Category: Documentary

A group of hunky gay athletes get personal in the short sports documentary ‘Soccer Boys’

Years ago, a group of athletic gay friends in Brazil got together to play soccer. After founding the team, they never could have imagined the popularity that would soon come their way.

There is now an entire gay football league in Brazil, consisting of eighty teams and a legion of fans. They even have national playoffs.

In the short documentary Soccer Boys, filmmaker Carlos Guilherme Vogel focuses his lens on the BeesCats Football Club as they prepare to compete in the upcoming Diversity Cup.

In candid interviews, the players discuss important issues regarding homosexuality in sports and homophobia in contemporary society.

The film closely follows two players on the first gay football team in Rio de Janeiro, who explain how joining the team has changed their lives for the better.

Soccer Boys is a touching tribute to gay athletes, offering inspiring messages about activism, self-realization, gay pride and following your dreams, wherever they may lead you.

Watch the trailer for Soccer Boys below. The full 14-minute documentary is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Filmmaker Victoria Linares Villegas explores personal family history in this unique docudrama

A revelation about her family connection to an influential figure sets filmmaker Victoria Linares Villegas on her own path of playful self-discovery in this fascinating and deeply personal new docudrama.

It Runs in the Family begins when Villegas discovers she is related to Oscar Torres, a little-known Dominican director. She soon embarks on a cinematic excavation of his role in Caribbean fiction and leftist movements during the authoritarian 1940s.

Through her research, she pieces together a portrait of his creative and political legacy while breaking down the boundaries between his story and her own ambitions as an image-maker. She brings Torres’ work back to life through a series of elaborate re-stagings of his unproduced screenplays, with members of her family stepping in as actors.

Through this process of playful discovery, Villegas poses questions about the Dominican Republic’s political history, transgenerational memory and queer erasure.

A film full of heart, It Runs in the Family is a bold first feature from an exciting new voice in nonfiction filmmaking.

Watch the trailer for It Runs in the Family below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

Author and performer E. Patrick Johnson challenges Southern stereotypes in the documentary ‘Making Sweet Tea’

Giving voice to a population too rarely acknowledged, researcher and performer E. Patrick Johnson’s 2008 novel “Sweet Tea” collected more than 60 life stories from black gay men who were born, raised and continue to live in the South.

Based on two years of ethnographic research, the book offered a window into the ways black gay men negotiate their identities, build community, maintain friendship networks and find partners – often in spaces that appear to be anti-gay.

A hit at countless film festivals around the country, the profoundly moving new documentary Making Sweet Tea follows Johnson as he travels to North Carolina, Georgia, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. in an effort to come to terms with his past and reconnect with some of the men he interviewed for the book. Johnson also transformed the book into several staged plays over the course of a decade.

Making Sweet Tea combines performance footage with interviews of the men, showing how they have changed since – and been changed by – their depictions in his book and plays. The film covers the subtle complexities of Johnson’s relationships with these men, with his family and with his hometown in North Carolina. It also restages Johnson’s performances of the men’s narratives in their homes, in their churches and at their jobs, sometimes with them directing him or even participating in the scene.

Blurring the line between art and life, Making Sweet Tea offers a glimpse into the lives of people not often given a platform to speak and demonstrates how research, artistry and real life converge.

Watch the trailer for Making Sweet Tea below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

Short Film Spotlight: Campfire

There are thirty-some LGBTQ campgrounds in America – many of which started in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic as refuges for urban gay men and as meeting places for rural (often closeted) men from conservative areas.

In the summer of 2022, author, filmmaker and former New York Times journalist Austin Bunn decided to make a documentary about Hillside, one of the oldest gay campgrounds, located in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

After weeks of interviews, he found that some men were only willing to talk off the record. In an effort to capture their transformational experiences, he created a composite character from their stories and filmed Campfire, a narrative/documentary hybrid.

This award-winning film follows a married dairy farmer who travels to a gay campground in rural Northeast Pennsylvania in search of the man he fell in love with 30 years earlier. Along his journey, he discovers that the past is not done with him yet.

Unfolding in the real location, during one weekend, this inventive and deeply poignant film features six permanent residents of Hillside along with two professional actors and dozens of actual campers – who just happened to be there at the right time – serving as extras.

Check out the poster for Campfire below. A hit with audiences at film festivals all over the country, this unique short film is now available on Dekkoo.

‘Every Act of Life’ celebrates the career and friendships of legendary playwright Terrence McNally

Through six groundbreaking decades in the theatre, four-time Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally became a living legend, both on stage and off.

He launched the careers of some of Broadway’s biggest stars, was a pioneer in the fight for LGBTQ rights, triumphed over addiction, found love and inspiration at every age and continually showed the power of art to transform society.

Featuring interviews with Nathan Lane, Patrick Wilson, Edie Falco, Rita Moreno, Christine Baranski, F. Murray Abraham, Bryan Cranston and many more, Every Act of Life is an intimate and illuminating documentary that celebrates McNally’s life and relationships while examining his incredible legacy of work.

Watch the trailer for Every Act of Life below. The documentary is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Survivors speak out in director David France’s riveting documentary ‘Welcome to Chechnya’

With searing urgency and uncommon bravery, the eye-opening documentary Welcome to Chechnya shadows a group of activists who risk unimaginable peril to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ purge raging in the repressive and closed Russian republic.

Since 2017, Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has waged a depraved operation to “cleanse the blood” of LGBTQ Chechens, overseeing a campaign to detain, torture and execute them. Operating without the sanction of the Kremlin, activists take matters into their own hands.

In this riveting and deeply affecting piece of work, David France, the acclaimed, award-winning director behind How to Survive a Plague, uses a remarkable hands-on approach to expose this atrocity and tell the story of an extraordinary group of people literally putting their lives on the line to confront evil and make not just Chechnya, but the whole world a better place for the LGBTQ community.

Watch the trailer for Welcome to Chechnya below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

An accomplished figure skater reveals his truth in the documentary ‘Go Figure: The Randy Gardner Story’

In Go Figure: The Randy Gardner Story, two-time Olympian and World Champion, the legendary Randy Gardner, explores his true identity through figure skating and his own one man show.

With his skating partner of over fifty years, Tai Babilonia, the pair experienced the heights of worldwide glory and devastating personal tragedy.

Now that the intense glare of the public spotlight has softened, he is free to finally reveal his untold magical and meaningful journey… both on and off the ice.

Go Figure: The Randy Gardner Story is a moving film filled with family secrets, closeted sexuality and the price that one gifted and wildly accomplished man paid to keep everything quiet.

Watch a short trailer for Go Figure: The Randy Gardner Story below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Two up-and-coming gay songwriters get a little too close to screen legend Gloria Swanson in ‘Boulevard: A Hollywood Story’

For Gloria Swanson, the iconic star of Sunset Boulevard, both the movie and the character of Norma Desmond provided a renewed spotlight.

Swanson strategically began efforts to parlay her success into a musical stage adaptation of the film. Enter, Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley, two struggling songwriters-in-love looking for their big break.

Enamored by the idea of helping Swanson step into the next phase of her career, Stapley and Hughes found themselves whisked away by Swanson to a sumptuous house in Palm Springs, where the trio started creating the musical.

As the days wore on, an unusual love triangle began to take hold. Hughes and Stapley found their intimate relationship intruded upon by Swanson.

Boulevard: A Hollywood Story is a fascinating documentary about three individuals who attempted to share a melody… and how the music of that moment defined the rest of their lives.

Watch the trailer for Boulevard: A Hollywood Story below. The full documentary is now available on Dekkoo.