From the acclaimed director of Married Life and Forty Shades of Blue comes a haunting, subtle tale of a contemporary gay relationship. Debuting at Sundance and winning the Teddy Award at the 2012 Berlinale, Keep the Lights On is a visually stunning film that “breaks new ground in contemporary American gay cinema” (The Hollywood Reporter). The deeply personal story charts the highs and lows of an emotionally and sexually charged relationship between two men. It’s 1997 and New York City is in a state of intense flux when documentary filmmaker Erik Rothman (Thure Lindhardt) first meets Paul Lucy (Zachary Booth), a handsome but closeted lawyer in the publishing field. What begins as a highly charged first encounter soon becomes something much more, and a relationship quickly develops. Told over the course of ten years, this is a film about sex, friendship, intimacy and most of all, love.

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With glitter, wit, evening gowns, and enchanting storytelling, Miwa looks back over a 50-year career and a fascinating life in music, film, and television (including the cult classic Black Lizard). As a young singer, Miwa popularized androgyny as a fashion statement, fusing the masculine and the feminine into a signal of a new generation of aesthetics. This evolved into performing as a woman and living off-stage as a man. In recent years he has voiced characters in Hayao Miyazaki’s internationally successful anime films like Howl’s Moving Castle and appears almost daily on Japanese talk shows. Having sold millions of records, publishing over 20 books, and performing to sell out crowds, Miwa continues to fight for gay rights.

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Carlos is spending the summer in the country with his family in order to help out with things. Perhaps he won’t even be returning to the capital, as economic prospects are hardly rosy there either. Extremadura on the other hand, sparsely populated and for a long time one of the most neglected regions in Europe, is experiencing a tentative upturn. Tourism and modernisation rub shoulders with almost archaic customs and a conservative, mostly elderly population here. Sleepless Knights depicts all this in casual, unobtrusive fashion, in images that have at times a truly otherworldly beauty. The central theme is the love story between the newly returned Carlos and the young policeman Juan. “You don’t look like you’re from here,” remarks Juan when they meet. “I’m not from here,“ replies Carlos, “I live in Madrid.” Whether to be from here or elsewhere is a decision that many here have to make. Extremadura, Madrid, maybe even Munich? This uncertainty suffuses their love story with a peculiar sense of tension before the backdrop of a seemingly relaxed, uneventful summer. It is only the old men striding through the austere landscape in their strange knight costumes who remain blissfully untroubled.

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