Category: New This Wekk

‘The First Fallen’ is a profoundly moving 1980s period drama from Brazil

Set in 1983 The First Fallen stars Johnny Massaro as a young biologist who returns home from studies abroad and starts to feel that there is something wrong with his body.

This is the beginning of the AIDS crisis – when the first wave of the epidemic hit Brazil. Lives will change, friends will be lost and gained and the future is suddenly uncertain.

With energy, humor and righteous anger, director Rodrigo de Oliveira (the award-winning filmmaker behind Tu Me Manques) creates a drama full of powerful performances, vibrant color and dramatic craft.

Partly entertainment and partly a work of cinematic activism, The First Fallen takes audiences on an emotional journey, offering up a powerful ode to the victims of the AIDS crisis and the community of solidarity and support that formed during those terrifying early days.

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

Short Film Spotlight: All the Awards I Never Gave You

A 16-minute short film from director Caio Scot and screenwriters Lucas Drummond and Mel Carvalho, All the Awards I Never Gave You takes place entirely in one public restroom during a prestigious awards ceremony in Brazil.

Lucas Drummond and Matheus Campos star in the film as two young actors on the rise. When they unexpectedly reunite in the bathroom, they find that their feelings for one another are far from resolved.

The two promising young men soon try to come to some kind of an understanding while struggling with the fact that they’re forced to keep their relationship a secret from the public and the film industry that employs them.

Scot, Drummond and Carvalho’s previous short film, 2019’s After That Party earned the trio a great reputation on the international film festival circuit – screening at over 60 different events and picking up nine different awards.

Watch the trailer for All the Awards I Never Gave You below. The full short film is now available to stream on Dekkoo.

Body language is used to provocative ends in the sensual gay drama ‘Easy Tiger’

In Easy Tiger, a brand-new gay drama from Belgium, much of the story is told through body language – expressing deep desires in a way that words cannot.

Easy Tiger tells the story of a psychologist whose seemingly perfect city life is upended by an unexpected moment with a client, a deaf man who awakens a desire deep within him.

Their charged encounter has a ripple effect on the psychologist’s life. His inescapable desires for his male client force to look at who he does not want to be in order to find out who he actually is.

French and English are used sparingly throughout the film, but its narrative largely unfolds through International Sign Language as director Karel Tuytschaever explores physicality and the body itself as a storytelling device.

With this unique approach, Easy Tiger is a uniquely inclusive feature that aims to provide, as much as possible, the same experience for both hearing and non or partially-hearing viewers.

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

Now Available: Subways

In Subways, writer-director-star Dane Harrington Joseph tells the story of a disgruntled young man who is coping with the taboo feelings towards his half-brother and the tragic loss of a young friend to whom he made a special promise.

Unable to properly handle his feelings, he lashes out toward anyone in his path. When a violent encounter with a coworker leaves him forever scarred, he plummets into a depression that only humor, truth and fulfilling his promise to his departed friend can lift him out of.

With a cast of over 100 and music by some of the LGBTQ+ hip hop scene’s most luminary indie artists, Subways, subtitled “A Requiem in Five Stages,” is a moving drama which chronicles one young gay man’s journey through tragic twists, taboo longing and the darkness of depression.

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

Short Film Spotlight: A Pipe Dream

Plans for a casual Grindr hook-up go horribly wrong in A Pipe Dream, a unabashedly scatological 8-minute comedy from writer-director-star Ethan Wayne Smith.

The film follows an attractive young student (Smith) living in a cramped New York apartment with a very messy, nightmare roommate.

After making plans to meet up with a charming top from his past, he rushes off to their shared-space bathroom to prepare – not expecting to be thwarted at every turn by unfortunate happenstance.

Not for the squeamish, A Pipe Dream will make you laugh while you squirm in your seat.

Watch the trailer for A Pipe Dream below. The full short film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Girls Will Be Girls is celebrating its 20th anniversary!

Celebrating its 20-year anniversary, the drag-tastic queer comedy classic Girls Will Be Girls stars Jack Plotnick, Jeffrey Roberson and Clinton Leupp (better known as drag icon Coco Peru) as three actresses at various places on the Hollywood food chain who navigate the minefield of love, aging and irrepressible ambition.

Plotnick stars as Evie Harris, a washed-up, alcoholic, aging C-list actress who lives a Norma Desmond lifestyle in a woefully out-of-date bungalow. Her roommate, Coco, is a lonely doormat of a spinster who carries a torch for the handsome young doctor who performed her abortion years ago.

When the pair take in new roommate Varla Simonds, the voracious, starry-eyed daughter of Evie’s former rival, their lives are turned upside down. Tensions and jealousies among the three women reach a boiling point and treachery soon rears its ugly head.

Paying homage to camp classics like Valley of the Dolls, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Mommie Dearest – not to mention All About Eve – Girls Will Be Girls is a delightfully outrageous comedy that revels in good old-fashioned drag bitchery.

Watch the trailer for Girls Will Be Girls below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

Jason T. Gaffney’s ‘Out of Body’ is a wildly inventive supernatural gay romance

From writer, director, actor and overall Dekkoo-favorite Jason T. Gaffney and co-writer Suzanne Brockmann comes the new supernatural comedy-drama Out of Body.

Malcolm (Kevin Held) has always had feelings for his best friend Henry (Gaffney), but it’s going to take some extreme measures to bring those feelings out into the open.

When a demon escapes from an orb that’s been imprisoning him, he takes possession of Malcolm’s body, leaving his spirit in limbo. As Henry is the only person who can communicate with Malcolm’s lost soul, the two embark on a valiant quest to get Malcolm’s body back, vanquish evil and maybe even find love along the way.

Out of Body is a wildly inventive and fast-paced film that gleefully upends the traditional gay romance.

Watch the trailer for Out of Body below. The film is now available to stream on Dekkoo. Jason T. Gaffney’s other new project, the Dekkoo-original comedy series Marriage of Inconvenience, is also available now.