The New Zealand Film Festival is back for another stellar season that includes a special GLBT section, viewable right at your fingertips.

Simply head to www.nzff.co.nz or pick up a guide from vendors in the 14 towns and cities showing the festival to find the “Lesbian Gay Bi Trans” section, which features seven stellar films.

Beauty

This ferocious, compact drama of repression electrified and divided audiences at Cannes. Francois, a tough, buttoned-down married man, develops a disturbed obsession with his friends’ handsome son. The camera accompanies him in envious pursuit of the self-possessed young man. Directed and co-written by young South African Oliver Hermanus, it is an illuminating, indelible portrait of an angry white man in South Africa, no longer a member of the ruling elite, maintaining his racism along with a disgust for homosexuals that barely masks his self-loathing. “This deeply disturbing jaunt lulls the viewer into a rhythm of sameness before destroying all notions of safety… Beauty is a dynamic character study of a human cannonball waiting to rip through the walls of life-long repression, but it’s the most difficult cinematic experience I’ve had at Cannes.” — Glenn Heath Jr, Slant

Beginners

In a romantic comedy of appealing depth and thoughtfulness, Oliver, a Los Angeles graphic designer (Ewan McGregor, slow-burningly charming) ponders his budding new relationship with a mercurial young actress named Anna (Mélanie Laurent). In effect he’s considering his own dismal record of commitment-phobia in the light of what he’s been finding out about his parents’ marriage. Providing punchy magazine cut-up collages to characterise each era, the film moves easily amongst several time periods to achieve an affecting appreciation of their uneasy union.

Writer/director Mike Mills (who is married to artist/filmmaker Miranda July) based Beginners on experience. Almost immediately after the death of his mother, his 75-year-old father announced that he was gay, always had been, and intended finally to do something about it.

Circumstance

The world of sex, drugs, and underground nightclubs in Iran provides the backdrop for Maryam Keshavarz’s lusty, dreamy take on the passionate teenagers behind the hijabs. Risking jail and worse are the sassy, privileged Atafeh and the beautiful, orphaned Shireen, who, much like young women anywhere, just want to be free… The difference here is that they’re under constant, unnerving surveillance, in a country where more than 70 per cent of the population is younger than 30. Nevertheless, within their mansion walls and without, beneath graffitied walls and undulating at intoxicating house parties, the two girls begin to fall in love with each other, as Atafeh’s handsome, albeit creepy older brother Mehran gazes on. Filmed underground in Beirut.

Heartbeats

French-Canadian prodigy Xavier Dolan (I Killed My Mother) took Cannes by storm a second time last year (aged 21) with this sharp, ebulliently stylish tale of two best friends competing for the attention of the same boy. Francis (Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) are a couple of drop-dead gorgeous twenty-something hipsters whose friendship is rocked when they both fall for Nicolas. Luscious and elusive, the curly-headed blonde is the definition of ambiguous, flirting with both of them and enjoying the power of his attractiveness. Intoxicated by the image of Nicolas (in one party scene, Francis sees him as a series of Cocteau drawings while Marie sees Michelangelo’s statue of David), the pair refuse to let reality intrude on their constructed world. Dolan’s queer reworking of the romantic ménage à trois is heightened by a black, psychological dimension that constantly threatens to disrupt the film’s dreamy surfaces.

She Monkeys

Immersed in the world of competitive equestrian vaulting, introverted striver Emma and cool, self-assured Cassandra find themselves drawn to each other, first as friends, then as rivals. Meanwhile, Emma’s eight-year-old sister tests out her own understanding of attraction and power as she attempts to seduce her alarmed teenage babysitter. Incisive direction and unwavering performances by a non-professional cast lend startling force and psychological exactness to this raw, sexually charged drama of adolescent power play and small-town emotional austerity.

Tomboys

(Preview does not have sub-titles)

Confirming the talent shown in her debut Water Lilies, Céline Sciamma explores, with luminous grace, children’s notions of gender and identity. Ten-year-old Laure and her family have just moved to a new neighbourhood. Her mother is heavily pregnant with a third child, a baby brother for Laure and little sister Jeanne. Androgynous Laure hovers between childhood and something else, still romping around at home with giggly Jeanne in her thrall, but also keen to strike out on her own and enjoy what’s left of the summer holidays. When Lisa, a next-door neighbour Laure’s age, asks Laure her name, she forthrightly responds ‘Michaël’. Soon Michaël, barechested and bold, is playing soccer with the local boys. However, trying out boys’ stuff requires deception that Laure will have difficulty maintaining. Among the terrific, unaffected performances from the young cast, Zoé Héran’s Laure/Michaël is a knockout.

Weekend

A brief encounter proves mutually disarming for two temperamentally opposite young men in a salty, insightful love story buoyed by sex, drugs and testing differences of opinion. Russell, a pool lifeguard, parties with his straight friends before heading to a bar where he picks up Glen. Glen turns out next morning to be a right live wire, a one-man gay liberation front, not really Russell’s style at all. Could be, though, that what separates these two is stuff that registers deep with them both.