Category: New Release

Short Film Spotlight: Black Hat

At first blush, Shmuel (Adam Silver) is a pious Hasidic man leading a fairly simple life. By day he dutifully prays at the local synagogue and manages a busy dry cleaner. But when his wife and daughters leave town for a few days, Shmuel will step out of his simple daily life and into a more complex world lit by the night. When he misplaces his black hat along the way, Shmuel’s two lives will interconnect in a way he never expected.

The 15-minute short drama Black Hat follows twenty-four hours in the life of one Hasidic man that must wrestle with his own repressed identity. Through Shmuel’s story, writer Phillip Guttmann and director Sarah Smith raise the notion that these often mysterious and misunderstood religious individuals, typically only seen by the outside world on streets covered by hats and sheitels, are perhaps more complex – more like us – than we previously imagined.

Black Hat is “a story about loneliness and the feeling of being trapped between two worlds,” said director Smith. “Ultimately, this is a character study of a man searching for his place in the world, and our artistic approach will aim to support this main theme.”

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

The Ice King tells a story of art, sport, sexuality and rebellion

Featuring incredible unseen footage of some of his mort remarkable performances, the searing documentary The Ice King tells the story of lost figure skating icon John Curry. With access to Curry’s personal letters, archive interviews, and interviews with his family, friends and collaborators, this is a portrait of the man who turned ice-skating from a dated sport into an exalted art form.

Watch any figure skating and it falls into two possible camps: before and after John Curry. From what was a macho, technical sport whose judges punished deviation blossomed – through John Curry’s stubborn beauty – ice-dancing. This was no Holiday on Ice, but a new artistic medium. After winning gold at the Winter Olympics for a rebelliously balletic routine, Curry saw the world’s stages sheeted with ice. Audiences and reviewers alike were enthralled by his genius. But Curry’s story is about more than skating. On the night of the final, Curry became the first openly gay Olympian at a time when homosexuality was barely legal.

From bullying and prejudice, to relief in the gay underworld, to his untimely death from AIDS, Curry’s story dovetails with the experiences of a generation. Tortured by demons, Curry was forever on the run. Never owning a home, he lived on the favors of those who loved him. The only place he found true freedom was the ice.

The Ice King tells the story of a man whose body was a battleground. From love affairs, to violence in sex clubs, to its ‘unmanly’ elegance on the ice, every act was rebellion. John Curry was no activist, but an artist expressing his authentic self – yet in a world where his existence was taboo, his life was unavoidably political.

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

Short Film Spotlight: Black Knuckle and Deputy Maltese

Two men on opposite sides of the law – a notorious outlaw and a principled deputy – can’t quite ignore their feelings for one another in the heartwarming Western comedy Black Knuckle and Deputy Maltese.

Deputy Maltese (Lane Compton) has mixed feelings when he learns that Black Knuckle (Gabriel Sousa) has been apprehended. A wanted thief, the most valuable asset Black Knuckle ever stole was the deputy’s heart. Still, Maltese can’t sit idly by with his lover behind bars. He lets Black Knuckle go, allowing himself to be tied up in the process to make it look like to proper escape.

Their parting is bittersweet, but thankfully won’t last long. Black Knuckle is soon captured by a band of even more dangerous outlaws. It’s up to Deputy Maltese – along with his badass, no-nonsense female sheriff (Kym Wilson) – to step up, ride out and go save the man he loves.

With a lightening-fast pace and game performances, Black Knuckle and Deputy Maltese plays out like a live-action cartoon. Director Jason Phillips and screenwriter Theo Poling have great fun upending American Western tropes in delightful ways. Using a diverse cast, playing characters who freely accept and encourage the gay ‘will-they-won’t-they’ romance unfolding before them, the film manages to be radically subversive in the most charming, easy-breezy, non-confrontational way possible. It’s just good, clean fun. The only downside is that, at just 14-minutes, you’ll wish it was a feature-length film.

Watch the trailer for Black Knuckle and Deputy Maltese below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Don’t miss the surprising Dekkoo Original short film Do We Really Have To Say Goodbye?

Ryan (Noah Brown) and Jacob (Jamal Douglas) have been together for four years. They had planned to get married in the summer of 2020. Then the pandemic hit… and Jacob got sick.

To make matters worse, because of the nature of the virus, Ryan was not allowed to visit Jacob in the hospital. Nor was he there when Jacob died. But before his passing, Jacob had recorded a message on his phone for Ryan. Now, Ryan has travelled to their favorite beach to watch the video message and to say goodbye – even though going outside places Ryan in immediate, physical danger.

Making movies during the pandemic is, obviously, an extremely tricky task, but writer-director J.T. Seaton pulls it off with aplomb. At just 11 minutes, Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye packs a hefty emotional punch… and has a horror twist in store as well.

Do We Really Have to Say Goodbye is available to stream now on Dekkoo.

Alan Cumming and Garret Dillahunt fight for their right to be parents in the acclaimed drama Any Day Now

Set in Los Angeles in 1978, the gripping drama Any Day Now stars Alan Cumming and Garret Dillahunt as a brave couple who must fight for their right to be parents.

When singer, Rudy Donatello (Cumming) meets ambitious lawyer, Paul Fliger (Dillahunt), little do they know they are about to embark on the biggest and most important journey of their lives.

When Rudy’s neighbor is arrested and sent to jail, the couple take in her teenage son, Marco (Isaac Leyva) and they quickly become the family that Marco has always wanted. But when their alternative living arrangements are exposed, the family become subject to prejudice from everyone around them. The pair then becomes embroiled in a fight against a biased legal system to keep the child they have come to love as their own.

Winner of numerous international audience awards and inspired by a touching true story, Any Day Now is an emotional drama, which resonates on a universal level and reminds us of the importance of never giving up.

Watch the trailer for Any Day Now below. The film is streaming now on Dekkoo.

Now Available: Dry Wind

Sandro (Leandro Faria Lelo) is shy, hirsute and incredibly horny middle-aged factory worker living in a dusty town in central Brazil. By day, he keeps his head down just enough not to be spotted eyeing the ample flesh on display at his local pool. But after a few glances shared with the younger and sexier Ricardo (Allan Jacinto Santana), an undeniable connection has been sparked.

A few chance encounters in the woodlands, and a memorably explicit moment at a county fair, visionary writer-director Daniel Nolasco’s sumptuous new drama Dry Wind takes us on an erotic trip – sometimes real, sometimes imagined – out of the mundane parts of Sandro’s life.

But just as things start to make sense for Sandro and Ricardo as a pair, in walks Maicon (Rafael Teóphilo), a man who seems like he literally stepped out a Tom of Finland sketch. He soon upends everything, forcing a love triangle that threatens Sandro’s careful discreet lifestyle.

A stylish and explicit follow-up to his wildly provocative pseudo-documentary Mr. Leather, Dry Wind proves that Daniel Nolasco is a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on and sets a new standard for original queer erotic cinema in the process.

Watch the trailer for Dry Wind below. The film is now streaming exclusively on Dekkoo.

Max Ryder and Jake Bass invite you on an intimate and revealing Road Strip

Coming off their stellar performances as bitter rivals in the award-winning and groundbreaking adult film Project Gogo Boy, Max Ryder and Jake Bass set upon a journey of self-discovery that tests their friendship and their resolve. Heralded as the “(F**k) Buddy Movie of the Year,” Road Strip is an intense journey into the real lives of two of the most popular young performers in the gay adult entertainment industry!

Road Strip follows Max and Jake as they travel from New York to Palm Springs in a rented RV. We soon see what happens when cameras are on them 24/7 and the line between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred. It also heralds an entirely new genre in gay filmmaking.

Having just launched their careers, the two adorable subjects took the gay adult world by storm, racking up a mountain of awards and instantly catapulting both models and studio to the forefront of the industry. This time you’ll get to witness their interpersonal relationships flowering and unraveling, highly personal interviews, and one of the most revealing – and sidesplitting – desert “trips” ever taken.

Road Strip writer/director Jake Jaxson, along with his partners-in-business-and-in-life Benny Morecock, and R.J. Sebastian have creatively fused a behind-the-scenes look at the gay porn world with experimental art, cinema verite and raunchy reality TV and have managed to fashion one seriously visually arresting experience.

You can now stream Road Strip on Dekkoo today!

Discreet is a dark thriller from acclaimed director Travis Mathews

A haunting past threatens to undermine one man’s journey toward emotional peace in writer-director Travis Mathews’ dark queer thriller Discreet .

After years in hiding and struggling to control his demons, an eccentric drifter returns home and discovers that his childhood abuser, the center of his pain, is still alive. Armed with this knowledge, the drifter plots his revenge, all the while navigating through the perilous land of masculine fragility in modern-day America.

Since 2000, Travis Mathews has been a consistently interesting director, screenwriter, editor and producer in the LGBTQ indie film scene. Most famously, Mathews collaborated with James Franco to make the docufiction, Interior. Leather Bar. Of the film, The New York Times said it was “one of the sharpest, best surprises” of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. The film screened in over 75 festivals internationally, including Berlinale and Rotterdam, and was released theatrically by Strand Releasing in early 2014.

Mathews’ feature narrative debut, I Want Your Love, about a group of gay San Francisco friends, premiered at the Frameline Film Festival, screened in dozens of international festivals, and was called “a bold film with rare insight into the uncensored lives of a generation of gay men” by filmmaker, Andrew Haigh (Weekend). In 2014, Mathews was an OUT 100 recipient and a two time SFFS/KRF grant recipient.

A self-taught filmmaker, Mathews’ body of work focuses on gay male intimacy and masculinity.

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

Politics get personal in the timely new drama Snowflake

The new queer political drama Snowflake tells a fictional story about the fear a nation faces when a dictatorial politician is suddenly thrust into the White House. Sound familiar?

After a shocking presidential election flings an anti-LGBTQ Christian warrior into the Vice Presidency, Ethan (JJ Bozeman) must grapple with his fear of the future and decide how many bridges he’s willing to burn, and how far he’s willing to go, to fight the future he fears.

“While I am overjoyed that the nation is finally beginning to grapple with the hard truths of systemic racism and police brutality, it is still shocking to me just how much we as a nation have numbed to the outrageous fraud and corruption of the Trump administration,” reflects Jack Tracy, the film’s writer director. “It has been normalized.  I hope when people watch Snowflake, the emotional spiral that I and so many other Americans felt in the days following Trump’s election will resurface and a new fire will be lit.”

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

Now Available: Are We Lost Forever

Hampus and Adrian’s on-again off-again relationship gets the final nail in the coffin one morning when Hampus finally works up the courage to reveal his love has fizzled out for good.

Since they were in a long term relationship thought to last forever, so becomes the long process of their breakup. The walls where pictures of them together once hung become increasingly bare, the pillow that once steadily carried the scent of Hampus begins to weaken, and old videos of a romantic holiday now seem a fleeting dream.

As the story unfolds the two are both pushed further apart but fate seems to continue to find ways of bringing the men together. Although they are broken up, lingering are the feelings of longing and loss.

Featuring terrific lead performances from Swedish actors Jonathan Andersson and Björn Elgerd, the new break-up drama Are We Lost Forever marks the feature-length debut of award-winning short film director David Färdmar.

Watch the trailer for Are We Lost Forever below. The film is available now on Dekkoo.