Among the highlights at the 2009 Southwest Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which runs Oct. 9-15 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are:
Tom Murray's Amancio: Two Faces on a Tombstone, about the brutal murder of Yuma-based drag performer Amancio Corrales, whose body was found floating in the Colorado River. The local police didn't seem all that interested in solving the case, but Yuma resident Michael Baughman became determined to keep the hate crime in the public eye.
Chaim Elbaum's Israeli short And Thou Shalt Love tells the story of a young man studying in the special “Hesder” program for orthodox soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces. Much to his chagrin, said young man eventually comes to realization that he must answer some thorny questions to both himself and his god.
Sonia Sebastian's Girl Seeks Girl is a romantic comedy set in Madrid featuring several gorgeous lesbians. The film is an amalgam of the first episodes of a Spanish television series à la The L Word.
In Bohdan Sláma's Czech drama The Country Teacher, a Prague teacher finds refuge from his personal problems at an elementary school in a Czech village. Once there, he becomes attached to both an older woman and her 17-year-old son. Things become complicated when the teacher's boyfriend arrives from the big city.
Richard Laxton's An Englishman in New York, starring John Hurt as Queen of Queens Quentin Crisp.
Directed by Paul Morrison and written by Philippa Goslett, Little Ashes stars teen idol Robert Pattinson as (gasp!) Salvador Dali, Javier Beltran as Federico Garcia Lorca, and Matthew McNulty as Luis Buñuel. In the film, Dali develops feelings for Garcia Lorca, but can't quite handle them. Garcia Lorca, for his part, is the victim of an internal war between his sexual desires and his strict Catholic upbringing. And then comes the Spanish Civil War to mess things up even more.
In Simon Pearce's Shank, a British thug discovers love of a kind he wasn't quite expecting.
Ron Daniels' The War Boys follows three former high-school friends-turned-border vigilantes whose lives — after several deep, dark secrets come to the surface — become more difficult than those of desperate Mexicans trying to cross the US border.