Telling two distinctly different but related stories, sophomore filmmaker Richard Bell (Two Brothers) has crafted an accomplished drama about forgiveness, love, and a tragic family. Pip is a street kid who is meeting life head-on in the big city. On his eighteenth birthday, he receives his grandfather’s WWII memoirs on cassette, a gift that awakens the ghost of the past. His grandfather relates the story of the day he turned eighteen, fleeing German forces through the woods of France. In Pip’s own contemporary way, he begins to live the parallel life of his grandfather, each man lost in his own world and generation. Bell has assembled an outstanding cast of actors with queer credentials including Thea Gill (Queer as Folk), Sir Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, and Canadian actor Brendan Fletcher (The Five Senses).

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his is the first British Dogme 95 film and was made on a shoestring budget by first-time director Jan Dunn. It tells of the impact of Tasha, a Czech refugee who affects one unhappy British working-class family. The same story is told from three radically different perspectives: that of the good-hearted mother who welcomes Tasha, the teenage daughter who turns against Tasha, and the fed-up father who loathes Tasha. The bare-bones style (no music, no artificial lighting, and actual locations) gives the story a documentary realism that, combined with a determination to tackle a taboo subject head-on, makes this similar in many ways to the films of Ken Loach. Description adapted from the Borderlines Film Festival.

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Experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer illuminates the story of surrealist writer, photographer, and lesbian Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, her lover, step-sister, and artistic collaborator. Capturing the spirit of this Jewish couple who refused to live by any standards but their own, the film masterfully employs photographs of the women and their artwork, interwoven with voiceovers and insightful interviews. Lover Other brings art, politics, and gender identity to the fore in a thought-provoking investigation of artists and resistance during WWII.

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