Weekend: Sunday 28 April, 7:30pm
Bad Education: Sunday 26 May, 7pm
Desert Hearts: Sunday 30 June, 7.30pm
In February 2020, GFT previewed Céline Sciamma’s now iconic lesbian love drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire. In a packed Cinema One screening, a wonderful range of people huddled together to watch something breathtaking. I personally hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. When the film came to end, the audience sat in stunned silence for a moment before breaking out into a rapturous applause. The energy in the cinema, a celebration of queer filmmaking and storytelling, was magnetic.
A few years previously in 2017, Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight, a thoughtful intersectional exploration of queer sexuality and identity won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and later the same year Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name saw audiences flock to the cinema to see Timothée Chalamet’s heart get broken by an older man.
Around this time perhaps marks a shift in queer cinema which has now spilled over to the mainstream and is much more present at award ceremonies and in popular culture than in previous years. A recent boom in lesbian genre films such as Bottoms, Drive-Away Dolls, and Love Lies Bleeding, and indie hits such as Passages and All of Us Strangers indicates an increasing range of films with queer characters and stories which are flooding the big screen and reaching wider audiences.
Now seems like as exciting a time as ever to dive into the rich catalogue of LGBTQ+ cinema which is what Queer Cinema Sundays is offering. A screening on the last Sunday of the month will allow audiences a chance to discover and rediscover their favourite queer films in the shared space of the cinema. The first three films that have been selected offer a short anti-chronological introduction to the season.
After the success of Andrew Haigh’s moving portrayal of gay love and identity in All of Us Strangers earlier this year, it is fitting to revisit his earlier, more subdued 2011 feature film Weekend. It follows a mild-mannered lifeguard, Russell (Tom Cullen), who meets Glen (Chris New), a politically outspoken aspiring artist, at a gay club and the two hit it off after a one-night stand. Just when the connection begins to feel promising, Glen reveals that he is moving to the US for an art course at the end of the weekend. Over the next precious few hours that they spend together, the two men unravel each other, exploring their different relationships with their gay identities by talking through their past sexual encounters and relationships, gay politics, and coming out. In one particularly moving scene, Glen roleplays as Russell’s father — allowing him the chance to come out to his parent, an opportunity he never got as he grew up in the foster care system. ‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ he tells Russell. ‘I love you just the same.’ The bittersweet scene fuses loss and the complexity of family dynamics for queer people — themes Haigh would later expand on in All of Us Strangers.
The way that Haigh intimately portrays the inner lives and feelings of these two men is striking. For an art project, Glen has his one-night stands record themselves speaking about the previous night’s encounters. Not dissimilarly, Russell writes private notes on his thoughts and feelings after sleeping with men. In a review at the time for Little White Lies, Paul Weedon speculated that Weekend could be ‘challenging to sell to mainstream audiences’ but nonetheless hailed Haigh as an exciting new voice in LGBTQ+ filmmaking. Like Weedon’s prediction about the film, Glen smirks that straight people wouldn’t be interested in his art project about gay life and sex. The same cannot be said for All of Us Strangers which explores similar themes but was a critical and popular success, perhaps indicating a significant cultural shift in the time between the two films.
The following screening for Queer Cinema Sundays will be Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 melodramatic noir Bad Education. Almodóvar is not only one of Europe’s most distinctive working directors but has contributed a significant body of work which explores queer identities in his films such as Law of Desire (1987), All About My Mother (1999), Pain and Glory (2019) and his recent short film Strange Way of Life (2023).
Bad Education, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in May, stars Gael García Bernal as Ignacio, an actor, now going by the name Angel who pays a visit to filmmaker and first love Enrique (Fele Martínez) with a script based on their childhood together at a Catholic boarding school where they suffered at the hands of a tyrannous priest. The film soon unravels into a story-within-a-story narrative with sensational twists and a blur between fiction and reality. With a suspenseful Hitchcockian score and nods to classical Hollywood film noirs (in one scene two of the characters hide out in a cinema which is screening a film noir season), Almodóvar adds his signature bright colour palette and melodrama to this classical genre.
Bad Education was the first Spanish film to open Cannes Film Festival and contains many of the key signifiers of the auteur’s work, such as a campy collaged aesthetic, a non-linear narrative structure, challenging themes, and an interest in subverting sexual and gendered norms. As Roger Ebert wrote while reviewing the film in 2004, the film does not ‘have a statement to make about homosexuality, which for Almodóvar is no more of a topic than heterosexuality is for Clint Eastwood.’ Despite these complex components, Almodóvar is not only a critically acclaimed director, but his films have a long-standing popularity amongst indie cinema audiences. Bad Education, from which Almodóvar drew upon his own experiences at a Catholic boarding school, exemplifies the director’s qualities as a queer auteur at their best.
In June, just in time for Pride Month, the Queer Cinema Sundays screening will be Donna Deitch’s iconic 1985 film Desert Hearts. Regarded as the first film to present a positive portrayal of a lesbian relationship and one which grants its leading couple a happy ending, Desert Hearts is a must-see sensation of queer filmmaking. As a predecessor to the New Queer Wave cinema of the 1990s — where a fertile ground for independent filmmaking saw a rise in films with LGBTQ+ themes and characters — Desert Hearts was for some time one of the few films where queer women could see themselves represented in a positive and overt way. According to B. Ruby Rich, video clips from the film were screened in lesbian bars in the US repetitively.
Desert Hearts was independently produced, financed, and directed by Donna Deitch and filmed beautifully by cinematographer Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood). The film follows a highly-strung English Professor Vivian (Helen Shaver) who arrives in Reno, Nevada in 1959 to legalise her divorce. There she meets the younger and free-spirited Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) whose openness and charm win over Vivian’s heart.
Despite being such a trailblazing film, Desert Hearts, like a lot of women-directed features, goes through waves of being forgotten and rediscovered. A 2017 Criterion Collection restoration and the rise of film clips being shared among younger film enthusiasts on social media platforms such as TikTok, has breathed new life into the film in recent years. Nearly 40 years later, there are still so few films like this one.
The hope for this season is to explore the rich history of LGBTQ+ films on the big screen with a shared audience. From classics to underseen gems, Queer Cinema Sundays will offer audiences the chance to see an LGBTQ+ film every month and explore the unique perspectives offered by queer filmmaking.
Rosie Beattie, Film Programmer
22 April 2024
Click here to book your tickets for the films in our Queer Cinema Sundays programme.
SUPPORT GFT WITH £50 FOR OUR 50TH BIRTHDAY
Whilst our box office and bar sales only cover around 50% of our annual costs and help keep the film reels rolling, we rely on donations and fundraising to run our education and community activities. We need your help! Celebrate 50 years of GFT by donating £50. A £50 donation secures your seat at our special January screening. Find out more or donate via glasgowfilm.org/donate.
Shape the next 50 years of independent film. Your contribution matters.
