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The Journey (Sancharram, India/US 2004)
In preparation for a Saturday School on Indian Cinema, I came across this film from Kerala in South India, directed by Ligy J. Pullappally. It is partly derived from a real life incident in Kerala when...
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Fremde haut (Unveiled, Germany/Austria 2005)
‘Fremde haut‘ translated via Google tools produces ‘foreign skin’ in English (in the interview referenced below, the director suggests ‘a stranger’s skin’ which she sees as an eroticised concept). I...
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Spider Lillies (Ci qing, Taiwan 2007)
Isabella Leong (left) as Takeko and Rainie Yang as Jade in Spider Lilies Spider Lilies was shown in the UK as part of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on tour (following an awards win at...
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Daughters of Darkness (Les lèvres rouges, Bel/Fra/West Germany 1971)
I imported this DVD from the US. The 2003 disc from Blue Underground is NTSC but coded Region 0. I was following up a suggestion from Stephen when I was discussing Let the Right One In and looking for...
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BIFF 1: And Then Came Lola (US 2009)
The blurb on this film’s website announces it as: [a] “time-bending, sexy, lesbian romp, with an irreverent nod to the popular art-house classic Run, Lola, Run“. A pretty good description really. Lola...
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The Kids Are All Right (US 2010)
This is a thoroughly entertaining romantic comedy/drama with excellent performances and witty dialogue. What’s interesting, I guess, is that it is classified as an independent movie because a) it is...
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Films From the South #6: So Hard to Forget (Como Esquecer, Brazil 2010)
I enjoyed this film very much – just the right antidote to miserable weather on a Sunday. As one of the blurbs reads, you wouldn’t expect a story that begins with a character suffering a form of...
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Circumstance (US/France 2011)
Chambers Dictionary defines ‘circumstance’ as the ‘logical surroundings of an action’. For me, this film is itself a circumstance more than it is a film. My first thought was that it was an ‘event’ –...
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Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres, France 2007)
The first of Céline Sciamma’s trilogy about teenage girls is in some ways the most hard-hitting, primarily because it is the least contextualised in terms of family and setting. All three films deal...
View ArticleThe Misandrists (Germany 2017)
Bruce LaBruce is a Canadian writer/photographer/director active since the late 1980s. He is known as an art-pornographer and the founder of ‘queercore’ via his punk magazine J.D.s. His work has...
View ArticleThe Daughters of Fire (Las hijas del fuego, Argentina 2018)
This is a startling film for a number of reasons. Most obvious is the nature of the representations of sexual intercourse, which are the most explicit I’ve seen. Compared to In the Realm of the Senses...
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