Category: New Release

The critically-acclaimed British drama Into the Mirror comes to Dekkoo

One of the past year’s most critically-acclaimed LGBTQ films, the gorgeous, haunting, colorful and deeply emotional Into the Mirror is now available on Dekkoo.

The feature-length debut of co-writers Charles Streeter and Jamie Bacon (who also star in the film) and director Lois Stevenson, Into the Mirror follows Daniel, a young man struggling with an inner identity that is desperate to be released.

After leaving his father’s home and moving to London, Daniel’s subconscious desires begin to take control of his everyday waking life. Upon finding London’s drag hot-spot, “Lost & Found” nightclub, he begins to realize the truth about his gender and sexuality – even if he’s not fully ready to accept it. One way or another, his life will never have to be the same again.

Featuring exceptional performances and cinematography, Into the Mirror marks the arrival of numerous creative talents worth keeping an eye on. Both prolific actors in the UK, Streeter and Bacon show a terrific flair for timely, personal storytelling and we can’t wait to see what they will do next.

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

Short Film Spotlight: Vertical Lines

Dave and Andrew reach a new level of closeness in their relationship when they share their personal experiences with self-harm. An intimate conversational piece inspired by true events, Vertical Lines explores the path forward from personal trauma.

Vertical Lines co-stars and was directed by Kyle Reaume. An award winning Toronto-based director, writer, actor, and picture editor, Reaume is a graduate of the Toronto Film School. His student short film The Lazarus Files took home Best Picture, Best Producer, Best Editor and Best Production Design at TFS Fest and his collective shorts have screened in over 60 film festivals worldwide. In additional to Vertical Lines, you can see his films What About Shelley, Battle Cry and Ecstasy on Dekkoo now.

Reaume’s co-star in the film is writer-director-actor Nick Neon. His films Ultra Blue, The Definition of Lonely and Zero One are also available on Dekkoo right now.

Vertical Lines won the “Best Men’s Short” Audience Award at the Wicked Queer 2018 Film Festival. It also took home the “Best Screenplay” prize at the 2019 Future of Film Showcase.

Vertical Lines is available now on Dekkoo.

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Now Available: At the End of the Day

After losing his wife and counseling practice, the only thing thirty-two-year-old Dave Hopper (Stephen Shane Martin) has going for himself is his part-time professorship at his alma mater, a growing Christian college. And the only reason he even got that job was because his previous professor (Tom Nowicki), now ambitious dean, pulled a few strings.

The Dean’s plans for growth hit a snag when the property he wants to develop has been promised to a gay support group – which has plans to open an LGBT homeless teen shelter if they can raise the money in time. The Dean is forced to take drastic measures, offering Dave his dream job, but he only gets it if he goes undercover in the group as a gay man – the abomination he counsels against – and stops them from raising the funds needed to buy the property.

Dave reluctantly agrees, and for the first time, is met face-to-face with the community he has been battling his entire career. The awkward and emotional experiences that follow lead Dave on a journey of truth, revealing that life and love are not as black and white as he first thought.

The feature-length debut from writer-director Kevin O’Brien, At the End of the Day is a compassionate new comedy drama. Watch the trailer below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

 

New Episodes: Two Naked Gay Guys

Lucas (Matthew Dussler) is a cocky pretty boy who lives for casual sex and no commitments. Dean (Riley Brophy) is a shy romantic trying to work out what he wants. After a hookup leads to a moment of genuine connection, these two guys find themselves both questioning when does a casual fling become something more, and discover that everyone they know has a different answer.

Two Naked Gay Guys follows the growing relationship between Lucas and Dean as they try to navigate their feelings for each other and how that then has a rippling impact on the relationships of the friends and family around them. The series examines themes of love, intimacy, honesty, sexuality, and relationships. When does a relationship truly start? When does a relationship truly end?

All twenty-six “brief” episodes of Two Naked Gay Guys are available now on Dekkoo. Watch the original “sizzle trailer” below.

 

A family reunion takes a tense turn in Take Me to the River

A Nebraskan family reunion couldn’t seem more backwards to a gay Californian teenager. If Ryder (Love, Simon and Escape Room star Logan Miller) had his way, he’d choose a moment just like this to come out – the bigger the scene the better! For the sake of his conditionally-accepting parents (Richard Schiff and Robin Weigert), however, Ryder agrees to keep quiet… save parading around the picnic in his most audacious pair of short-shorts.

Ryder’s antics raise dubious eyebrows from his hardened cowboy relatives, but nine-year-old Molly (Ursula Parker) can’t get enough. She follows her cool California cousin everywhere. After lunch, they walk to the barn to look for a bird’s nest in the rafters Their strange encounter, and whatever happened while the two escaped their family’s watchful eyes, makes Ryder the sudden target of suspicion, and places him at the center of a long buried family secret.

Featuring excellent performances from a stellar cast (also including Josh Hamilton and Azura Skye), Take Me to the River is an intense indie family drama from writer-director Matt Sobel.

Watch the trailer for Take Me to the River below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

Now Available: Your Bones and Your Eyes

João (writer-director Caetano Gotardo), a middle-class filmmaker who lives in the city of São Paulo, goes through a series of encounters with people like his long-time friend Irene (Malu Galli); his boyfriend Álvaro (Vinicius Meloni); Matias (Carlos Escher), a young man he meets in the subway and has a sexual experience with, among others, some acquainted, some unknown.

These encounters affect him and slowly begin to reveal a play of time frames which blends together life and creative process, memory and the present.

In Caetano Gotardo’s gorgeous, meditative follow-up to his debut feature The Moving Creatures, life and love, the creative process emerges as a recurring theme, recalling the films of Éric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo.

Watch the trailer for Your Bones and Your Eyes below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

 

Short Film Spotlight: The Gay Rub

The Gay Rub is a project by Steven Reigns devoted to collecting rubbings from LGBTQ historical markers, signs, tombstones, cenotaphs, plaques, and monuments. By gathering LGBTQ rubbings from across the globe, these public historic commemorations can be viewed at once. LGBTQ history and landmarks are underrepresented and underappreciated. The Gay Rub’s aim is to help draw more attention to the markers and the LGBTQ significance that prompted them.

Steven Reigns is a Los Angeles-based poet and educator and was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. Alongside over a dozen chapbooks, he has published collections such as Inheritance and Your Dead Body is My Welcome Mat.

Reigns holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida, a Master of Clinical Psychology from Antioch University, and is an eleven-time recipient of The Los Angeles County’s Department of Cultural Affairs’ Artist in Residency Grant. Currently he is touring The Gay Rub, an exhibition of rubbings from LGBT landmarks, facilitates the monthly Lambda Lit Book Club, and is at work on a new collection of poetry.

Director Michael J. Saul is fairly new to documentary filmmaking, but he was a pioneer in the San Francisco art and film scene of the 1980s, producing a series of experimental films with musical collaborator Steven M. Miller which found success in film festivals around the world. With the new short doc, The Gay Rub, Saul shines a spotlight on the important work that Reigns has been doing and offers viewers an exclusive look at this profoundly impressive collection.

The Gay Rub is now available on Dekkoo.

 

Now Available: Cheetah in August

A former high school track athlete’s distorted views on love, negatively affects the people closest to him in the acclaimed LGBTQ series Cheetah in August.

The show centers around the deep personal journey of the main character, August (Andre Myers), as he examines his life in therapy, from his high school years into adulthood. At the start of the season we are introduced to August’s alter ego, “Cheetah”, who is the main force preventing August from enjoying a monogamous relationship with his current lover. As a large cast of characters are soon introduced, they intertwine within a web of sex, lies, deception, and murder.

Sexuality, love, religion, psychology and self-hate are all themes that are touched on throughout Cheetah in August, which proudly aims to raise awareness of societal issues often swept under the rug. Series creator Anthony Bawn has said that he hopes to use the show to explore ideas of ethnic LGBTQ identity through a “mentally confused young adult searching for normalcy” and that he pictured how a young black male growing up in a religious family could develop social desegregation within the gay community.

Watch the trailer for Cheetah in August below. The first two twelve-episode seasons are available now on Dekkoo.

Two siblings reconnect after choosing very different paths in Escaping Freedom

Foster siblings Vincent and Krystal (Patrick D. Green and Kelly Godell) have been estranged for many years. When they are forced to reunite, their polar opposite paths in life lead to an explosive outcome where each is made to come to terms with their own faults.

Vincent is a pastor living in the Pacific Northwest. During his childhood, his best friend was his foster sister, Krystal. The two regularly found themselves in all sorts of trouble which brought no end of frustration to their parents. Broken by the death of their minister father, Vincent committed his life to the church and began a career behind the pulpit. This decision directly led to a falling out between him and Krystal. Over the last two years, Vincent wrote her letters of an increasingly personal nature. These “confessions” reveal his crisis of faith and a suppression of his sexuality. His best friend is Marcus (Jonathan Daniel Miles), a fellow pastor at the church, who Vincent’s affection for has developed into something he knows must be kept hidden.

A self-proclaimed hedonist, Krystal lives every day basking in the moment. After Vincent left town to begin his time at seminary, she decided to dedicate her life to the theatre, a passion she has held since childhood. Today she is a well-respected actress in town with a reputation for bringing “a foul mouth and a good time” wherever she goes. She finds immense pride in always striving to be authentic to who she is, even if she does not like what she sees. After receiving a series of letters from Vincent, Krystal finally responds with a hurtful message for her brother to move on in his life and leave her alone.

As each other’s closest confidant as well as biggest critic, Vincent and Krystal attract and repel like magnets. When the siblings reunite, everything comes to a head, both within their relationship and within each of their individual lives.

“Escaping Freedom is about two very different people. They can see the apparent faults in the other while completely ignoring their own. How long can this dance last without failing? On the surface these two are polar opposites, but when you look a little deeper, they are truly two sides of the same coin,” said writer-director Edd Blott.

“It’s the same for all of us. We are neither Vincent nor Krystal. We are all BOTH Vincent and Krystal. That is ultimately what Escaping Freedom is about. We are complex creatures with the capacity to love, feel pain and deep fears, and exude incredible strength. When the credits roll, I hope you see a bit more clearly that you and the person sitting next to you are in this world together. Both are worthy of being loved, by others and, maybe even more importantly, by his/her/their own self.”

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

 

Buddies is an intensely personal study of love, death, and the need for activism

David (David Schachter), a naive graduate student, has volunteered to work as a ‘buddy’ for people dying of AIDS. Assigned to the intensely political Robert (Geoff Edholm), a lifelong activist whose friends and family have abandoned him following his diagnosis, the two men, each with notably different world views, soon discover common bonds, as David’s inner activist awakens and Robert’s need for emotional release is fulfilled.

The first narrative feature film made about the AIDS crisis, acclaimed independent filmmaker Arthur Bressan Jr’s (Passing Strangers, Abuse) Buddies is an intensely personal study of love, death, and the need for activism during the earliest years of the LGBTQ community’s fight for survival.

Structured like a filmed play, Buddies turned out to be Bressan’s final film, as he too would fall victim to AIDS barely two years after its completion.

Nearly impossible to see following its brief theatrical release and never officially released on home video, Buddies is available now on Dekkoo, newly restored from a long-lost 16mm negative. You can watch the original 1985 trailer below.