Queer films in the NZIFF 1979-1998
by Quinoa_Chris_Kirk | created - 13 Dec 2020 | updated - 25 May 2022 | PublicEvery film screened in the Wellington Film Festival evolving into the New Zealand International Film Festival dealing with queer themes, queer characters or queer sensibilities. Comments are from the film festival programmes.
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1. Outrageous! (1977)
R | 96 min | Comedy, Drama
A story about a female impersonator who rooms with a pregnant schizophrenic.
Director: Richard Benner | Stars: Craig Russell, Hollis McLaren, Richert Easley, Allan Moyle
Votes: 1,028
The Eighth Wellington Film Festival 1979
"This remarkably assured feature debut is about the loving and affectionate friendship between Liza, a refugee from a mental institution who sees and hears monsters all around her, and has a compulsive sexual appetite, mostly directed at taxi drivers, and Robin, an overweight homosexual unhappy with his job in a hairdressing salon, but lacking the courage to turn his clever impersonations of various famous female stars into a night club act."
2. The Consequence (1977)
Not Rated | 100 min | Drama, Romance
Thomas, the son of a prison warden, falls for and seduces inmate Martin. When Martin is released from jail, they try to build a relationship and a life together but no one will let them alone.
Director: Wolfgang Petersen | Stars: Jürgen Prochnow, Ernst Hannawald, Werner Schwuchow, Hans-Michael Rehberg
Votes: 1,036
The Eighth Wellington Film Festival 1979
"In this film we show two homosexuals who love each other and try to live happily together."
3. The Getting of Wisdom (1977)
Not Rated | 101 min | Drama
Oscar-nominated director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, Tender Mercies) crafts a tender coming-of-age tale that introduces one of Australian literature's most beloved characters to ... See full summary »
Director: Bruce Beresford | Stars: Susannah Fowle, Dorothy Bradley, Patricia Kennedy, Sheila Helpmann
Votes: 559
The Eighth Wellington Film Festival 1979
"...the girl's crush on a teacher who disappoints in a specially strange way, the hinted at lesbian relationship..."
4. To an Unknown God (1977)
104 min | Drama
José, a homosexual magician of 50 years, lived his childhood in Granada (Spain). His father was a gardener in the Buendía house. There he once saw Federico García Lorca. One night of July ... See full summary »
Director: Jaime Chávarri | Stars: Héctor Alterio, Xabier Elorriaga, María Rosa Salgado, Mirta Miller
Votes: 177
The Eighth Wellington Film Festival 1979
"Astonishing that the best, most audacious movie yet made with homosexuality as its central theme should come from one of the sexually repressive Latin countries."
5. In a Year with 13 Moons (1978)
Not Rated | 124 min | Drama
A transgender woman tries to salvage something from the wreckage love has made of her life by confronting her anguished past, hoping to find ultimate acceptance among former acquaintances and herself.
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Stars: Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar
Votes: 4,740
The Eighth Wellington Film Festival 1979
6. Alexandria... Why? (1979)
Not Rated | 133 min | Drama
Yehia is a young man living in the cosmopolitan Alexandria during World War II. Inspired by American movies and Shakespeare, he aspires to be an actor, but struggles to pursue his Hollywood... See full summary »
Director: Youssef Chahine | Stars: Naglaa Fathi, Ahmed Zaki, Farid Shawqi, Mahmoud Al Meleji
Votes: 2,043
The 9th Wellington Film Festival 1980
7. Nighthawks (1978)
Not Rated | 113 min | Drama
A homosexual man is forced to hide his sexuality by day while living his secret life by night.
Director: Ron Peck | Stars: Ken Robertson, Tony Westrope, Rachel Nicholas James, Maureen Dolan
Votes: 712
The 9th Wellington Film Festival 1980
8. Rapunzel Let Down Your Hair (1978)
78 min
Rapunzel's story from Grimm's fairytales is retold and reinterpreted several times to examine feminist issues. There's the male voyeur as film noir detective; a raunchy cartoon Venus who's ... See full summary »
Stars: Jeanette Bateman, Lydia Blackman, Jean Boht, Martin Burrows
Votes: 9
The 9th Wellington Film Festival 1980
9. Why Not! (1977)
93 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
The eventful life of a three-way household in a suburban pavilion arouses the curiosity of those around them, including that of a police inspector.
Director: Coline Serreau | Stars: Sami Frey, Christine Murillo, Mario Gonzales, Nicole Jamet
Votes: 311
Pourquoi Pas! The 9th Wellington Film Festival 1980
10. Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters (1980)
45 min | Documentary
In 1978 the police attacked demonstrators at the Sydney (Australia) Mardi Gras celebrations. This film details the communities response.
Director: Digby Duncan | Stars: Jude Kuring, David Stiff
Votes: 36
The 10th Wellington Film Festival 1981
"The celebration (depicted), originally intended to highlight the 4th National Homosexual Conference became the shamefully ugly scene of violent police attacks and 53 inherently illegal arrests."
11. El diputado (1978)
Unrated | 110 min | Drama
Sex and politics collide in this tale of forbidden love, blackmail and murder. Set up by the secret police to compromise a prominent politician, a teenage hustler discovers himself ... See full summary »
Director: Eloy de la Iglesia | Stars: José Sacristán, María Luisa San José, José Luis Alonso, Enrique Vivó
Votes: 742
The Deputy
The 10th Wellington Film Festival 1981
"What distinguishes The Deputy from other films about homosexuality is its vivid and coherent analysis of the politics of repression."
12. The Meetings of Anna (1978)
128 min | Drama
Anna, a detached and diffident director, arrives in Germany to show her latest film; she checks into a hotel, invites a stranger to her bed, and abruptly tells him to leave. He asks her to ... See full summary »
Director: Chantal Akerman | Stars: Aurore Clément, Helmut Griem, Magali Noël, Hanns Zischler
Votes: 2,098
The 10th Wellington Film Festival 1981
13. Sebastiane (1976)
X | 86 min | Drama, Romance
Reassigned to a lowly outpost, a Roman guard's Christian beliefs clash with his gay commander's desire for closeness. Being tortured becomes pleasurable.
Directors: Paul Humfress, Derek Jarman | Stars: Leonardo Treviglio, Barney James, Neil Kennedy, Richard Warwick
Votes: 3,145
The 10th Wellington Film Festival 1981
"Sebastiane is a committedly 'psychological' intervention in the 'frank' discussion of homosexual themes in recent cinema: the situation it describes is (in Jarman's words) 'a laboratory in which it is possible to see a spectrum of relationships', and that spectrum ranges freely from the ostensibly asexual male bonding of barrack-room life through a variety of indulgences and sublimations to Sebastiane's own absurdly detached Apollonian fantasies."
14. Foolish Things (1981)
12 min | Short, Drama
The anguish following the break-up of a gay relationship that was never going to get heavy.
Director: Peter Wells
The 10th Wellington Film Festival 1981
15. Nous étions un seul homme (1979)
Unrated | 91 min | Drama, Romance
During the final days of World War II, a simple French peasant rescues a wounded German soldier and nurses him back to health. As their playful camaraderie grows, two young men who should ... See full summary »
Director: Philippe Vallois | Stars: Serge Avedikian, Piotr Stanislas, Catherine Albin, Lucien Guérin
Votes: 644
Nous etions un seul homme
The 10th Wellington Film Festival 1981
"The film spins some marvellous will-they-won't-they suspense as it skirmishes with ever impending homosexuality and/or troilism, and there's a pre-lapasarian piquancy, hard to resist, in this portrait of a rustic Eden on the brink of the sexual Fall."
16. The Tempest (1979)
R | 95 min | Drama, Fantasy
Banished to a forsaken island, the Right Duke of Milan and Sorcerer Prospero gets the chance to take his revenge on the King of Naples with the assistance of his airy spirit-servant, Ariel.
Director: Derek Jarman | Stars: Peter Bull, David Meyer, Neil Cunningham, Heathcote Williams
Votes: 1,243
The 10th Wellington Film Festival 1981
17. Moments (1979)
92 min | Drama
Anne, a Parisian, visits her friend Yola in Tel Aviv, where Yola lives with her husband Avi and their son. There's tension in the air and the attraction between the two women is palpable. ... See full summary »
Director: Michal Bat-Adam | Stars: Michal Bat-Adam, Brigitte Catillon, Assi Dayan, Avi Pnini
Votes: 79
The 10th Wellington Film Festival 1981
"What Bat-Adam conveys so effectively is that homosexuality is not always such an absolute but often a matter of degree and circumstance."
18. Deux lions au soleil (1980)
110 min | Comedy, Drama
Paul and René, two 40-year-old proletarians, refuse to go back to the factory. They decide to go to the sun. They experience small scams and meet love in the course of their adventure.
Director: Claude Faraldo | Stars: Jean-François Stévenin, Jean-Pierre Sentier, Catherine Lachens, Jean-Pierre Tailhade
Votes: 40
The 11th Wellington Film Festival 1982
"Two gay men in their forties, Paul and René, one divorced and the other widowed, tire of their ordinary lives and its humdrum trappings."
19. Pixote (1980)
TV-MA | 128 min | Crime, Drama
The life of a boy on the streets of Sao Paulo, involved with crimes, prostitution, and drugs.
Director: Hector Babenco | Stars: Fernando Ramos da Silva, Jorge Julião, Gilberto Moura, Edilson Lino
Votes: 9,240
The 11th Wellington Film Festival 1982
"Pixote has seen it all, from a gang rape of a fellow inmate to fellatio, cunnilingus, and sodomy performed professionally, and, more rarely, between lovers."
20. Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts (1979)
107 min | Documentary
Personal diary-style documentary of German Gay rights activist Von Praunheim's sojourn in the U. S. Grace Jones is seen writhing her way through "I Need A Man" at a rally and is sharply criticized for doing so by a Lesbian feminist.
Director: Rosa von Praunheim | Stars: Arthur Bell, John Briggs, Anita Bryant, Gordon Guy
Votes: 47
The 11th Wellington Film Festival 1982
"An effectively blunt, blatantly doctrinaire, altogether exemplary piece of agit-prop filmmaking."
21. Liquid Sky (1982)
R | 112 min | Sci-Fi, Thriller
A small, heroin seeking UFO lands on a Manhattan roof, observes a bizarre, drug addicted fashion model and sucks endorphin from her sexual encounters' brains.
Director: Slava Tsukerman | Stars: Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, Otto von Wernherr
Votes: 6,861
Twelfth Wellington Film Festival 1983
22. Taxi to the Toilet (1980)
Not Rated | 98 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
Frank Ripploh is a rascal: he is a shaggy-haired, bearded teacher who is gay and has a very active sex life plus an interest in making films. He keeps his personal life separate from his ... See full summary »
Director: Frank Ripploh | Stars: Frank Ripploh, Bernd Broaderup, Orpha Termin, Peter Fahrni
Votes: 1,772
Twelfth Wellington Film Festival 1983
"Homosexuality is treated without a trace of mystification, gay glibbery, or Cage Aux Folles frippery. The ebullient love scenes are shameless and tender; the movie has brains and balls."
23. A Woman in Flames (1983)
Not Rated | 106 min | Drama
Eva, an upper-class housewife, frustratingly leaves her arrogant husband and decides to enter the call girl business. She lets Yvonne, a prostitute, teach her the basics and both set out ... See full summary »
Director: Robert van Ackeren | Stars: Gudrun Landgrebe, Mathieu Carrière, Hanns Zischler, Gabriele Lafari
Votes: 639
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"She promptly falls in love with Chris, only to discover that he's in the same business, serving both women and men alike."
24. Another Way (1982)
102 min | Biography, Drama, History
Political and sexual repression in Hungary, just after the revolution of 1956. In 1958, the body of Eva Szalanczky, a political journalist, is discovered near the border. Her friend Livia ... See full summary »
Director: Károly Makk | Stars: Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak, Grazyna Szapolowska, Jozef Kroner, Péter Andorai
Votes: 914
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"...the film poses the lesbian love affair as a metaphor in a wider discussion of public and private freedom."
25. Waiting 'Round Wynyard (1984)
14 min | Short, Drama
A young man attempts to pick up another man in a Sydney railway station.
Director: Franco di Chiera | Stars: Peter East, James Porter
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"A film about suspension, ambivalence and desire. Will they? Won't they?"
26. Veronika Voss (1982)
R | 104 min | Drama
Partially based on the life of Sybille Schmitz, who found fame under the Nazi regime, but whose career was destroyed afterward. Veronika Voss is a once prominent UFA actress, kept by her doctor, who raises suspicion in a sports journalist.
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Stars: Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Annemarie Düringer
Votes: 7,790
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"Fassbinder's black and white palette turns neon into a soft blinking Cyclops eye, slices light into flickers with an overhead fan, dapples windows with rain stains, all to re-create the visual style in which Veronika could feel at home and alive."
27. Little Queen (1984)
18 min | Short
A boy's awakening recognition of his (homo)sexuality and the 1954 royal visit coincide in this complex memoir of national under-development and solitary personal growth.
Director: Peter Wells
Sticks & Stones
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"Eden Park fills with thousands of kids (tomorrow's leaders?) who contort their bodies and waggle their uvulas all in the hope that the royal eye will be bestowed upon them. The taunts of self-righteous heterosexuals are still flung with venom at those who choose another way. The link is there. A country which clings to its colonial past clings also to its narrow vision of how people should behave, a vision which is punitive and smug and proudly chauvinistic." - Peter Wells and Helen Martin discuss Sticks & Stones in Alternative Cinema, Autumn/Winter 1984
28. On Guard (1984)
50 min | Crime, Drama
Four women team up to sabotage a supercomputer belonging to a disreputable biotechnology firm.
Director: Susan Lambert | Stars: Alice Ansara, Martha Ansara, Mystery Carnage, Liddy Clark
Votes: 6
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"The four women... are sometimes so busy developing political consciousness and liberating women that they fail to give time to their ideologically-sound female lovers..."
29. Born in Flames (1983)
Not Rated | 79 min | Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi
Set ten years after the most peaceful revolution in United States history, it presents a dystopia in which the issues of many groups - minorities, liberals, gay rights organizations, feminists - are dealt with by the government.
Director: Lizzie Borden | Stars: Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield, Florynce Kennedy
Votes: 2,061
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"I don't like the utter sincerity of the women's movement, either the "We are wonderful, we are women" variety, or the "We've had such hard lives, look at all our suffering" type. That's another reason to make a film that contains gay women and yet isn't a gay film per se. I didn't want that to be the issue, because I find that a lot of films about homosexuality get bogged down in that. I didn't want that kind of masochism. I'm tired of seeing women's films where in the end it's all about tragedy and suffering alone, bearing the burden, having a child. I want it to be very different from either the pessimisms of women's films or the nihilism of downtown New York punk films." - Lizzie Borden, Monthly Film Bulletin, 2/84
30. Lianna (1983)
R | 110 min | Drama, Romance
A happily married woman comes to realize herself of being a repressed lesbian after she has an affair with a female college professor, and then tries to come to terms with her newfound lifestyle.
Director: John Sayles | Stars: Linda Griffiths, Jane Hallaren, Jon DeVries, Jo Henderson
Votes: 1,824 | Gross: $1.50M
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"Sayles simply refuses to indulge in any of the usual Hollywood cop-outs that accompany this terrain. There are no breast-beating melodramatics, coy evasions, special pleading - and no wavering in the heroine's commitment to her newly discovered sexual priorities." - David Ansen, Newsweek, 7/2/83
31. Golden Eighties (1986)
96 min | Comedy, Musical
Employees and clients of a commercial gallery only live for love; they dream it, proclaim it, sing it and dance it. Experience the encounters, reunions, passions and disappointments of a malicious chorus of girls and a group of idle boys.
Director: Chantal Akerman | Stars: Lio, Pascale Salkin, Delphine Seyrig, Myriam Boyer
Votes: 575
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
32. Der Bockerer (1981)
104 min | Drama, History
A politically naïve Viennese butcher (Bockerer) manages to survive the unification of Germany and Austria and the Second World War.
Director: Franz Antel | Stars: Karl Merkatz, Alfred Böhm, Hans Holt, Marte Harell
Votes: 1,026
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"But his almost poignant rendering of nice people doing terrible things stops dead in its tracks whenever the question of homosexuality arises and his film turns rigid with dread and repugnance." - Bill Gosden
33. Entre Nous (1983)
PG | 110 min | Biography, Drama, Romance
A Jewish refugee marries a soldier to escape deportation to Germany. Meanwhile a wealthy art student loses her first husband to a stray Resistance bullet; at the Liberation she meets an actor, gets pregnant, and marries him.
Director: Diane Kurys | Stars: Miou-Miou, Isabelle Huppert, Guy Marchand, Jean-Pierre Bacri
Votes: 2,260
Entre Nous
Fourteenth Wellington Film Festival 1985
"Without ever telling us out loud, Kurys makes us feel that the constraints and attachments that bind together these young matrons ca. 1952 have everything to do with that they have endured during the decade before. Huppert's petulant princess jive and Miou-Miou's wistful aesthete generate an authentic and palpable chemistry - whether it's carnal or not is deliberately ambiguous, finally unimportant." - Stephen Harvey, Film Comment, 12/83
34. Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80 (1984)
64 min | Documentary, Biography
In this intimate film portrait, artist Paul Cadmus, makes a nude drawing of his long time companion, demonstrates his mastery of egg tempera painting and recounts his past as a prominent ... See full summary »
Director: David Sutherland | Stars: Jon Andersson, Paul Cadmus
Votes: 7
Fourteenth Wellington Film Festival 1985
"Cadmus scandalised the WPA with a painting they understood all too well: The Fleet's In, a 1934 canvas, frankly erotic, of sailors necking with ladies of the night and each other. A naval admiral called for the painting's immediate removal, dubbing Cadmus "an abortionist of art"." - Carrie Rickey, Boston Herald, 8/5/84
35. Burroughs: The Movie (1983)
Not Rated | 90 min | Documentary, Biography
Burroughs: The Movie explores the life and times of controversial Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs, with an intimacy never before seen and never repeated. The film charts the ... See full summary »
Director: Howard Brookner | Stars: William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, James Grauerholz
Votes: 795
Fourteenth Wellington Film Festival 1985
"He has been both Harvard patrician and Lower East Side vagrant, and documented the unholy intersection of the two in numerous novels and shorter narratives. He is the hidden America of closeted gays and midnight misogynists; the frontier junkies lusting for guns, cars and the open road; the furiously repressed anima of Puritan culture." - Carol Cooper, Village Voice, 25/10/83
36. Mother's Meat & Freud's Flesh (1984)
93 min | Comedy
Mother's milk makes strong children, but a child who is a reluctant weaner may have developed a mother-addiction. "Mother's Meat & Freud's Flesh" ironically explores the resulting triangle of a mother, psychiatrist, and mother's boy.
Director: Demetri Estdelacropolis | Stars: George Agetees, Pierre Bastien, Christian Dufault, Demetri Estdelacropolis
Votes: 30
Fourteenth Wellington Film Festival 1985
"Add to this struggle a wacky psychiatrist, whose main scientific interest is to undertake a psychological sex-change operation on the mother to turn the hero into a homosexual, while fighting his own passionate attraction to the young man... The Freudian angle about mother-son relationships and homosexuality is such a parody of contemporary wisdoms that only the most hypersensitive would feel threatened." - Gary Evans, Cinema Canada, 10/84
37. The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
Not Rated | 90 min | Documentary, Biography, History
A documentary of the successful career and assassination of San Francisco's first elected gay city supervisor.
Director: Rob Epstein | Stars: Harvey Fierstein, Harvey Milk, Anne Kronenberg, Tory Hartmann
Votes: 6,579 | Gross: $0.01M
Fourteenth Wellington Film Festival 1985
"Milk was both the first self-proclaimed gay civil servant elected to office in the nation's self-proclaimed gay capital, and the modern homosexual movement's first martyr. This last lamentable distinction reinforced for gays the bitter truth learned by civil rights activists in the 1960s. For unpopular minorities, the quest for visibility spawns the promise of power, to be sure, but it also makes you more vulnerable to the manifest hatred of your enemies." - Stephen Harvey, Village Voice, 16/10/84
38. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
R | 97 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
An ambitious Pakistani Briton and his white boyfriend strive for success and hope when they open a glamorous laundromat.
Director: Stephen Frears | Stars: Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Daniel Day-Lewis, Richard Graham
Votes: 17,302 | Gross: $2.45M
Fifteenth Wellington Film Festival 1986
"In the foreground is a homosexual romance between a dark-eyed, softly handsome, almost flowerlike Pakistani teen-ager, Omar, who grew up in the neighbourhood, and a young blond street lout, Johnny." - Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 10/3/86
39. Before Stonewall (1984)
Unrated | 87 min | Documentary, History
The history of the Gay and Lesbian community before the Stonewall riots began the major gay rights movement.
Directors: Greta Schiller, Robert Rosenberg | Stars: Rita Mae Brown, Bruce Nugent, Henry Otis, Donna Smith
Votes: 1,190 | Gross: $0.02M
Fifteenth Wellington Film Festival 1986
"The Stonewall Inn comes at the end rather than the beginning of Greta Schiller's film: she is interested in gay life before the riot; gay lives at a time when Gay Liberation was unimaginable." - Jane Root, Edinburgh Film Festival
40. Silent Pioneers (1985)
42 min | Documentary, Short
Contrary to the public stereotype of a youthful homosexual community, gay men and women do grow old. Silent Pioneers presents an upbeat focus on the lives of these people today, showing ... See full summary »
Director: Lucy Winer
Votes: 16
Fifteenth Wellington Film Festival 1986
"A documentary profiling eight older gays and lesbians."
41. The Wounded Man (1983)
Unrated | 109 min | Crime, Drama, Romance
A young man discovers his homosexuality and begins a relationship with a manipulative hustler / petty criminal that he meets at a train station.
Director: Patrice Chéreau | Stars: Jean-Hugues Anglade, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Roland Bertin, Lisa Kreuzer
Votes: 1,310
L'Homme Blessé
Fifteenth Wellington Film Festival 1986
"L'Homme Blessé takes the potent sexual attraction between a young man who craves an outlet for his love and the older man who is pathologically incapable of providing it to its frightening, cathartic, logical conclusion. This excursion into the depths is as distressing as it is mesmerising." - Bill Gosden
Short: La Scala, Lo Scalone. An Italian Australian boyhood. Dir: Franco di Chiera/Australia/1985/17m
42. The 4th Man (1983)
Unrated | 102 min | Drama, Mystery, Thriller
A man who has been having visions of an impending danger begins an affair with a woman who may lead him to his doom.
Director: Paul Verhoeven | Stars: Jeroen Krabbé, Renée Soutendijk, Thom Hoffman, Dolf de Vries
Votes: 8,550
Fifteenth Wellington Film Festival 1986
"He plays a connicing, self-infatuated, alcoholic, morbidly Catholic and misogynist gay writer. He may be a mess, but that's the way he likes it. His mind is a fetid fun factory of homosexual fantasy and garish premonitions of death..." - Bill Gosden
43. Ménage (1986)
84 min | Comedy, Crime, Drama
A bisexual petty criminal named Bob encounters a married couple arguing in a bar. Bob breaks up the fight and proceeds to seduce first the wife and then the husband. Then Bob teaches the ... See full summary »
Director: Bertrand Blier | Stars: Gérard Depardieu, Michel Blanc, Miou-Miou, Michel Creton
Votes: 3,612 | Gross: $0.93M
Fifteenth Wellington Film Festival 1986
"Despite his impressive range, one did not quite expect to see robust Gérard Depardieu falling for another man, especially one so nebbishy as Michel Blanc..." - Len., Variety, 7/5/86
44. Desert Hearts (1985)
R | 91 min | Drama, Romance
While waiting for her divorce papers, a repressed professor of literature is unexpectedly seduced by a carefree, spirited young lesbian.
Director: Donna Deitch | Stars: Helen Shaver, Patricia Charbonneau, Audra Lindley, Andra Akers
Votes: 7,296 | Gross: $2.49M
Fifteenth Wellington Film Festival 1986
"In the postmodernist '80s, it is risky to be romantic, unfashionable to be direct, and downright retrograde to be lesbian... It's probably obligatory to say that Desert Hearts isn't just a lesbian heart-throb movie, but a truly universal film of yearning and romance and the wish to belong. Sure, all true, but no big deal. What's really amazing is that it is a lesbian heart-throb movie." - B. Ruby Rich, Village Voice, 8/4/86
45. The Queen Is Dead (1986)
13 min | Short, Music
Three song clips by The Smiths ('The Queen is Dead', 'There is a Light that Never Goes Out' and 'Panic'), all directed with an artistic and conceptual vision by the late Derek Jarman. The ... See full summary »
Directors: Derek Jarman, Richard Heslop, John Maybury | Stars: Craig Gannon, Mike Joyce, Johnny Marr, Morrissey
Votes: 151
Sixteenth Wellington Film Festival 1987
"Three songs by The Smiths, set to images by Derek Jarman, Richard Heslop and John Maybury."
46. Parting Glances (1986)
Not Rated | 90 min | Drama, Music, Romance
As Michael and Robert, a gay couple in New York, prepare for Robert's departure for a two-year work assignment in Africa, Michael must face Robert's true motives for leaving while dealing ... See full summary »
Director: Bill Sherwood | Stars: John Bolger, Richard Ganoung, Steve Buscemi, Adam Nathan
Votes: 3,236 | Gross: $0.54M
Sixteenth Wellington Film Festival 1987
"No lachrymose little tale of maladjusted gay men or guys scared to die. The sexuality is a fact. Sherwood moves forward from that point..." - Helen Knode, LA Weekly, 14/3/86
47. Tandem (II) (1987)
20 min | Short
A young woman celebrates the life and mourns the death of her grandfather.
Directors: Greg Brice, Garth Maxwell | Star: Kirsten van der Meijden
Sixteenth Wellington Film Festival 1987
48. Colonel Redl (1985)
R | 144 min | Biography, Drama, History
Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl (Brandauer), an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become ... See full summary »
Director: István Szabó | Stars: Klaus Maria Brandauer, Hans Christian Blech, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gudrun Landgrebe
Votes: 3,342 | Gross: $0.00M
Sixteenth Wellington Film Festival 1987
"At the expense of his poverty-stricken family, his Jewishness, his homosexuality and friends, he makes a dramatic rise through the ranks of the crumbling Hapsburg Empire, only to discover, under the dyspeptic tutelage of the Archduke, that he will always be a suspicious, disposable intruder on the upper classes." - Jane Edwardes, Time Out, 27/11/85
49. Mystère Alexina (1985)
86 min | Drama
In 1856, fresh from life with nuns in an orphanage school, Alexina Barbin comes to a coastal village in La Rochelle to teach the village girls. She is deeply religious. She shares the ... See full summary »
Director: René Féret | Stars: Philippe Vuillemin, Valérie Stroh, Véronique Silver, Bernard Freyd
Votes: 111
The Mystery of Alexina
Sixteenth Wellington Film Festival 1987
"For two years they lived blissfully; gamboling through wildflowers, exchanging sisterly caresses in front of their students, sharing a lovers' bed at night. Then suddenly Alexina was stricken with severe pains in her abdomen. The doctor's diagnosis? She was male, or nearly so..." - Laurie Stone, Ms., 3/86
50. The Decline of the American Empire (1986)
R | 101 min | Comedy, Drama
Sexual revelations emerge when a group of academics and their partners spend a weekend at a country retreat.
Director: Denys Arcand | Stars: Dominique Michel, Dorothée Berryman, Louise Portal, Pierre Curzi
Votes: 8,699 | Gross: $1.90M
Sixteenth Wellington Film Festival 1987
"The group includes a gay professor who is a compulsive cruiser and a bored and betrayed housewife who has recently discovered the joys of S&M with a raunchy biker. Arcand is as nonjudgmental about them as he is about the other characters." - Elliott Stein, Film Comment, 12/86
51. Prick Up Your Ears (1987)
R | 105 min | Biography, Drama
Biographer John Lahr is writing a book about playwright Joe Orton. Joe and Kenneth meet at drama school and live together for ten years as lovers and collaborators. Both want to be writers, but only one of them is successful.
Director: Stephen Frears | Stars: Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Vanessa Redgrave, Wallace Shawn
Votes: 6,540 | Gross: $1.65M
Sixteenth Wellington Film Festival 1987
"Orton and Halliwell were lovers, co-authors of unpublished novels, jail-mates (for defacing library books) and then thorns in each other's flesh." - David Thomson, San Francisco Film Festival
52. I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987)
R | 81 min | Comedy, Drama
Scatterbrained Polly gets a job as a secretary in Gabrielle's art gallery. Polly aspires to be a professional photographer, and idolizes Gabrielle for her artistic ability. When Gabrielle ... See full summary »
Director: Patricia Rozema | Stars: Sheila McCarthy, Paule Baillargeon, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Richard Monette
Votes: 1,913 | Gross: $1.41M
Seventeenth Wellington Film Festival 1988
"Gabrielle and her lesbian lover transcend conventional villainy, and an allegorical subtext warning against blind faith in false gods is handled so lightly as to be virtually invisible."
53. Law of Desire (1987)
NC-17 | 102 min | Comedy, Drama, Thriller
A gay filmmaker becomes involved with an obsessive fan while still pining for his absent true love. Meanwhile, he shares a close but complex relationship with his trans sister, an actress.
Director: Pedro Almodóvar | Stars: Eusebio Poncela, Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Miguel Molina
Votes: 14,087
Seventeenth Wellington Film Festival 1988
"Although desire in this film leads to murder and suicide, Almodovar is resolutely unmoralistic about it - he neither punishes his characters nor treats them as case histories." - John Powers, LA Weekly, 24/4/87
54. Singing Seas (1988)
9 min | Short, Musical
Gay tribal life on a mythic South Sea island, with exotically attired beautiful men emerging from the sea.
Director: Mark Summerville | Stars: Ivan Davis, Taiaroa Royal
Seventeenth Wellington Film Festival 1988
"Gay tribal life on a mythic South Sea island with animals. As exotically attired and beautiful men emerge from the sea, it's impossible not to detect a tribute to Derek Jarman."
55. Hey Paris (1988)
18 min | Short, Music
A film adaptation of an original dance, set in a sleazy Paris cabaret nightclub, in which a man and a woman, sharing halves of the same suit, enact desire and gender through dance.
Director: Gregor Nicholas | Stars: Douglas Wright, Debra McCulloch, Gary Hunt, Danny Oxley
Seventeenth Wellington Film Festival 1988
"A film adaptation of an original dance, Hey Paris, with its semi-clad mand and woman duo, is a colourful comment on female/male interrelationships and gender mannerisms. Richly atmospheric, the film enhances the dance's sleazy cabaret style which evokes Brassai's images taken in the back-street clubs of Paris." - the producers
56. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
R | 88 min | Comedy, Drama
A television actress encounters a variety of eccentric characters after embarking on a journey to discover why her lover abruptly left her.
Director: Pedro Almodóvar | Stars: Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Julieta Serrano, Rossy de Palma
Votes: 46,483 | Gross: $7.18M
Eighteenth Wellington Film Festival 1989
57.
American Masters (1985– )
Episode:
James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket
(1989)
TV-14 | 87 min | Documentary, Biography, History
Profiles the life and work of author/civil rights activist, James Baldwin.
Director: Karen Thorsen | Stars: James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Frances Foster
Votes: 224
Nineteenth Wellington Film Festival 1990
"Asked by a rather dopey TV reporter why he so frequently wrote about being black and homosexual, James Baldwin replied, "I didn't have a lot of choice."" - Joseph McBride, Variety, 14/08/89
58. Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
79 min | Documentary, Biography, History
A collection of profiles of people dead from AIDS who are remembered in the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Directors: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman | Stars: Sara Lewinstein, David Mandell, Suzi Mandell, Sallie Perryman
Votes: 1,085
Nineteenth Wellington Film Festival 1990
"The tenderness of memory is offset by anger as the bereaved recall the insensitivity with which the person with AIDS, particularly the gay person with AIDS, is treated." - Bill Gosden
59. Apartment Zero (1988)
R | 124 min | Drama, Mystery, Thriller
In early 1980s Buenos Aires, a struggling movie theater owner takes in a roommate but suspects he is responsible for a series of political assassinations.
Director: Martin Donovan | Stars: Hart Bochner, Colin Firth, Dora Bryan, Liz Smith
Votes: 4,239 | Gross: $0.67M
Nineteenth Wellington Film Festival 1990
"His flat is chockablock with portraits of Monty Clift and Charles Laughton. He knows the casts and credits of every film ever made. He's unbearable. A tightass closet case, snotty, bitter and asocial." - Elliott Stein, Village Voice 24/10/89
60. Looking for Langston (1989)
R | 45 min | Biography, Drama
A black and white, fantasy-like recreation of high-society gay men during the Harlem Renaissance, with archival footage and photographs intercut with a story. A wake is going on, with ... See full summary »
Director: Isaac Julien | Stars: Ben Ellison, Matthew Baidoo, Akim Mogaji, John Wilson
Votes: 613
Nineteenth Wellington Film Festival 1990
"Resistance to the public exposure of Hughes' homosexuality only underscores the significance of the impulse prompting this film: the desire to foreground Hughes' identity as an important black American poet within the context of homosexual culture and its suppression in America." - Lisa Katzman, Film Comment, 11/89
61. Ballad of Reading Gaol (1989)
12 min | Short
Director: Richard Kwietniowski | Star: Quentin Crisp
Votes: 15
Nineteenth Wellington Film Festival 1990
"Words (1895) by Oscar Wilde."
62. Tongues Untied (1989)
Not Rated | 55 min | Documentary
A documentary about the experiences of black homosexual men living in the United States of America.
Director: Marlon Riggs | Stars: Marlon Riggs, Michael Bell, Kerrigan Black, Blackberri
Votes: 1,851
Nineteenth Wellington Film Festival 1990
"Tongues Untied erupts with the exhilarating energy of the newly liberated. Black American gay culture in all its diversity emerges from the celluloid closet in a rush of anger and elation – but there's a steady, controlling intelligence that makes this work all the more transfixing." - Bill Gosden
63. Damned If You Don't (1987)
Not Rated | 42 min | Short, Drama, Romance
"Damned If You Don't is a real prize. Beautifully shot in black and white, it blends conventional narrative technique with impressionistic camerawork, symbols and voicovers to create an ... See full summary »
Director: Su Friedrich | Stars: Peggy Healey, Makea MacDonald, Ela Troyano
Votes: 124
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Damned If You Don't is a meditation on lesbian sexuality in relation to a community of women - Catholic nuns - in which desire is all the more compelling for being bound and silenced." - Amy Taubin, Village Voice, 15/9/87
64. Gently Down the Stream (1981)
14 min | Short
GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM is constructed from fourteen dreams taken from eight years' worth of my journals. The text is scratched directly on to the film so that you hear your own voice as you... See full summary »
Director: Su Friedrich
Votes: 118
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"The text of this film is a succession of fourteen dreams taken from eight years of my journals... I chose to work with dreams that were the most troubling to me, that expressed my deepest fears, anxieties and longings, or ones that enforced a sudden awareness of a nagging problem." - Su Friedrich
65. Red Delicious (1991)
14 min | Short
Director: Garth Maxwell | Stars: Jessica Cardiff-Smith, Bart Hoera, Michael Mizrahi, Bob Mansbridge
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Eve and Adam eat the apple and face the seven deadly consequences."
66. Give AIDS the Freeze (1991)
2 min | Animation, Short, Comedy
A humorous PSA made to entertain (esp. young) people and remind them to protect themselves against AIDS.
Director: Cathy Joritz
Votes: 12
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Advice for strangers in the night."
67. Vaudeville (1991)
Not Rated | 55 min
A traveling theatrical troupe, made up primarily of gay and lesbian performers, mirrors the troubles of a political and social community through its tight-knit existence.
Director: Ira Sachs | Stars: Suzanne Cryer, Kathleen Donohue, Brad Friedman, Patrick Kerr
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"There they wreck grave psychic damage on the drab, straight world by flaunting their sexuality in front of the hostile locals." - Bill Gosden
68. Longtime Companion (1989)
R | 96 min | Drama, Romance
The emergence and devastation of the AIDS epidemic is chronicled in the lives of several gay men living during the 1980s.
Director: Norman René | Stars: Stephen Caffrey, Patrick Cassidy, Brian Cousins, Bruce Davison
Votes: 6,133 | Gross: $4.61M
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Though AIDS has devastated the film community, you'd never know it from Hollywood movies... The remarkable Longtime Companion is the first mainstream American movie to tackle the subject head-on. What's immediately apparent - and refreshing - is that writer Craig Lucas and director Norman Rene aren't the least bit afraid of their subject." - David Ansen, Newsweek, 14/5/90
69. Relax (1991)
25 min | Short
Steve, a gay man who lives with his lover Ned, has had multiple partners and is worried he may have the HIV virus. Ned tells him to relax and get tested. Steve can't relax: he's obsessed ... See full summary »
Director: Chris Newby | Stars: Philip Rosch, Timothy Keen, Grant Oatley, Joe Searby
Votes: 65
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"A young man awaits the result of his HIV test."
70. Paris Is Burning (1990)
R | 78 min | Documentary
A chronicle of New York's drag scene in the 1980s, focusing on balls, voguing and the ambitions and dreams of those who gave the era its warmth and vitality.
Director: Jennie Livingston | Stars: Brooke Xtravaganza, André Christian, Dorian Corey, Paris Duprée
Votes: 17,620 | Gross: $3.78M
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Livingston is smart enough not to reduce her subjects to the sum of their possible meanings, perhaps because she realises that the way the drag performers manipulate image and fetishes and the iconography of popular culture is for many of them a sophisticated form of humour." - Terence Rafferty, New Yorker, 25/3/91
71. Poison (1991)
R | 85 min | Drama, Horror, Romance
A boy shoots his father and flies out the window. A man falls in love with a fellow inmate in prison. A doctor accidentally ingests his experimental sex serum, wreaking havoc on the community.
Director: Todd Haynes | Stars: Edith Meeks, Larry Maxwell, Susan Norman, Millie White
Votes: 5,035 | Gross: $0.61M
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Every film targeted by right-wing bigots should be as intelligent, provocative and original as Poison." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 9/4/91
72. Proof (1991)
R | 86 min | Drama, Romance
The life of a blind photographer who is looked after by a housekeeper is disrupted by the arrival of an agreeable restaurant worker.
Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse | Stars: Hugo Weaving, Geneviève Picot, Russell Crowe, Heather Mitchell
Votes: 7,126 | Gross: $0.52M
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
73. Resonance (1991)
Not Rated | 11 min | Short, Drama, Romance
A stylized, wordless look at two men in Sydney: a gay man and a man who leads a gay-bashing gang. The gay man, recovering from his beating, practices dance that is sometimes tai chi, ... See full summary »
Director: Stephen Cummins | Stars: Andrea Aloise, Mathew Bergan, Chad Courtney, Annette Evans
Votes: 46
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"A poetic examination of what "resonates" from a gay bashing."
74. Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)
R | 120 min | Documentary, Music
Documentary following singer Madonna on her controversial Blond Ambition tour in 1990.
Director: Alek Keshishian | Stars: Madonna, Donna DeLory, Niki Haris, Luis Camacho
Votes: 10,037 | Gross: $15.01M
Truth or Dare: In Bed with Madonna
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Having her throat examined, talking gender-bent sex lives with pal Sandra Bernhard, cuddling near-naked in bed with her gay dancers or treating Warren Beatty like an aging girl toy to be pushed around her dressing room." - Daws, Variety, 6/5/91
75. Salmonberries (1991)
R | 95 min | Drama
A woman who grew up in a small town in Alaska goes to the public library to try and find out who her parents were. She was brought to town as a baby in a cardboard box with "Kotzebue" on it... See full summary »
Director: Percy Adlon | Stars: Rosel Zech, k.d. lang, Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, Eugene Omiak
Votes: 756 | Gross: $0.10M
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
"Eskimos are said to abandon their unwanted baby girls on the ice. Kotz takes that message to heart and lives her life disguised as a boy until, after falling in love with the town librarian, a blonde-haired German emigree called Roswitha, she reveals her true sexual identity." - Lucy O'Brien, City Limits, 9/4/92
76. Swoon (1992)
Unrated | 93 min | Crime, Drama
The true story of gay lovers, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold Jr. Who kidnapped and murdered a child in the early 1920s for kicks. The plot covers the months before the crime, the investigation, trial and final fate of the two men.
Director: Tom Kalin | Stars: Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester, Ron Vawter, Michael Kirby
Votes: 1,920 | Gross: $0.34M
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
"Swoon is not a 'politically correct' re-reading of the case from a gay point of view but an intense and glamorously queer enquiry into Leopold and Loeb: their family backgrounds, the cultural climate that shaped them, the way they planned and carried out their crimes and, best of all, their respective erotic fantasies." - Tony Rayns, Berlinale Journal, 19/2/92
77. Backyard Movie (1991)
9 min | Short
Handwritten notes from the filmmaker are superimposed over home movies. The narration describes the filmmaker's meditations on sexuality - at 20 when his mother asks him about his sexual ... See full summary »
Director: Bruce Weber | Star: Ric Arrango
Votes: 22
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
"Bruce Weber, with self-deprecating humour, relives his youthful cravings, adolescent crushes and overwhelming desire to look like Clint Eastwood."
78. Damned in the U.S.A. (1992)
Not Rated | 68 min | Documentary
A documentary about censorship in America.
Director: Paul Yule | Stars: Jimmy Tingle, David J. Albanese, Dennis Barrie, Luther Campbell
Votes: 64
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
"The film gives most thorough coverage to the 1990 case against an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs in Cincinnati. Like man such campaigns, the legal case against Mapplethorpe's monumentally blunt (if clinical) images of masturbation and gay sexual performance found a second, political arena, in the U.S. senate." - Bill Gosden
79. Naked Lunch (1991)
R | 115 min | Drama, Mystery
After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally kills his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in a port town in North Africa.
Director: David Cronenberg | Stars: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands
Votes: 56,685 | Gross: $2.54M
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
80. Voices from the Front (1991)
Not Rated | 88 min | Documentary
In New York City, a distraught activist confronts the mayor with a story of a friend who languished on a cot in an emergency room hallway for nine days, only to die 48 hours after leaving ... See full summary »
Directors: Sandra Elgear, Robyn Hutt, David Meieran | Star: Vito Russo
Votes: 27
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
"Voices makes its points with urgency and vibrancy. A noisy, frequently assaultive kaleidoscope... Polite, well-meaning dialogue is no longer feasible for achieving these goals." - Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle, 26/6/91
81. Edward II (1991)
R | 87 min | Drama, History, Romance
In this Derek Jarman version of Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan drama, in modern costumes and settings, Plantagenet king Edward II hands the power-craving nobility the perfect excuse by ... See full summary »
Director: Derek Jarman | Stars: Steven Waddington, Kevin Collins, Andrew Tiernan, John Lynch
Votes: 3,037 | Gross: $0.69M
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
"Jarman yanks his chosen text into the modern world rooting Marlowe's play in a malevolent society of conspicuous consumption, street riots and anti-gay legislation. Through the miracle of cinema, two sensibilities and two centuries become wondrously fused." - Geoff Brown, The Times, 17/10/91
82. The Living End (1992)
Unrated | 81 min | Comedy, Crime, Drama
Luke is a gay hustler. Jon is a movie critic. Both are HIV positive. They go on a hedonistic, dangerous journey, their motto "Fuck the world".
Director: Gregg Araki | Stars: Mike Dytri, Craig Gilmore, Mark Finch, Mary Woronov
Votes: 3,720 | Gross: $0.69M
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
"Abrasively funny, violently romantic and brazenly sexy, Gregg Araki's desperados-on-the-run movie is the most vitally of-the-moment on our programme." - Bill Gosden
83. The Hours and Times (1991)
57 min | Drama, Music
A fictionalized account of what may have happened when John Lennon and Brian Epstein went on holiday together to Spain in 1963.
Director: Christopher Munch | Stars: David Angus, Ian Hart, Stephanie Pack, Robin McDonald
Votes: 818 | Gross: $0.00M
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
"The film is an evocative mood piece that takes in a startling range of complicated emotions. Though both men were from Liverpool, the reserved, cultured Epstein would seem to have little in common with his playfully loutish client. But in Angus's rending performance, Epstein can't hide his longing. Lennon's reaction is by turns curious, teasing and deflective. Hart is uncanny; you can sense Lennon thinking on his feet." - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, 28/5/92
"A view of the past with the myopia of homophobia removed." - B. Ruby Rich, Village Voice, 24/3/92
84. RSVP (1992)
23 min | Short
Music's healing power. The week his lover Andrew has died of AIDS, Sid comes home to an empty apartment and turns on the radio to CBC's classical music program, RSVP. Jessye Norman sings Le... See full summary »
Director: Laurie Lynd | Stars: Stewart Arnott, Ferne Downey, Gordon Jocelyn, London Juno
Votes: 36
Twenty-first Wellington Film Festival 1992
85. The Wedding Banquet (1993)
R | 106 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance
To satisfy his nagging parents, a gay landlord and a female tenant agree to a marriage of convenience, but his parents arrive to visit and things get out of hand.
Director: Ang Lee | Stars: Winston Chao, May Chin, Ah-Lei Gua, Sihung Lung
Votes: 17,151 | Gross: $6.93M
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
Gao Wai-Tung has a happy and very settled life in Manhattan. Some shrewd real-estate investments keep him busy and comfortably well off; regular work-outs in the gym keep him in good shape; best of all, his Caucasion lover Simon cooks first-rate Chinese food. The only problem is Wai-Tung's elderly parents back in Taiwan. They expect him to marry and give them a grandchild." - Tony Rayns, Berlinale journal
86. Mirage (II) (1993)
Short
Directors: Nicky Marshall, Slamet Rahardjo | Stars: Sassy Acorn, David Aston
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"A young woman on the road with her father is frustrated by his failure to acknowledge her sexuality."
87. The Long Day Closes (1992)
PG | 85 min | Biography, Drama
A lyrical reverie about a young Liverpool boy coming of age in the 1950s among his loving family and the austere Catholic Church as he enters the rigors of school, nurtures a bedazzled love of the movies and longs for companionship.
Director: Terence Davies | Stars: Leigh McCormack, Marjorie Yates, Anthony Watson, Nicholas Lamont
Votes: 4,001 | Gross: $0.16M
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"Terence Davies describes the two years after his father died and before high school reacted mercilessly to his effeminacy as the happiest of his life. This film sings with that happiness." - Bill Gosden
Screened with: Elegy/1993/Chris Graves "Since I am still lucky enough to have a body, I decided to make a dance for my friends who have died of AIDS, and this is it." - Douglas Wright
88. Rules of the Road (1993)
Not Rated | 31 min | Short
Rules of the Road tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the primary objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling along the sides... See full summary »
Director: Su Friedrich | Star: Su Friedrich
Votes: 50
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
Videos by Sadie Benning
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"Watching these films chronologically, we witness the assertion of her lesbian identity growing hand in hand with her confidence as an artist." - Bill Gosden
90. Me and Rubyfruit (1989)
4 min | Short
Interpretation of "Rubyfruit Jungle".
Director: Sadie Benning
Votes: 68
Videos by Sadie Benning 22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
91. Jollies (1990)
11 min | Short
Short depicting a teenage lesbian in Milwaukee.
Director: Sadie Benning
Votes: 182
Videos by Sadie Benning 22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
Videos by Sadie Benning 22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
93. I Am My Own Woman (1992)
91 min | Documentary, Biography, Drama
The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berflede. Miss Charlotte survived the Nazi reign and the repression of the Communists as a transvestite and helped start the German ... See full summary »
Director: Rosa von Praunheim | Stars: Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Jens Taschner, Ichgola Androgyn, Robert Dietl
Votes: 200
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"In its way, this inspiring tale of a permanently shifted sexual identity making her way through successive political regimes is the real Orlando... The matter-of-factness with which she ever questioned her sexual identity - despite enormous incentive to do so - has the force of passion." - Bill Gosden
94. Together Alone (1991)
Unrated | 87 min | Drama
During the early AIDS epidemic, a young and insecure gay man meets another man with whom he spends the night, have sex, and shares life experiences and hopes for the future.
Director: P.J. Castellaneta | Stars: Terry Curry, Todd Stites
Votes: 126 | Gross: $0.11M
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"Though Together Alone is not an explicit movie - because the room is cold the two men dress right at the start; we never even see them kiss - it is highly sensual, almost painfully intimate." - Robert Massa, Village Voice, 29/9/92
95. Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (1992)
85 min | Documentary
Ten women, most of them in Vancouver or Toronto, talk about being lesbian in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: discovering the pulp fiction of the day about women in love, their own first ... See full summary »
Directors: Lynne Fernie, Aerlyn Weissman | Stars: Keely Moll, Stephanie Ozard, Ann Bannon, Reva Hutkin
Votes: 320
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"Fernie and Weissman have woven a complex oral history as recounted by black, native and white women from across Canada, ranging in age from 40 to 70, and living in both rural and urban settings. Still vibrant and rebellious, these women speak eloquently, and often hilariously, of their first loves, last husbands, heavy butch/femme scenes, cross-dressing, bar scenes, motorcycles, knife fights, racism, police harassment, job ghettoisation, and disappearing lesbian landmarks." - Toronto Film Festival
96. Wittgenstein (1993)
Not Rated | 72 min | Biography, Comedy, Drama
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 ... See full summary »
Director: Derek Jarman | Stars: Clancy Chassay, Jill Balcon, Sally Dexter, Gina Marsh
Votes: 2,931
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"Jarman makes a good deal less of Wittgenstein's homosexuality than one would expect, though the rampantly heterosexual Bertrand Russell is roundly lampooned." - Philip French, The Observer, 28/3/93
97. Desperate Remedies (1992)
R | 93 min | Comedy, Drama, Music
In a town called Hope on the edge of Britain's empire, desperations clash: the beautiful Dorothea Brook is desperate to free her pregnant sister Rose from the clutches of Fraser, a fortune ... See full summary »
Directors: Stewart Main, Peter Wells | Stars: Jennifer Ward-Lealand, Kevin Smith, Lisa Chappell, Cliff Curtis
Votes: 410 | Gross: $0.07M
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"Our two boldest gay filmmakers have constructed a delirious fantasia around the opportunities for female impersonation in a world where men - and lusty, good-looking men at that - are two a penny." - Bill Gosden
98. Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1992)
Not Rated | 63 min | Documentary, Biography
Documentary about the career and eventual death from AIDS of actor Rock Hudson.
Director: Mark Rappaport | Stars: Eric Farr, Lauren Bacall, Cyd Charisse, Marc Christian
Votes: 526
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"The underlying presumption is that Hudson's "real" gayness kept leaking through his portrayals of straight men." - Tony Rayns, Berlinale journal, 22/2/93
99. The Dead Boys' Club (1992)
Not Rated | 26 min | Short, Comedy, Drama
It's the 1990s. Toby, just out of college in Wisconsin, comes to Manhattan to spend the summer with his older cousin, Packard, a gay man whose lover John R. has just died of AIDS. Toby is ... See full summary »
Director: Mark Christopher | Stars: Nat DeWolf, Erik Van Der Wilden, Matt Decker, Ari Benjamin
Votes: 145
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"A '90s boy is transported to the '70s in this dramatised account of the generational differences wrought by AIDS."
100. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
R | 99 min | Biography, Crime, Drama
Two teenage girls share a unique bond; their parents, concerned that the friendship is too intense, separate them, and the girls take revenge.
Director: Peter Jackson | Stars: Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent
Votes: 67,422 | Gross: $3.05M
Twenty-third Wellington Film Festival 1994
"Forty years on, this story is still recalled in New Zealand as a warning of the dangers of "unnatural" closeness between girls." - Bill Gosden
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