1987 Boston Gay & Lesbian Film Festival

The final part of Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life series is rich with exotic tales of slaves and kings, potions, betrayals, demons and, most of all, love and lovemaking in all its myriad forms. Mysterious and liberating, this is an exquisitely dreamlike and adult interpretation of the original folk tales.

Manhattanites Bruce and Prudence are each looking for a meaningful romantic relationship and have been encouraged by their psychiatrists to find someone through the personal ads. Their first meeting is disastrous, but they begin to hit it off during their second date. However, Bruce’s bisexual, live-in lover does not want to share Bruce and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep him to himself.

José is an unemployed 18-year-old living in a cramped apartment in the slums of Madrid. Marginalized by poverty, José spends his time with his friend Antonio. However, when Antonio gets his girlfriend, Rosario, pregnant, the two friends try anything to get the money to pay for her to have an abortion.

Family honor, greed, machismo, homophobia, and dreams collide in a small Mexican town.

Henri is a lonely, isolated young man who lets no one get close to him. He meets a street hustler and comes out of his shell, going 180 degrees into gay obsession. Though he has yet to physically approach the object of his affection, Henri builds up so much unrequited lust that it explodes with horrible results.

Mala Noche is the film debut from director Gus Van Sant. The film portrays the unanswered love of an American man toward a young Mexican man.

Jorge and Aarón, two young boys growing up in a quiet town often miss classes to go together to the cinema matinee. One day they are kidnapped by robbers while traveling in a truck. After the disintegration of the band, they begin to participate in the robberies until the adventure turns into something more sinister and dangerous.

Inspired by the early trash films of John Waters, the film stars Estdelacropolis as Demira, a gay porn actor struggling with both his emotionally complicated relationship with his mother Esther and his desire to break out of porn and into mainstream movies. He connects with a Freudian psychiatrist who is convinced that his homosexuality stems from an unresolved Oedipus complex which he has repressed by denying his natural attractions to women, to which the psychiatrist’s proposed solution is to hypnotize Esther into believing that she is a man so that men will become the gender that sexually repulses Demira; in his career, he is ambivalent when the first “mainstream” role he is able to land is a gore film in which he will play the victim of a cannibal family for which Esther has also been cast as the mother.

Two former patients of Sigmund Freud meet again and discuss their psychiatric treatment 65 years earlier.

Following her husband’s death, a wife discovers and confronts her husband’s lover. Their mutual pain, love, envy and jealousy bring them together in an unexpected emotional and physical relationship.

A gang of Nazi bikers prepares for a race as sexual, sadistic, and occult images are cut together.

Rome, AD 303. Emperor Diocletian demotes his favourite, Sebastian, from captain of the palace guard to the rank of common soldier and banishes him to a remote coastal outpost where his fellow soldiers, weakened by their desires, turn to homosexual activities to satisfy their needs. Sebastian becomes the target of lust for the officer Severus, but repeatedly rejects the man’s advances. Castigated for his Christian faith, he is tortured, humiliated and ultimately killed.

The love affair involving the beautiful Simone and the younger Françoise, coming from a frustrated suicide attempt.

What begins as an innocent art class becomes a steamy triangle of erotic passions and forbidden love. A beautiful Japanese girl becomes the object of obsession in a devious relationship between the wife of a German diplomat and her husband.

Roberto, a leader and follower of the ideals of his radical leftist opposition party, can’t resist the cheap beautiful street teenagers that are thrown his way for various pleasures.

Fictionalized portrait of one of history’s great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, Guillaume Apollinaire, others; and Hemingway pops in.

Philo Bregstein tells us this film looks at Pasolini’s life and art to explain why he died. The film traces Pasolini’s life chronologically - family roots, hiding during World War II, teaching, moving to Rome, being arrested and acquitted many times, publishing poems, getting into film, being provocative, and being murdered. Interviews with Alberto Moravia, Laura Betti, Maria Antonietta Macciocch, and Bernard Bertolucci are inter-cut with readings of Pasolini’s poems and with clips from four films - primarily the Gospel According to St. Matthew - to illustrate his changing ideas and points of view. Bregstein makes a case for Pasolini’s being lynched.