It’s that time of year again. Now celebrating its 22nd birthday, the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival will screen at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank from March 27 to April 10, offering queer-themed shorts, documentaries, and feature films from around the world. You can view a complete list of the films on offer here. Among the ones reviewed or mentioned by AfterEllen.com are the romantic tragedy The Chinese Botanist’s Daughter (pictured above), the American TV pilot Don’t Go featuring Guinevere Turner, and the Oscar-winning short documentary Freeheld, about the fight of dying lesbian policewoman Laurel Hester to see her pension go to her partner Stacie Andree.
There’s also the Taiwanese romance Spider Lilies, the German drama Vivere, the French coming-of-age film Water Lilies, and the South African period romance The World Unseen. There’s the 1996 American documentary It’s Elementary – Talking About Gay Issues in School, and its 2007 follow-up, It’s STILL Elementary – The Movie and the Movement. And there’s the HBO film Life Support, starring Queen Latifah
as an HIV-positive charity worker (although unfortunately her character isn’t a lesbian). A program titled “The Face of Another: Imagining Lesbian Desire” offers a chance to see Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring fall in love in Mulholland Dr. It also includes films that explore female relationships but are not so overtly lesbian-themed, like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and the Madonna—Rosanna Arquette
flick Desperately Seeking Susan.
Two of my favorite crushes are featured in the festival: one being Atonement actress Romola Garai, who stars in the François Ozon film Angel. Sadly, the film seems to have been included in the festival because Ozon is openly gay and because it has a camp sensibility, rather than because Garai herself has any lesbian encounters in the movie – although evidently she does get a massage from co-star Lucy Russell: Meanwhile, the beautiful French actress Ludivine Sagnier (pictured below left) plays bisexual in Les Chansons D’Amour (Love Songs), a musical about a threesome between a man and two women that becomes complicated when the man finds himself drawn towards another man. You can view a trailer for the film here. There’s also a chance to see Cate Blanchett in her acclaimed gender-bending turn as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Although some films may already be listed as fully booked, be aware that it’s always worth calling the box office to see if they’ve had any returns. And while you’re at the BFI, why not stop by their Mediatheque and watch a selection of archive British lesbian films for free?
