Month: May 2021

A family man self-destructs in the hard-hitting Irish drama Rialto

Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) is in his mid-forties and married with two teenage children. Still grieving after the recent the death of his father, a destructive figure in his life, Colm finds himself struggling in his relationship to his own son.

To make matters worse, recent takeover at work has threatened his job. Unable to share his vulnerability with his wife, Colm’s world begins falling apart around him. In the midst of this crisis, he solicits sex from a young hustler named Jay (Tom Glynn-Carney).

This unexpected encounter – and his growing infatuation – has a deep effect on Colm. He finds a certain comfort in Jay that no one else can provide. When Jay shows up at Colm’s work demanding even more money and threatening to expose his secrets, Colm’s self-destructive fantasies get the better of him.

Directed by Peter Mackie Burns and based on a stage play by Mark O’Halloran, Rialto is a hard-hitting Irish drama about repressed sexuality and all of the ways it can disrupt a seemingly normal life.

Watch the trailer for Rialto below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

A touching family bond is explored in the new documentary Madame

The touching new documentary Madame is a double portrait of a young boy slowly coming out of the closet and of the lady that was, even more than his own mother, the woman of his life – his grandmother.

Based on private archival footage, Madame takes us onto an intimate journey where Caroline, a flamboyant 90-year-old grandmother and her filmmaker grandson Stéphane explore the development and transmission of gender identity in a patriarchal environment.

Promised to a domestic life in the 1920s, Caroline manages to free herself from the clutches of a forced marriage and becomes a successful businesswoman, defying the social rules of her time.

In parallel, Stéphane struggles to play the role everyone expects in his Swiss bourgeois family, until the day he comes out of the closet and sets off on a crusade against homophobia and sexism.

Watch the trailer for Madame below. The film is available now on Dekkoo.