10 Hidden Gems About Queer Male Desire
1. L’Homme Blessé (Dir: Patrice Chéreau, 1983, France)
Masterfully acted by Jean-Hugues Anglade and directed by the great French filmmaker Patrice Chéreau, this film is a daring and ahead-of-its-time portrait of the anguishes of a young gay man in love with a manipulative criminal.
2. The Garden (Derek Jarman, 1990, United Kingdom)
The great Derek Jarman delivers a visual and metaphorical narrative about the struggles of the gay community having to face oppression, criminalization, stigmatization and society’s homophobia. With his current collaborator, Tilda Swinton, Jarman makes an experimental movie that is very poetical, haunting and unique.
3. Young Soul Rebels (Isaac Julien, 1991, United Kingdom)
A great exponent of the New Queer Cinema. This film touches the subjects of racism, homophobia, black and queer identity, contracultural movements, police violence, punk music, love and desire. A rare kind of film that speaks of themes rarely seen on the big screen even nowadays. It tells the story of the friends Chris and Caz, who run a pirate radio station from a tower block in Dalston, East London.
4. Dong gong xi gong (East Palace, West Palace) (Yuan Zhang, 1996, China)
The first Mainland Chinese movie with an explicitly homosexual theme. The film tells the story of a young gay writer A-Lan who, being attracted to a young policeman, manages to have himself interrogated for a whole night. In placing the openly gay protagonist and the homophobic policeman alone in a room, the movie was able to explore the relations of power, masculinity, and repressed desire with a haunting and, at the same time, sensual atmosphere.
5. Wild Side (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2004, France)
The film is a tender and melancholic portrait of three outsiders who love each other: Stéphanie, a transsexual prostitute; Djamel, an Egyptian hustler and Mikhail, a Russian man who works in a restaurant. Fluid and working like an everyday simple tale, the movie showcases these three characters in a very intimate and sincere way.
6. Soundless Wind Chime (Kit Hung, 2009, Hong-Kong/ Switzerland/ Germany)
An impressionist tale of love, grief and regret which tells the story of Ricky, who leaves Hong-Hong to look for the lost soul and the past of his deceased Swiss lover, Pascal. Ricky struggles with the confusion of memories, reality and illusion.
7. L’Armée du Salut (Abdellah Taia, 2013, France/ Marocco)
The Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, debuts his filmmaking with an autobiographical adaptation of his homonymous novel. A crude, realistic and intimate coming-of-age about the formation of identity, sexuality and desire and that showcases the difficulties of immigrants in France.
8. Onthakan (The Blue Hour) (Anucha Boonyawatana, 2015, Thailand)
A genre-bending love story about a bullied loner, Tam, who finds solace in the arms of Phum, a boy he meets at a haunted swimming pool. The Blue Hour is a thriller with glances of horror and teenage romance. Sometimes tender, sometimes disturbing, this film is very unlike and unique.
9. Spa Night (Andrew Ahn, 2016, United States)
This minimalistic sensorial film is a hauntingly blurry study on repression, tradition, foreignness, desire and family bound. It tells the story of David, a Korean-American teenager who starts working in a spa to help his struggling family. There he has contact with gay men who uses the spa for sex, and this new reality both scares and excites him.
10. Corpo Elétrico (Body Electric) (Marcelo Caetano, 2017, Brazil)
This film is a fluid and naturalistic study of the every-day-life of factory workers in the northeast of Brazil. The protagonist is Elias, a gay young man who spends his days working in a fabric factory, having love affairs and getting out with his friends. This movie works like a chronic full of energy, love, truth and an elegant simplicity.
