Manolo Cardona and Cristian Mercado in Javier Fuentes-León’s romantic, supernatural gay Peruvian drama Undertow.
Robert Pattinson gay movie + incest & ghosts at Mundo Hispanico LGBT festival
The 23rd edition of image+nation, Montreal’s lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender film festival, will kick off with a screening of Javier Fuentes-León’s Peruvian drama Contracorriente / Undertow at the Cinéma Impérial on Thursday, Oct. 28.
The World Cinema (Dramatic) Audience Award winner at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and Peru’s 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submission, Undertow features a love triangle with supernatural undertones: a married fisherman is in love with another guy. The film is described in the festival’s press release as “Ghost meets Brokeback Mountain.”
Image+nation comes to a close on Nov. 7 with a screening of Medhi Ben Attia’s Le fil / The String, a Franco-Belgian comedy-drama starring Antonin Stahly-Vishwanadan (the son), veteran Claudia Cardinale (the mother), in addition to a dose of social commentary.
“In response to the cinematic watershed of LGBT-themed films from South America and Spain in the past year,” explains the image+nation press release, the 2010 edition of Montreal’s LGBT film festival will present “Mundo Hispanico.”
Countries represented in “Mundo Hispanico” are Spain, Uruguay, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil – where people speak Portuguese, not Spanish.
But hey, were I a Brazilian filmmaker I’d be happy to have my movie included in any film festival sidebar, be it Mundo Hispanico, Mundo Mongolico, or Mondo Cane. If people showed up to check out my movie, that’d be all I’d care about. (How about “Mundo Ibérico” for next time, which could then include some Portuguese cinematic efforts as well?)
In addition to opening-night film, the supernatural love story Undertow (Peru), “Mundo Hispanico” will feature, among others, Aluízio Abranches’ controversial incest-themed Do Começo ao Fim / From Beginning to End (Brazil), about two hunky brothers in love; Lucía Puenzo’s El niño pez / The Fish Child (Argentina), about two lesbian lovers who resort to crime; and Paul Morrison’s Little Ashes (Spain), an English-language drama featuring Robert Pattinson as Salvador Dali.