"Queer" Films

[spinetta]

Julián Hernández new film "Rabioso Sol Rabioso Cielo" will be screened in the Panorama Section on the Berlinale 2009, this "Epic" movie (191 mins) will have it's international premiere although it's only in Spanish, it contains some interesting making of pics and in the right side, the crew and talent.

The official link, unfinished but with it's synopsis in both Spanish and English.

[Michael]

Fantastic news. I really love Hernandez's Broken Sky - one of the better gay films of the recent time, immeasurably lyrical and gorgeously crafted.

[John Cope]

Damn, you beat me to it, spinetta. I had been toying with making a thread for this one as it will, I am certain, merit one. Raging Sun, Raging Sky was supposed to premiere almost a year ago at a fest in Mexico but I don't think it ever did. Hopefully the very long post-production will be more than worth the wait. I am pleased that he hasn't cut his picture down any from the early rumored 3+ hour cut.


Excerpts from the new film can be seen here. This is not exactly a trailer but it does give an excellent sense of Hernandez's style. For me he is one of the finest directors working today. Both his previous features are towering masterpieces of unabashed and deeply understood sentiment as well as similarly unrestrained and rapturous aesthetic glory. Hernandez's style matches his characters' sensibilities but also complements them and takes their monumental devotions seriously. If Raging Sun can cross over at all in its impact than that will begin to go a ways towards making up for his horrible neglect. He is one of the greatest hopes of modern cinema.

[Michael]

Excerpts from the new film can be seen here. This is not exactly a trailer but it does give an excellent sense of Hernandez's style. For me he is one of the finest directors working today. Both his previous features are towering masterpieces of unabashed and deeply understood sentiment as well as similarly unrestrained and rapturous aesthetic glory. Hernandez's style matches his characters' sensibilities but also complements them and takes their monumental devotions seriously. If Raging Sun can cross over at all in its impact than that will begin to go a ways towards making up for his horrible neglect. He is one of the greatest hopes of modern cinema.

I really can't wait to see the new film. I agree with you that Broken Sky is a towering masterpiece, it's going to be very interesting to see how Hernandez moves further from this film. The way his characters switch locations and transforms in same tracking shots is startlingly beautiful. We have Gay Tarkovsky!

[John Cope]

Our confidence pays off. From IndieWire:

But Panorama’s real highlight was the film perhaps truest to its own, outsider nature: Julian Hernandez’s “Raging Sun, Raging Sky,” a 191-minute, B&W Mexican reverie on homosexual desire that rewarded those with the patience to submit to it. Recalling, at times, such queer landmarks as Genet’s “Un Chant d’Amour” and Ron Peck’s “Nighthawks” and even Gus Van Sant’s “Mala Noche,” it demonstrated with almost every scene not only its maker’s fluent command of the medium, his unerring compositional eye, but also a remarkable sensuality, a feel for the textures of flesh and fabric and concrete, and for the quiet, hidden places in which desire may be sated. At once urgent (sex is very much the engine of this drama), and weirdly endistanced (courtesy of its capital-A arthouse technique), it offered a kind of meditation on what the American novelist Samuel R. Delany once called “the splendor and misery of bodies and cities” - one that built by slow stages to a devastating final hour. If there was a discovery to made at Berlin this year, this was it.

[JonathanM]

Q. Allan Brocka anyone?

Meretricious tripe full of guys taking their shirts off masquerading as an actual film? One of his films actually got shown at the london LGBT film festival last year. Ugh. TLA releasing. Ugh.

Is there any love on here for Jacques Nolot? writer of I don't kiss and writer/director/actor in Before I forget and the hideously named Porn Theater?

[John Cope]

Is there any love on here for Jacques Nolot?

Uh, yeah.

As far as Hernandez goes, I would suggest that such a flip dismissal does him a major disservice, to say the least.

[JonathanM]

Is there any love on here for Jacques Nolot?

Uh, yeah.

Should have checked... that was just me being lazy.

Agree with that thread, the new Nolot is simply sensational. It's one of the most brutally honest films I think I've ever seen.

[John Cope]

Reverse Shot on Defining a New Queer Cinema. An all around excellent collection of essays including the best piece I've seen to date on Broken Sky.

[Ruh-roh]

Hope this is the right place for this. I am trying to come up with a list of films that include scenes shot in actual, real-world gay bars. Cruising (The Eagle's Nest), The Laughing Policeman (The Ramrod), and The Killing of Sister George (The Gateways Club) are the films that came to mind. Does anyone know of any others?