19th GAZE Film Festival Festival Held On August Bank Holiday Weekend

For 19 years GAZE has been bringing the best in local and international lesbian and gay film to Dublin cinemagoers every August bank holiday weekend. This year GAZE expands its view dramatically. Running in three major city centre venues over five days, GAZE 2011 is jam-packed with the brightest and hottest of award-winning new gay cinema from around the globe.

The programme this year represents the huge range of diversity that runs through the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community internationally. From cutting edge dramas to immensely powerful and moving documentaries, via musicals, shorts, retrospectives and archive classics, GAZE 2011 presents its most exciting and diverse programme yet.

This year GAZE is back in the city centre, showing films at The Screen, The Irish Film Institute, and the Project Arts Centre. Over 50 films from around the world will light up Dublin screens for five days, bringing to our devoted audience movies that will probably receive their only Irish screening ever at GAZE.

Director of Programming Paul Rowley says about this year's festival line up:

"The films we're bringing to GAZE 2011 are some the best you will see in Dublin this year. We have top award winners from the world's best festivals, a dynamic range of movies that will keep you on The Edge of your seat, or have you falling off it laughing. Genuinely encompassing the true diverse range of experiences in the LGBT community worldwide, the films on offer this year bring us unforgettable characters and profound stories that will stay with us long after."

GAZE Director, Brian Finnegan adds:

"In the past few years GAZE has become recognized as a major player on the international gay film festival circuit. This year's programme is our most interesting and riveting yet. It's a showcase of the concerns of some of the best filmmakers in the world, giving our audiences a glimpse of lives less ordinary. GAZE 2011 is entertaining, challenging and diverse in its representations of human drama and sexuality. It's vibrant mix of films, discussion, parties and presentations reflect a community in Ireland that is still flying its rainbow colours high in the midst of and despite our country's current difficulties."

BELOW SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THIS YEAR'S FESTIVAL

From France, and winner of the Teddy Jury Award at the Berlin Film Festival, TOMBOY has to be one of the most heartwarming and tender coming of age films ever. Young Laure moves to a new neighbourhood with her family. It's summer holidays, all the local kids are running rampant round the area as to be expected. Boyish Laure, when first meeting with the gang, introduces herself as Michael. The other kids don't even blink. Michael it is. And so the summer fun begins, with Laure doing everything she can to keep her new identity secret. But as the summer draws to an end, and the threat of school looms, tings start to get very complicated.
Directed with incredible tenderness by young French auteur, and described by the grandfather of French film criticism Michel Ciment as ‘a masterpiece', TOMBOY is nothing short of a perfect film. IRISH PREMIERE

Also from France, a little more on the sexy side, GIGOLA brings us right into the 1960's Paris lesbian underground. Handsome garçonne Gigola is the girl that has everyone's eye. She makes her living in the clubs and bars of Pigalle, filled with tuxedoed women and their admirers - women from Paris high society dripping with wealth and only too keen to lavish it on the objects of their desire. Aloof, in control, gorgeous, Gigola takes no prisoners. But her life begins to unravel as she is forced to come to grips with the underbelly of this world where everyone it seems is expendable.
Told in a style that verges perfectly on the right side of melodrama, and with pitch perfect art direction and performances GIGOLA is fantastically entertaining. IRISH PREMIERE

The most famous international porn star currently in the gay world, the perfectly proportioned François Saggat makes a bid for serious attention starring in not one but two films in this year's GAZE. The first, MEN AT BATH, from experimental director Christophe Honoré features Saggat as Emmanuel, a gay hustler living with his lover. After the two quarrel and separate, Emmanuel is left to reflect on the relationship. Saggat's second GAZE film, LA ZOMBIE, teams him up with cult director Bruce La Bruce, who casts the porn hunk as a zombie come to wreak sexy havoc on the residents of Los Angeles.
IRISH PREMIERES

ABSENT is a film from Argentina that took the coveted Teddy award at Berlin this year. Set in a secondary school for boys it focuses on the relationship between one of the boys on the swimming team and his coach as one draws the other into a deep, tangled web of manipulation. What at first seems innocent quickly becomes dangerous for both. Dark and brooding and exquisitely shot with powerful performances from the two leads, ABSENT is utterly captivating.
IRISH PREMIERE

From Uruguay, MISS TACUAREMBO is joyful bundle of pure post-Catholic campness that will certainly hit the spot with Irish audiences. Fuelled by Flashdance and soap operas, Cristal heads to Buenos Aires to make her dreams of becoming a singer come true. She ends up working at the Jesus Theme Park dressed up as one of the ten commandments, but does not lose hope! A national TV talent show (with Pedro Almodóvar favoruite, Rosy De Palma as host) offers her one chance to fulfill the dreams she's held inside as a child.
IRISH PREMIERE

Documentaries are big as ever at GAZE this year.

WHO TOOK THE BOMP? takes us on the last concert tour of post-punk feminist electro band Le Tigre. Hugely influential, the band melded politics and art with a confident quirky aesthetic. We spend time with JD Samson and the other members of the band on stage and behind the scenes as the group negotiate the challenges of being feminist and lesbians in a male dominated rock world. Fun, upbeat, and often hilarious. IRISH PREMIERE

In 1978 a young man in San Francisco sticks a photocopy up in a shop window, saying: "I have these marks on my body and no doctor can tell me what's wrong with me. Can anyone help?" What followed is now well known, the almost total annihilation of a community and the beginnings of the global pandemic called AIDS. Composed simply and perfectly as a series of interviews with survivors from that time in San Francisco, WE WERE HERE has to be one of the most devastating and important accounts of the early years of AIDS. It is also an empowering record of the power of people to rally together as a community to help each other. IRISH PREMIERE

Along with screenings, shorts programmes, video installation, discussion panels, special guests, a special retrospective, and nightly parties, GAZE 2011 promises to be unmissable.

Full programme will be announced on 13th July

 

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