Following a censored broadcast of the multiple-award winning Brokeback Mountain — minus the gay lovemaking scenes — on one of Italy's public TV channels, Rai Due, Italian gay rights' groups have demanded that the network's director, Antonio Marano, explain the channel's decision to censor the film.
Adding insult to injury, the cuts came days after the Vatican attacked an EU proposal for the UN to formally condemn anti-gay discrimination. (Now, when does the Catholic Boycott begin? Which film festivals will be affected in Catholic states and/or countries?)
"Who had the presumption to think that an adult public could not handle the sight of kissing and intimacy between two men?" inquired Aurelio Mancuso, president of the gay advocacy group Arcigay, which has also petitioned Rai Due to show Brokeback Mountain minus the cuts as "a conciliatory gesture."
According to the Arcigay website, Marano has explained that the cuts were an "accident" — Brokeback Mountain was supposed to be have been aired at an earlier TV slot in which gay kissing is apparently a big no-no — and that the film will be shown in its entirety "at the first chance." Curiously, the film's heterosexual sex scene was left intact in the censored version. (Youtube has a similar double standard, as a viewer's age must be confirmed before they get a chance to watch a gay kiss montage, but there's no such requirement for hetero movie kissing.)
According to The Guardian, Il Giornale, the newspaper owned by right-wing prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's family, "dismissed the protest as the work of 'the politically correct lobby.'" Vladimir Luxuria, a transsexual former member of parliament, saw the matter differently, stating that the version aired on Rai Due was like "the Mona Lisa without a head."
Directed by Ang Lee, and starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ranchhands in love, Brokeback Mountain won the Golden Lion at the 2005 Venice Film Festival, and went on to garner dozens of accolades including Academy Awards for best direction, best adapted screenplay, and best original score.
As an aside: I get RAI international as part of my cable line-up. If RAI's programming is a reflection of Italian culture at the beginning of the third millennium, then it's a good thing that Michelangelo, Dante, Da Vinci — even the Borgias — have been dead for centuries. Were they alive now, either they'd be hosting some Italian Idol variant or, more likely, they'd be slashing one another's wrists.
Oh. I stand corrected.
You are mistake and confuse!
I would like to watch two man using a organ to §excre$ment% as sex!
Broke
If thback Mountainb is a %pornogr&aphic& film… e personal of Hollywood haven't any kind of imagination it is better close their studios like the automobile industry in USA!
You got your mountains confused. This post is about the 2005 film "Brokeback Mountain," not the 2006 video "Bareback Mountain."
There are lot of pornographic videos in video shops. Adult people can take one if they have interesse!
It isn't necessary that the children would see the sex scene of these film.
Congratulation for authorities of Italian government. They have seen the true bad intention of the dirty people of Hollywood.
It is true that the pornographic film industry has more profit and not so much expenses as the normal film and they would be making lot of competition against normal films …but these personal of Hollywood can try to have a little more imagination to make their films!