Fringe Festival • April 15
Gays On TV: Double Bill
Dir: ITV / Burton, Cole, Somerville, Collis, Field, Kettle, Martin
13:30 Rio Cinema • UK: 105 min • 1975, 1983
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World In Action: Coming Out In Newport Pagnell: A retro relic from the ITV archive – last seen in 1975 (25min). Growing up gay in Newport Pagnell in 1975 wasn’t easy. Especially when DJ / Cigar Fan, Jimmy Saville came to town to make a radio show on the issue of being openly queer. Gay issues were rarely discussed or shown anywhere in the mainsteam media in the 1970s and this film follows the story of a local gay rights group, their bizarre brush with Saville and the fall out from their frank and honest radio broadcast.
Framed Youth (The Revenge Of The Teenage Perverts): A maverick treat from the early days of Channel 4. One of the great gay films of the 1980 (45min). In the early 1980s queers were moving away from trusting the likes of Jimmy Saville to tell their stories on television, and Framed Youth was the pioneering film of this revolution! Framed Youth frankly explores the lives and love of gay teenagers, who film and edit themselves with mischief, honesty and no pretentioousness. Featuring Jimmy Somerville, Richard Coles, Isaac Julien and a healthy dose of 1980s nostalgia. Framed Youth won the Grierson Award for best documentary at the 1983 Baftas.
Un Chant D’Amour
Dir: Jean Genet
12:40 Little Joe Clubhouse • France: 26 min • 1950
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Jonathan Kemp presents Un Chant D’amour at the Little Joe Clubhouse. Un Chant D’amour is French writer Jean Genet’s only film, which he directed in 1950. Because of its explicit (though artistically presented) homosexual content, the 26-minute movie was long banned and even disowned by Genet later in his life. The plot is set in a French prison, where a prison guard takes voyeuristic pleasure in observing the prisoners perform masturbatory sexual acts.
Swoon
Dir: Tom Kalin
16:00 Rio Cinema • UK: 82 min • 1992
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Tom Kalin’s Swoon centres on the infamous Leopold and Loeb trial: two gay Jewish 18 year old intellectuals who murdered a 13-year old boy in 1920s Chicago just for the ‘thrill’ of it. Dark, sexy and beautiful to look at, Kalin’s film uses stylised images to cast a dispassionate eye over the power play between the troubling lovers, and how they were treated in a society that linked homosexuality with criminal tendencies.
