Queer films in the NZIFF 1979-1998
by Quinoa_Chris_Kirk | Public
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."
The Eighth Wellington Film Festival 1979
"In this film we show two homosexuals who love each other and try to live happily together."
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..."
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."
The Eighth Wellington Film Festival 1979
Pourquoi Pas! The 9th Wellington Film Festival 1980
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
The 11th Wellington Film Festival 1982
"An effectively blunt, blatantly doctrinaire, altogether exemplary piece of agit-prop filmmaking."
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."
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."
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."
The Thirteenth Wellington Film Festival 1984
"A film about suspension, ambivalence and desire. Will they? Won't they?"
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."
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
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..."
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Fifteenth Wellington Film Festival 1986
"A documentary profiling eight older gays and lesbians."
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
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
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
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
Sixteenth Wellington Film Festival 1987
"Three songs by The Smiths, set to images by Derek Jarman, Richard Heslop and John Maybury."
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
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
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
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
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
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."
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
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."
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
Eighteenth Wellington Film Festival 1989
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
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
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
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
Nineteenth Wellington Film Festival 1990
"Words (1895) by Oscar Wilde."
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
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
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
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Eve and Adam eat the apple and face the seven deadly consequences."
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"Advice for strangers in the night."
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
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
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"A young man awaits the result of his HIV test."
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
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
Twentieth Wellington Film Festival 1991
"A poetic examination of what "resonates" from a gay bashing."
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
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
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
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."
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
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
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
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
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
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
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"A young woman on the road with her father is frustrated by his failure to acknowledge her sexuality."
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
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
Videos by Sadie Benning 22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
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
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
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
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
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
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
22nd Wellington Film Festival 1993
"A '90s boy is transported to the '70s in this dramatised account of the generational differences wrought by AIDS."
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