image+nation is officially on

I’m especially interested in A Walk into the Sea showing this Friday, but there’s lots of good in the program, and still time left to check it!

Montréal, Thursday, November 1st 2007 – image+nation, Canada’s oldest and largest LGBT film festival, will cap off two remarkable decades of vibrant queer cinema when its 20th edition unspools in Montréal from November 15 to 25. What a core group of relentlessly devoted LGBT community organizers, artists and academics established a generation ago has grown from a modest if valiant annual happening into an internationally renowned film festival with a strong loyal following and an always impressive lineup featuring the year’s best queer offerings. image+nation, which caters to the cinematic tastes of queers as well as queer-friendly patrons, will serve up a cornucopia of groundbreaking works of fiction, enlightening docs, provocative shorts and everything in between during 11 days of wall-to-wall inventive cinema. What’s more, an international workshop bringing together a plethora of eminent scholars, artists and programmers from five continents will mark image+nation’s twentieth anniversary, asking ‘’where are we now, where have we been, and where are we going?’’

And more good sounding stuff from the release:

Basic human rights and social justice are also on image+nation’s advocacy agenda, as the vital documentaries A Jihad for Love (Parvez Sharma, US/UK/France/Germany/Australia), Belgrade Pride (Douglas Conrad, USA) and Two Homelands: Cuba and the Night (Christian Liffers, Germany) corroborate the necessity to shed light on the drastically dissimilar global LGBT realities to affect change in certain parts of the world. A Jihad for Love’s director, as well as producer Sandi Dubowski (Trembling Before G-d) and one of the film’s characters, will be in Montréal for the Quebec premiere of their film, the first full-length documentary about devout gay and lesbian Muslims.

STELLAR LINEUP CULLED FROM WORLD FESTIVAL CIRCUIT

Staying true to form, image+nation’s 20th edition promises to deliver a slew of award-winning works hailing from the four corners of the globe. For starters, image+nation20’s centerpiece feature, André Téchiné’s Les témoins – nominated for a Golden Bear award at this year’s Berlinale Film Festival – is a masterful ensemble drama set in 1984 Paris during the AIDS outbreak. Among the feature films in competition are Avant que j’oublie (Jacques Nolot, France), a spare, unconventional treatment of hustler-dom by actor-director Nolot (Sous le sable, Les Roseaux sauvages). Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story (Martin Weisz, Germany) is an imaginative interpretation of the real-life Armin Miewes and Bernd Jürgen Brandes case of consensual cannibalism that was until recently banned in Germany. Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, UK) is a spicy Bollywood-laden flick about the importance of taking one’s time in Indian cuisine and love, from the director of Jodie: An Icon. The first South Korean feature by an out queer director, No Regret (Leesong Hee-il, South Korea) follows openly gay orphan Su-Min on his journey to study art design in Seoul in this formidable directorial debut. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Duncan Roy, USA) is an audacious, openly gay interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novella of loss and redemption, and a magnificent companion piece for our deeply shallow times! Spider Lillies (Zero Chou, Taiwan), is a powerful lesbian tragedy replete with tattoos, soft-porn webcam fun and magic realism that garnered the Berlinale’s Teddy Award earlier this year.

Also be on the lookout for Jamie Babbit’s (But I’m a Cheerleader, TV’s Popular) latest gem Itty Bitty Titty Committee (USA), a riot-grrrl rom-com with a queer spin and a killer soundtrack. Breakfast with Scot (Laurie Lynd, Canada) is a Canadian Ma vie en rose – with skating and snow – about a high-profile NHL commentator and professional closet queen who will go to great lengths to avoid laying his cards out for all to see! As part of a special 20+ Classics initiative, two newly restored queer classics will also be screened: Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (USA, 1986) and Philippe Vallois’ Johan: mon été 1975 (France, 1976).

http://www.image-nation.org/