the weight of self-denial is a weight that the gay players carry alone.

When screenwriter Thomas Hess approached me in 2010 with his idea to make a feature film on the topic of gay love in professional football, my first question was: Hasn’t that film already been made? The topic was already present in the media, but our research showed that, apart from numerous news features, there was only a comedy dating from 2004.

The great football love story, however, had not yet been made for cinema. This is why I committed to the project. Apart from the topical relevancy, I felt very much like making another love story twenty years after “F.est un salaud”. Since classical literature, love stories that are framed by any kind of forbidden love have moved us the most. I saw the opportunity to tell a truly moving story in the given social context of a modern forbidden love. It was important to me to illustrate this context as realisticallyand contemporarily as possible. The football club BSC YB from Berne, Switzerland, generously supported me during the research and script development phases. During shooting BSC YB and the St. Pauli football club provided us with infrastructure, materials, and their names, for which I am very grateful.

Marcel Gisler

Director and co-writer of MARIO – Marcel Gisler

Tamara Shogaolu talks about HALF A LIFE from Boys on Film 18: Heroes

Tamara Shogaolu, the director of the stunning short film Half a Life – part of Boys on Film 18: Heroes – chats about her inspiration for the film and the experience she had making it:

How did you meet the narrator, and what led you to want to tell his story?

Over the course of two years before, during and after the revolution, I traveled around Egypt collecting oral histories of a variety of people—mostly women, activists and members of marginalized communities. It was a time of openness where people felt like they could talk and be honest and for that I feel incredibly fortunate.

The plan was always to make an animated documentary film based on these oral histories. We felt an urgency to share this story first because of the active persecution of LGBT individuals in Egypt at the moment. We are also currently developing an interactive augmented reality animated
documentary based on some of the other interviews.

Where does the title “Half a Life” come from?

The title of HALF A LIFE is inspired by Khalil Gibran’s poem of the same name. It speaks to the value of individual action, commitment, and resistance, like the film’s interviewee and main character. The film ends with a selection from the poem:

The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists
to live a life not half a life

How and why did you decide the documentary should be animated?

Animation has allowed us to protect the identity of the people involved in the story, but it also affords us the artistic freedom to convey its emotion visually and viscerally. It also emphasizes Adam’s voice as he tells his story, offering us a firsthand look into the gay experience in Egypt today.

How was the experience for you as the director?

It has been an incredible experience. I have been working on this project for years and was finally able to get a really great team together. Everyone was really involved in all aspects of telling this story. This is the first animated film I direct and was also the first narrative film for the animation team. We were also incredibly lucky to have wonderful mentors who gave us key feedback to make the film and story more powerful.

What do you hope the impact of this film will be?

Like Adam, many Egyptians love Egypt, while they are struggling against the very backlash that many involved with the 2011 revolution feared. Our team is devoted to sharing Adam’s story, and it is our hope that this film can embolden and contribute to the movement for gay rights taking place in Egypt right now.

Boys on Film 18: Heroes is released on 30/04/2018 and you can order your copy here.

All about “Buddy”, in Boys on Film 18: Heroes.

A reunion with your ex-lover can be an emotional experience. An odd mix of contradictions. Intimacy and detachment. Awkwardness and familiarity. These casual meetings can have a tremendous impact on our lives. Especially if one still has feelings for the other. Something most of us can relate to. Therefore, it was very important to me that ‘Buddy’ would feel genuine and true.

In my quest to give the short film a sense of realism and believability I gave my actors tremendous freedom to move and improvise. In collaboration with my director of photography we created a shooting style that enabled our actors to move and act freely. The film was shot on location at a real STI clinic.

‘Buddy’ is based on an autobiographical event. What fascinated me about the story, is the inability of the main characters to communicate, despite sitting directly next to each other. The location of this reunion is the waiting room of an STI clinic. Probably one of the most uncomfortable places to be sitting with your ex. Surrounded by nervous pacers bracing for bad news. An atmosphere of tension and tediousness.

Seeing his ex boyfriend in such a vulnerable position, our main character cannot deny his feelings anymore. By being part of this very intimate moment, he feels there might still be hope for the two of them getting back together. There is something beautiful about losing the reality of the situation in favor of the possibility of love. Most of us have been there, I think.

‘Buddy’ is about accepting the truth, no matter how hurtful it may be. And about letting go the one you love.

Niels Bourgonje Director

Boys on Film 18: Heroes is released on 30/04/2018 and you can order your copy here

It’s All About Frankie from BEACH RATS

Director Eliza Hittman and star Harris Dickinson discuss the character of Frankie in BEACH RATS.

Frankie doesn’t really know where he’s headed or what he wants, but he does know what kind of behavior is off-limits in the heteronormative culture he’s grown up in. The web is his only real outlet to explore his attraction to other men. As Hittman describes it, “Frankie’s testing the waters. He’s thinking of the internet as being his channel to a world that might exist a few subways stops away, one that is more adventurous and progressive.” After his father’s passing, Frankie takes the next step and begins hooking up with some of the men he meets online.

Meanwhile, Frankie’s relationship with Simone progresses in fits and starts. Simone, who is also 19, is cut from different cloth than Frankie’s regular companions, Alexie, Frankie and Nick. She has a regular job and is conscientious about her responsibilities. She perceives and empathizes with Frankie’s emotional pain and is willing to forgive his faults, up to a point. “Simone is more aspirational than the men in film; she has a sense of purpose,” says Hittman. “She might want to make it work with Frankie, but in the end she’s capable of letting it go.”

Hittman didn’t write BEACH RATS as a coming-out narrative or a story about someone coming to terms with their sexuality. “Frankie’s an inarticulate 19-year-old who is slowly coming to consciousness about who he is,” she remarks. “For me, what was at the crux of the character was that he kind of knows but doesn’t know. He’s clinging onto his indecision; His answer for everything is ‘I don’t know.’ I think that’s very typical for a guy that age who is kind of incapable of saying anything about how he’s feeling.”

In trying to navigate his competing desires, Frankie makes decisions that lead to unintended and ultimately terrible consequences. Hittman was careful to show that when violence does erupt, it is spontaneous, a long-brewing fury that has found its escape valve.

Hittman spent approximately two years developing and writing the screenplay for BEACH RATS after receiving a fellowship from the nonprofit film foundation Cinereach (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, TEENAGE, SALERO), which had previously helped support the distribution of IT FELT LIKE LOVE. To the production executives at Cinereach, Hittman’s screenplay affirmed the promise shown by IT FELT LIKE LOVE and they decided to take on the project as a Cinereach original production. Says production head Andrew Goldman, “Eliza is a bold and insightful filmmaker. She has a unique ability to create a cinematic world wrought with complexities and nuances that few storytellers can capture on film. BEACH RATS is a big leap forward for her and we’re so thrilled to be part of her continued growth and success.”

Brad Becker-Parton and Drew Houpt joined Cinereach’s Goldman and Paul Mezey to produce BEACH RATS and began the casting process in the spring of 2016. The role of Frankie was not an easy one to cast, given the film’s psychological subtlety, sexual candor and frontal nudity. The production found its Frankie in a young English actor, Harris Dickinson, who makes his feature debut in BEACH RATS.

Dickinson says his interest in BEACH RATS was piqued by the email from his representatives in Los Angeles. “They said that screenplay was a bit rough-and-tumble and I might not like it. Those are usually the scripts that I want to read, because they’re unconventional,” he laughs. “I started reading and I loved it straightaway. I felt the tone of it, I felt the pace. The character jumped off the page for me — I was feeling it and reading as Frankie. It’s rare when something like that happens and it makes you really enthusiastic about the project. You want to be that character and you want to tell that story.”

He appreciated the observational nature of the script. “It’s not a typical problem-and resolution narrative. It’s an honest and raw look at a period in someone’s life,” the actor remarks. “We start the film and we’re introduced to the fact that Frankie’s father has cancer. It’s a time for Frankie where nothing is secure, nothing is solid in his own head. His father dying is a weird thing for him. He doesn’t really show much emotion in the script or in the film, he doesn’t react to it in the traditional way. A lot of the time, someone is a closed book and there are these brief moments where the book opens for a slight second and you see the underlying sadness, the underlying hate and fear and insecurity.”

Dickinson wasted no time making an audition tape, which made a powerful impression on Hittman. “The first thing that stood out to me was his very deep voice. But then he had this sort of gangly, teenager body and very intriguing eyes,” she recalls. “Harris’ acting was very subtle and didn’t telegraph anything that was internal. He didn’t transform, he didn’t take it to melodrama. He had a natural sense of rhythm and understanding of the dialogue. It was clear that he was a leading man and that he could carry the weight of the film on his shoulders.”

Dickinson’s upbringing in suburban London gave him a certain insight into the environment he would inhabit as Frankie. Says Hittman, “Harris is from the outer edges of London, which is not that different from the outer edges of Brooklyn and Queens and there are a lot of similar class issues. He understood the world perfectly. It was like he knew these guys without ever having been to New York,” she comments. She also felt affinity for his approach to acting. “Harris is very intuitive. He doesn’t want to talk in depth about the character. He wants to focus more on the behavior. He understands that acting is an act of doing. He’s a very serious and thoughtful young actor, very mature and focused.”

Read about the origins of BEACH RATS here.

BEACH RATS – The Origin

Writer / Director Eliza Hittman talks about the original ideas behind her award winning film BEACH RATS.

BEACH RATS

When Eliza Hittman’s debut feature, IT FELT LIKE LOVE, premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, it was hailed as a refreshingly unsentimental, original and visually poetic portrait of a teenage girl’s sexual coming-of-age. Hittman was lauded as a filmmaker to watch, and the accolades continued as IT FELT LIKE LOVE played additional festivals and went into theatrical release in 2014. Richard Brody of The New Yorker named it one of the 20 best films of 2014 and wrote “Even as the movie delves deep into the characters’ complex emotional lives, it subtly and gradually—yet ineluctably—conjures a world that I was sorry to leave. I didn’t want the movie to end.”

Hittman knew she would be expected to tell another female-centered story with her second feature, but she wanted to challenge industry assumptions and herself as a filmmaker. She wanted to continue to plumb the outer and inner lives of young people, but chose a different focus. “I grew up in a family where all conversations around sexuality were taboo. I watched someone be brutalized because of their sexuality, but I’ve been barred from writing about my family specifically. My firsthand experiences with homophobia haunt my youth and inspired me to tell a story about a character wrestling with sexuality. I wanted to take on something that was very masculine, and explore the intense pressures on young men to live traditionally masculine lives in an environment with no clear alternative, role model or way out.” BEACH RATS began production on July 25, 2016, and shot for 25 days in different parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

In considering a setting for the story, she was drawn back to the South Brooklyn working-class neighborhoods of IT FELT LIKE LOVE. A native of Flatbush, Brooklyn, Hittman came to know the borough’s coastal communities through high school friends who lived in places like Manhattan Beach. “I’ve always been a little bit fascinated with those neighborhoods and I’d spend a lot of the summer just flopping around those beaches,” she says. “It’s a part of Brooklyn that feels caught between past and present. Those areas have a history of violence of all kinds–crimes against people of color and gay men, and organized crime–and, unlike other parts of the City, change has come very slowly.

Harris Dickinson plays Frankie in BEACH RATS

Her image of the main character in BEACH RATS came from a Facebook image she’d found while researching wardrobe and set design for IT FELT LIKE LOVE. “It was a guy standing at a mirror holding his phone, with a big flash from the camera,” she says. “He had his shirt off and this hat on, and the visor was sort of masking his eyes. It looked like he was about to pull down his gym shorts and take a picture of his dick. There was this tension between hyper-masculine and homoerotic that the picture so clearly illustrated.”

At the same time, Hittman also became interested in Internet-related violence in the LGBTQ community, violence that has had a significant presence in these outer reaches of the City as a microcosm of events that happen throughout the world. The horrifying nature and similarities within stories where dating sites are used to lure people into sexual encounters that end with robbery, beatings, and even death. Hittman says “it’s a very dark subject, one that I know will have a divergent response as it’s a difficult topic that continually recurs.”

From there, Hittman started building out the world of Frankie, a 19-year-old facing an aimless summer at an uncertain moment in his life. His father is in the last stages of cancer, dying in hospice care in the family living room. Frankie spends his days killing time, getting high and hanging out with three delinquent fellow beach rats. At home, he squirrels himself away in the basement, where he can flirt with older men online without anyone knowing. But when a self-assured, sexy local girl named Simone makes a play for him on a Friday night at Luna Park, he awkwardly goes along with it.

Eliza Hittman writer / director of BEACH RATS

The Boys are Back for Christmas

The second BOYS ON FILM of 2017 is arriving a touch later than usual, but presents the perfect antidote to Christmas viewing, either on DVD or in high definition On Demand. As you know BOYS ON FILM is the world’s most successful short film anthology series, now with it’s seventeenth edition aptly titled LOVE IS THE DRUG. Here’s a run down of the nine films in this collection along with links to interviews that their directors did with Gay Star News.

ALEX AND THE HANDYMAN

Dir. Nicholas Colia (USA) 14 mins

When Alex, a precious nine-year-old boy, develops a crush on Jared, the moody twenty-five-year-old handyman who works in the mansion where he lives, he will stop at nothing to get his attention.

Read the interview with director Nicolas Colia HERE

NICHOLAS COLIA is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker who recently graduated from NYU Graduate Film School. Alex and the Handyman is his graduation film, it screened at Palm Springs International ShortFest and Outfest and has since won numerous awards. He is currently finishing work on a new short, a TV series and a feature film.

MR SUGAR DADDY

Dir. Dawid Ullgren (Sweden) 13 mins

Fifty-something Hans is looking for a fresh start. When he is pursued by the handsome younger Andrej, he falls for him fast. As the pair get closer, his wallet becomes looser. Is Andrej interested in Hans, or just the perks of an older man?

Read the interview with director Dawid Ullgren HERE

Dawid Ullgren studies directing at the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts. Dawid has previously directed the award-winning shorts Karma is a Bitch (2014) and Love at 03:56 (2013). Dawid also works as a casting assistant in Sweden, and holds a diploma in screenplay writing from Alma Writer College.

SPOILERS (Iris)

Dir. Brendon McDonall (UK, Australia) 22 mins

Leon’s loved and lost. Scarred by his experiences, his life takes a turn for the better when he meets the ideal man. Life seems full of possibility again, but what if he knew the ending before it even began?

Read the interview with director Brendon McDonall HERE

Brendon is a director, screenwriter and actor. His short film, All God’s Creatures, won numerous awards, including Best Film and Best Director at the 2014 Sydney Mardi Gras Film Festival and the prestigious international Iris Prize in 2014.

Brendon won the AFTRS/Foxtel Award for Exceptional Talent and was Associate Director to Ian Watson on the ABC series Janet King. His previous short films include The Law, Midnight Blue, All God’s Creatures and The Dam.

TELLIN’ DAD

Dir. André D Chambers (UK) 15 mins

A year into his relationship, Dan finally agrees to come out to his family. He writes letters to all of them. As each arrives, he deals with the aftermath, until there’s only one left… Starring Ricky Tomlinson (The Royle Family)

Read the interview with writer / producer Carl Loughlin HERE

André D Chambers studied Digital Film Making at the SAE Institute in Liverpool. His previous short films include Trip, a silent film about homelessness in Liverpool, and Thomas which screened at multiple film festivals around the world. Andre is currently working on short film Nam set in the Vietnam War.

BOYS

Dir. Eyal Resh (USA) 14 mins

Set on the first day of summer, Brian sleeps over at Jake’s house, as they have done countless times before. This night however, the two encounter unfamiliar desires that illuminate a new side of themselves.

Read the interview with director Eyal Resh HERE

Eyal Resh was born in Haifa, Israel in 1988. After graduating from the film department at Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv, he went on to do the Film Directing MFA Program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His films were chosen to be part of the CalArts prestigious show case and are now playing in festivals all over the world. Today, Eyal is focusing on narrative story telling using live action film making, animation and photography.

HOLE (Iris)

Dir. Martin Edralin (Canada) 15 mins

A daring portrait of a disabled man yearning for intimacy in a world that would rather ignore him.

The interview with director Martin Edralin will appear later.

Martin Edralin is a Toronto-based filmmaker and producer. Welcome to La Hesperia, shot in Ecuador, was his first documentary short. It was followed by several other award-winning short films, including Sara & Jim, The Tragedy of Henry J. Bellini and Jane. Hole won numerous awards around the world and has screened at over 100 international film festivals, including Toronto and Sundance. He is currently developing two feature film projects.

HAPPY AND GAY

Dir. Lorelei Pepi (USA) 10 mins

A queer revisionist history of 1930’s black and white cartoons, Happy and Gay is a musical cartoon inspired by the power of representation.

Read the interview with director Lorelei Pepi HERE

Lorelei Pepi is an American award-winning animation artist whose work engages with issues of identity and representation, the sexual body, gender and LGBT issues. Using animation‘s various forms, her materials and treatments range from the highly experimental to the character-driven narrative, lyrical and personal (Grace), to the socio-political queer cartoon (Happy & Gay). She teaches Animation at Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, Canada.

PEDRO

Dir. André Santos and Marco Leão (Portugal) 24 mins

When Pedro gets home at dawn exhausted, he is dragged to the beach by his loving mother. Initially reluctant, his interest is peaked when he catches the eye of a handsome stranger by the water.

Read the interview with directors Andre Santos and Marco Leao HERE

André Santos and Marco Leão started their long-lasting collaboration in 2008. Since then, they co-directed Our necessity for comfort, Wild Horses, Infinite, and the award-winning Bad Blood. André also works as a cinematographer, and Marco as a sound operator.

KISS ME SOFTLY

Dir. Anthony Schatteman (Belgium) 16 mins

An unexpected kiss from a friend brings a shaft of light to 17-year-old Jasper’s dull existence. It provides the spark he needs to embrace who he is, but how can he persuade his self-involved father to do the same?

The interview with director Anthony Schatteman will appear later.

Anthony studied film directing and holds a Master’s degree in Film Studies and Visual Culture from the University of Antwerp. KISS ME SOFTLY, his graduation film, was based on his relationship with his father and won him the 2012 Humo award at Leuven International Short Film Festival. Anthony’s work regularly explores difficult LGBT themes and is filmed in his own distinctive visual style.

Special Features for BOYS ON FILM 17: LOVE IS THE DRUG

Director’s Introduction for Spoilers

The Making of Kiss Me Softly

Trailers for Alex and the Handyman, Hole and Happy & Gay

Revealing the BODY ELECTRIC

Director Marcelo Caetano

BODY ELECTRIC is a boudoir film. With each bed Elias lies in, a new universe opens from the narratives told by the characters. Bodies embracing and caressing each other, voices that speak softly and quietly, lovers who tell of their encounters, sexual adventures and dreams. My desire was to address love as something serial and repetitive, portraying a kind of affection that distances itself from romantic love and its already soiled conflicts.

Elias loves in a lightly, solar and anarchic way. He is 23 years old, openly gay, a migrant from north-eastern Brazil. He uses each encounter to shape his personality by becoming a kind of human prism, capturing what he can from his partners. He changes his colour, and transitions between the masculine and the feminine. He can be a committed worker, but also a mocking anarchist. In this way, the film questions the socially established places for gay people, black people, immigrants, and workers. My aim is always to seek the individual, avoiding the discourse of identity that tries to capture and classify everybody.

BODY ELECTRIC is also a Bildungsroman. Elias comes into adulthood with great difficulty while trying to balance his personal pleasure with professional life. He is resistant to some conflicts simply because he does not believe in the high value that professional success and marital happiness have in our society. For him it is necessary to grow on his journey. I love filming these encounters and I love them more, the more unlikely they are. Perhaps the film’s most prominent political face is resisting intolerance by building links between socially distant people.

The film is influenced by Walt Whitman’s poem I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC in which the American author celebrates the beauty of bodies, regardless of age, gender, colour and form. I was also very touched by cinema of the 60’s and 70’s, especially the relation between word and image that I found in the poetic cinema of Pasolini and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. The choice of words and the strength of the narration are structural to me. This is how I found the way to speak of these bodies, this group of workers, and Elias is my spokesman: Like Scheherazade in ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS, he recounts his adventures as if he wanted, by the seduction of the story, to postpone the end of his youth.

Marcelo Caetano

Drug Slang A-Z

In these winter months, especially in the colder parts of the world, you might be delighted to hear people talking about the sleigh ride they went on over the weekend. That is until you realise they are talking about their cocaine high.

Since drug use is illegal in most countries around the world, the language and terminology surrounding controlled substances constantly changes in an attempt to stay one step ahead of law enforcement. For example, gammahydroxybutrate is a drug growing in popularity, it is now known simply as G or Geebs.

Drug use is an issue that especially affects the LGBT+ community. In a portrayal of a subsection of gay society, ChemSex is a poignant exposé of the rapid change coming from the intersection of technology and desire.

Here is our list of Drug Slang:

Amani – Magic Mushrooms

Bounce – Mephedrone (Meph)

ChemSex – the use of three specific drugs or ‘Chems’ (meth, meph & G) in a sexual context.

Dimitri – Dimethyltryptamine (DMT)

Exodus – Piperazines

Flash – LSD

Glass – Methamphetamine (Meth)

Hog – PCP

Ivory Wave – 2-DPMP

Jellies – Tranquilisers

Kix – Poppers

Lucy – LSD

Mandy – Ecstasy

Nemesis – Piperazines (Pep)

Opiate – Generally Morphine

Percy – Cocaine

Qat – Khat

Rocks – Cocaine

Skag – Heroin

Tina / Christine – Methamphetamine

Ultram – Tramadol

Vitamin K – Ketamine

Wash – Cocaine

X – Synthetic Cannabinoids

Yaba – Methamphetamine

Zoly – Etizola

To learn more – there is a monthly communication forum “Let’s Talk About Gay Sex and Drugs” for anyone to come talk about how they perceive sex and drug use amongst the modern gay male community in London. It is a wonderful resource to continue the discussion. Here is a link to there Facebook page: http://on.fb.me/1PdIHYx.

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