Anchor & Hope
Carlos Marques-Marcet’s debut, 10.000 Km, is an incredible portrait of a long-distance relationship slowly fraying, told almost entirely via Skype. His second feature reunites him with leads Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer, and ropes in Tena’s Game Of Thrones co-star Oona Chaplin and her mum, Geraldine Chaplin. It finds a same-sex couple, living on a canal boat in London, roping in their oddball, hirsute Spanish pal to serve as sperm donor for a child. It’s a study of the complexity and complications of human behaviour, interrogating what relationships are built upon, Marques-Marcet a director who allows actors a chance to truly shine.
15 Feb, Event Cinemas George Street
Boys and Sauvage
Two MGFF flicks form a distinct pair: Boys and Sauvage each grim, impressive French art movies starring Félix Maritaud, from recent French queer standouts BPM (Beats Per Minute) and Knife + Heart, as the self-destructive protagonist. The former is a stylised study of a tragic adolescence (set in 1997, year of Diana’s death and Gregg Araki’s Nowhere) haunting a wayward 30-something – the root of his anger, violence, and nihilism. Self-destructiveness turns into grim scrapping for survival in Sauvage, which, in Dardennes-influenced sociorealist shades, follows a homeless sex worker desperately trying to make it through a series of bleak days and bleaker nights, submitting himself to horrifying humiliations all the while.
15 Feb, Event Cinemas George Street
22 & 27 Feb, Event Cinemas George Street
The Favourite
It’s one of the films of the year, an Oscars-bound juggernaut that’s a breath of fresh air in the awards show realm: a queer film that isn’t some earnest issues movie or dreary tragedy. Instead, The Favourite’s a wild, wicked, ridiculous redrawing of period piece clichés, an acidic, absurdist comedy that turns 18th-century court rivalry into something utterly savage, almost surreal. It’s the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, don of the Greek weirdwave, who, after earning Kubrick comparisons with The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, delivers hyperstylised, perspective-distorting direction that plays like Barry Lyndon by way of A Clockwork Orange.
27 Feb, Event Cinemas George Street
Good Manners
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Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s genuinely odd flick is a long, strange trip, moving through distinct acts that often feel like thrown gauntlets, those who like tonal consistency or even singular genre thrown for a loop. It opens as almost Bergman-esque psychosexual parlour drama, in which two women from different social strata end up as lovers, confined to the one house. After a musical number and an animated interlude, Good Manners turns into a werewolf movie, boasting an evil kid and some terrible CGI. The theme of class percolates throughout, uniting the film’s disparate narrative modes.
16 Feb, Event Cinemas George Street
Maurice
Digitally restored for its 30th anniversary, Maurice’s re-arrival on the festival circuit has allowed a whole new generation to revel in the tender wonders of this queer classic – a resplendent period piece that’s a cinematic study of both forbidden passion and old-fashioned English repression. Starring the ever-so-pretty young Hugh Grant and various gentlemen in cricket whites, it’s a Merchant Ivory adaptation of an EM Forster novel, in which young school chums in Edwardian England move in and out of each other’s lives over the years, their love at once eternal and sidelined, sweet and tragic.
24 Feb, Event Cinemas George Street
Postcards From London
This candy-coloured, blindingly ersatz, metatheatrical flick looks and moves like a musical, though it’s, somehow, without actual song-and-dance numbers. Here, Harris Dickinson (the boy from Beach Rats) plays a handsome young Englishman who ends up landing in a neon-lit, nocturnal, storybook Soho, where a chorus of rent boys recast their paid-for-pleasure position as some mix between muse, geisha, method actor, and smug as shit poseur. Full of cutesy postmodernism, art history, wilful idiosyncrasy, and surrealist set pieces, Postcards From London lands somewhere between stage production and cinematic fever dream – at once slight and singular, cutesy and audacious.
15 Feb, Event Cinemas George Street
Rafiki
Watching Rafiki, an otherwise familiar-feeling portrait of same-sex attraction in an oppressive society, I was struck by a small but distinctly audible filmmaking gesture. The pic’s a portrait of two Nairobi girls whose budding romance challenges African cultural and legal stigmatisation of homosexuality - homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, where the film itself was initially banned. This early friendship and flirtation is sweet, but it’s when our teen paramours kiss that it feels ever so real: director Wanuri Kahiu - in league with sound designer Noemi Hampel - captures every tiny smacking of lips, sound conveying the pressed wetness, tactility, and physicality of kissing in a way few films do.
28 Feb, Event Cinemas George Street
The Mardi Gras Film Festival runs in selected cinemas from 13 Feb. Head here to find out more info.
