The 2009 edition of the Austin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, billed as the oldest and largest gay film festival in the American Southwest, will take place from Sept. 8-13
Among the screening films are:
Writer-director Caspar Andreas' Between Love & Goodbye, in which two lovers, Marcel (Justin Tensen) and Kyle (Simon Miller), find their happiness seriously threatened once Kyle's former prostitute transgender sister (Rob Harmon) moves in with them.
Fred M. Caruso's The Big Gay Musical, the story of two actors, Paul (Daniel Robinson) and Eddie (Joey Dudding), whose private lives mirror their stage roles in a play called "Adam and Steve, Just the Way God Made 'em": while Paul searches for True Love, Eddie struggles with his reactionary parents. Adult-film superstar Brent Corrigan has a cameo.
Jim Verburg's five-minute short For a Relationship, which uses photographs to chronicle the filmmaker's two-year relationship with another man.
Shamim Sarif's I Can't Think Straight, about a Jordanian woman (Lisa Ray) and an Indian woman (Sheetal Sheth) who fall in love, but must first find a way out of their stifling cultures. Curiously, that same year — 2007 — both Ray and Sheth (two of the most stunning-looking actresses around) starred in another forbidden lesbian love drama directed by Sarif, The World Unseen, set in Apartheid-plagued South Africa.
In Tracy D. Smith's short On the Bus, an insecure young man manages to talk to the man of his dreams — but only in his head.
Directed by Ron Daniels and written by Bruce McLeod and Naomi Wallace, The War Boys focuses on three childhood friends, David (Benjamin Walker), George (Brian J. Smith), and Greg (Victor Rasuk), who, while hunting illegal border-crossers, realize that both their mutual relationship and their own individual lives have more shady layers and dark corners than the Rio Grande.
Between Love and Good-bye could have been so much better
I was disappointed.
The actors were good but the story needed more something.