Category: Award Winner

Pride Month Spotlight: Queer Docs

For Pride Month this year, we wanted to shine a spotlight on some amazing documentaries.

A mix of films both underseen and celebrated, heartbreaking and triumphant, with varied tones and subject matter, this collection of docs take us deep inside true queer stories of life, loss and love.

Bridegroom, Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine and Gemmel & Tim tell true stories of people taken from us too soon, but whose lives and legacies have left us left us changed for the better.

50 Years of Fabulous, Oriented, A Queer Country and Pride & Protest take us to specific places to celebrate the power of community. Drag Race star Jamal Sims’ doc When the Beat Drops offers up a fun and fast-paced history of bucking in Atlanta.

An Act of Love and This is What Love in Action Looks like capture activism in unlikely places. Finally, Electroboy and Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood explore two fascinating queer figures from two very different time periods.

The Pride Month Spotlight: Queer Docs collection is available on Dekkoo now – and all throughout the month of June.

Cicada is a feast for the eyes as well as the heart

Co-written by Matthew Fifer and Sheldon D. Brown, who also star in the film, the must-see new indie comedy-drama Cicada examines inter-racial relationships, bisexual identity and sexual abuse while also exploring the intricacies of falling in love and how that can go hand-in-hand with uncovering uncomfortable truths about one’s self along the way.

Fifer, who also co-directs with Kieran Mulcare, stars as Ben a young bisexual man who, after a string of unsuccessful encounrers with women, decides it’s time to go “back on the dick.” He soon develops an intense relationship with Sam (Brown), a man of color struggling with deep wounds. As their summer romance progresses and their intimacy grows, Ben’s past begins crawling to the surface – putting the pair’s still-burgeoning love affair in jeopardy.

Co-starring Cobie Smulders, David Burtka and SNL breakout star Bowen Yang, Cicada is easily one of the most acclaimed gay films of the past several years. Vogue said that it “will stay with you long after the credits roll.” And The Jam Report called it “one of the most beautifully-crafted pieces of queer cinema of recent times.” We firmly agree with both assessments.

Watch the trailer for Cicada below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Now Available: French director André Téchiné’s acclaimed coming-of-age drama ‘Being 17’

From André Téchiné, the renowned writer-director behind the queer classic Wild Reeds, comes Being 17, a moving exploration of unexpected adolescent love.

Damien and Thomas (Kacey Mottet Klein and Corentin Fila) are teens from very different backgrounds who go to the same school… and are constantly fighting. Damien is the gawky son of a doctor and a military pilot stationed abroad. He can’t seem to stop staring at Thomas, the handsome bi-racial son of local farmers who reacts with hostility to Damien’s longing.

Damien’s mother Marianne (Sandrine Kiberlain) is treating Thomas’s ailing mother at the farm, a snowy two-hour ride outside of town. When she needs to be admitted to the hospital, Marianne quite naturally offers to take Thomas into their home for a temporary stay. Forced to live together under one roof, the two boys must work through their hostility, emerging attraction and complicated desires.

Co-written by Celine Sciamma, the award-winning filmmaker behind Tomboy, Petite Maman and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Being 17 is a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age gem that accurately captures both youthful friction and attraction.

Watch the trailer for Being 17 below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

Short Film Spotlight: Our Way Back

An intense 26-minute thriller from Israeli director Moshe Rosenthal, Our Way Back follows two secret lovers who find themselves in a life-or-death situation.

Lior Ashkenazi stars as Uri, a 50-year-old family man in a secret romantic relationship with the much-younger Oded, played by Shachar Netz.

Telling his wife that he’s going away for a business conference, Uri whisks Oded away to the desert, where the two can express their love for one another freely, away from the prying eyes of their small, close-knit community.

When Oded suffers a serious accident, it puts not only their affair, but his very life in jeopardy. Now Uri is faced with a major decision. He can call for help and risk being exposed, or let go of the man he loves in the most heartless way possible.

Our Way Back is now available on Dekkoo.

Short Film Spotlight: Aadat

Filmed in Pakistan in a matter-of-fact style, Aadat is a bracing 13-minute short from writer-director Iqran Rasheed.

Aadat tells the story of a deeply closeted young man from a conservative Muslim family. Gripped with unrealized desires, he dares to hire an attractive young sex worker. The two spend time together alone in a room, cautiously getting closer while fully aware of the risks involved.

A devastating film about one perfectly normal young man who is looking to explore his sexuality in a forbidding Islamic country, Aadat is a sobering and heartbreaking reminder of the basic freedoms that are still not afforded to gay men in many parts of the world today.

Watch a short trailer for Aadat below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

Short Film Spotlight: Sleepover

An eight-minute short film from Swedish director Jimi Vall Peterson, Sleepover follows Emil and Adam, two seemingly straight young men who have been friends since junior high. After a night together at the movies, Emil decides he is going to crash at Adam’s apartment.

The two young men end up sharing a double bed. In the middle of the night, Emil awakens and his unspoken feelings for Adam start to become clear. But is he willing to test the boundaries of their friendship?

A simple, but well-executed short film Sleepover perfectly captures those youthful pangs of unrequited love.

Sleepover is now available on Dekkoo.

Browse The Classic Queer Cinema Collection – 9 Groundbreaking Films Now Available on Dekkoo!

Dekkoo isn’t just a source for entertainment. We also offer a deeply engaging crash course in queer cinema history!

Starting with Queens at Heart, an eye-opening short film offering a look into the lives of four trans women during the pre-Stonewall 1960s, and continuing through to director Ira Sachs electrifying 2012 relationship drama Keep the Lights On, this collection exemplifies some of the most important queer cinema of the past five decades.

Including films like the landmark 1973 docudrama A Bigger Splash and Todd Haynes’ brazenly original Poison, which took the 1991 Sundance Film Festival by storm and helped launch the New Queer Cinema movement, these pioneering selections offer up a vibrant and expansive trip through time.

You can browse The Classic Queer Cinema Collection right now on Dekkoo. All of the titles are currently streaming.

The powerful gay drama The Last Match celebrates it’s 10th anniversary this year

Originally released in 2013, The Last Match centers on an intense love affair between two seemingly straight young men.

Reiner and Yosvani are best friends and soccer mates. Handsome Reinier, in order to support his mother, his wife and their baby turns to sex work. Meanwhile, the shy Yosvani is reluctantly engaged to a girl and lives with her and her bombastic loan shark father.

After a furtive kiss at a nightclub, the two young men quickly fall hard for one another. And as their love intensifies, the challenge is not with them but with their unforgiving Havana neighborhood… a place from which they desperately want to escape.

The two leads are charismatic and unforgettable as the super-charged lovers in this powerful drama from director Antonio Hens.

Celebrating it’s 10-year anniversary this year, The Last Match is now available on Dekkoo.

A family struggles with coming out in this heartwarming comedy-drama set in 1973 Cape Cod

Set in 1973, Wild About Harry follows Harry Goodhart (Tate Donovan), a British widower who relocates to Cape Cod with his two teen daughters to start a new furniture business. As daughters Madeline and Daisy (Danielle Savre and Skye McCole Bartusiak) adjust to their new lives, Harry struggles to withhold a deep secret – his new business partner, Theodore (Adam Pascal), is more than just that.

Trying to fit in with the cool kids at school, the girls sneak into a nearby gay club. There, Madeline discovers the truth about her father. The secrets that each keep slowly threaten to tear the family apart – especially when word gets out about the new family in town.

Set during a time when American society was redefining its national identity as well as its personal views, Wild About Harry perfectly captures the look and the language of the period in which it’s set. Alternately funny and heartbreaking, the film tells a parallel love story, richly painted on a canvas of small town suspicion, traditional family values and the rapidly changing sexual identity of America in an era of unrest and progressive change.

Watch the trailer for Wild About Harry below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

Ira Sachs’ emotional gay relationship drama Keep the Lights On comes to Dekkoo

The critically-acclaimed 2012 relationship drama Keep the Lights On chronicles the emotionally and sexually charged journey of two men in New York City through love, friendship and addiction.

Documentary filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and closeted lawyer Paul (Zachary Booth) meet through a casual encounter, but soon find a deeper connection and become a couple.

Individually and together, they are risk takers – compulsive, and fueled by drugs and sex. In an almost decade-long relationship defined by highs, lows, and dysfunctional patterns, Erik struggles to negotiate his own boundaries and dignity while being true to himself.

The film’s fearlessly personal screenplay, written by director Ira Sachs (The Delta, Love is Strange, Little Men, Frankie) is anchored by Lindhardt, who embodies Erik’s isolation and vulnerability with a gentle presence. Harrowing and romantic, visceral and layered, Keep the Lights On is a film that looks at love and all of its manifestations, taking it to dark depths and bringing it back to a place of grace.

Watch the trailer for Keep the Lights On below. The film is available now on Dekkoo.