Short Film Spotlight: Vermont

Desires shift after a trip to the mountains in the kaleidoscopic 20-minute short Vermont.

Ryan McDermott, making his acting debut, stars as a young man who, having recently returned from a winter trip to the mountains, drifts through New York City – contemplating an unseen landscape and exploring liaisons with various men.

The film also features a number of other non-actors who make up an ever-shifting ensemble cast of mostly queer men.

Shot on 16mm by cinematographer Robert Orlowski and set to a piano and flute score composed by Cody Boyce, Vermont is heavy on style and atmosphere. It feels like a mysterious and contemplative lost indie from the 1970s heyday of underground New York cinema. We can’t wait to see what writer-director Joseph Barglowski gets up to next.

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

‘In the Room Where He Waits’ comes to Dekkoo just in time for Halloween!

Set sometime during the earlier days of the pandemic, In the Room Where He Waits is a queer psychological horror film that uses isolation to its advantage.

Daniel Monks stars at Tobin Wade, an up-and-coming theatre actor who is about to have his first major break on Broadway in a production of ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ His plans change, however, when he learns of his father’s recent passing and is forced to return home to Australia for the funeral.

Stuck in a Brisbane hotel room while he waits out his two-week quarantine, Tobin begins to unravel. He’s not ready to confront a past he thought he’d long ago left behind. Things take an even darker turn when he begins to notice traces of another person in his room.

Soon, the hotel’s dark past and Tobin’s own repressions coalesce, manifesting in a malignant force that only grows stronger with each passing night.

The feature-length debut of short film director Timothy Despina Marshall, In the Room Where He Waits is a clever and stylishly-crafted exploration of grief, identity and the supernatural.

Watch the trailer for In the Room Where He Waits below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Andrea Riseborough and Demi Moore star in the wild queer pastiche ‘Please Baby Please’

Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling and Demi Moore star in this neon-lit fantasia about newlyweds who find themselves on diverging sexual journeys.

A wildly inventive and wickedly funny 1950s pastiche from acclaimed filmmaker Amanda Kramer, Please Baby Please follows Arthur and Suze, two seemingly straight arrows who live an outwardly traditional lifestyle as the Lower East Side’s most bohemian Eisenhower-era couple.

The pair find their cage rattled when they witness a murder and become the new targets of a gang of sadistic, leather-clad greasers known as ‘The Young Gents.’ Their initial thrust of fear soon evolves, arousing previously unsuspected emotions and feelings of sexuality in both of the young lovers.

This sudden exposure to flamboyant masculinity unlocks the realization that Suze is an aspiring leather daddy who mistook herself for a housewife. Meanwhile, the perpetually sensitive Arthur’s obsessive gender trouble goes sideways when ‘Young Gent’ Teddy sparks his dormant queer desires.

Please Baby Please presents a full spectrum of underground fetishism and seductive musical asides, along with delicious cameos from Karl Glusman and Cole Escola. Visionary filmmaker Amanda Kramer pegs the hetero hell-scape of the 1950s in a witty, syncopated riff that plays like a high camp emission from your wildest dreams – bathed in silk, sweat and bisexual lighting!

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

Short Film Spotlight: Before You Go

The 14-minute short Before You Go follows Daniel (Nícola Vilander) and his best friend Franco (Joaquín Batarce), who are on a camping trip together at a remote lake in Patagonia.

When their backpack and tent fall down a cliff, they’re forced to seek shelter during a storm. Finding an unoccupied cabin, they decide to break a window and trespass inside.

Alone together in the house, they begin to celebrate their last days together before going their separate ways for college. Daniel is yet to come clean about his feelings for Franco, but as their time together comes to a close and their trip takes more than a few harrowing turns, the true nature of their feelings will be brought to the fore.

Beautifully crafted by co-directors Vicente del Río Laya and Hans von Marées Pededeand and packed with subtle emotion and sexual tension, Before You Go is a bittersweet coming-of-age short about the early romantic infatuations that linger.

Watch a short teaser for Before You Go below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

An alluring stranger comes between three witchy siblings in the supernatural thriller ‘Cheat’

Originally produced by the Filipino network Hue TV, the new ‘Boys’ Love’ film Cheat is a campy psychological thriller with supernatural undercurrents.

A tale of stolen innocence, the film follows Vee (Daryll Rodriguez), an alluring and mysterious young man who comes from an unusually sheltered upbringing. When he befriends Dong, Jennifer and Jay (Migo de Vera, Allora Alcantara and Victor Relosa), a family of three siblings, along with their mother (Tuesday Vargas), who dabbles in witchcraft, his strange charms set off a series of events that will inflict devastating consequences.

As all three siblings begin to fall in love with the unusual stranger, jealously, lust and betrayal rear their ugly heads and Vee’s mere presence in the family’s life threatens to tear them apart.

With edgy supernatural soap opera vibes in the vein of ‘Supernatural’ or ‘Charmed,’ Cheat delves into the maelstrom of intimate relationships within a tightly knit family. It’s also got style and sex appeal to spare.

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

Three fugitives make a road movie in the edgy queer thriller ‘You Can’t Escape Lithuania’

After his star actress, Indre (Irina Lavrinovic), is suspected of murdering her mother, rich-kid filmmaker Romas (Denisas Kolomyckis) plans her escape from Lithuania. His sexy Mexican boyfriend Carlos (Adrian Escobar) helps them reluctantly.

On the road, Romas begins shooting an improvised experimental film of their harrowing trip with his smartphone. As events take an unexpected turn, their secrets, memories and emotions make this journey wilder than any film Romas could have imagined.

Stylish and supremely sexy, the gripping gay road thriller You Can’t Escape Lithuania comes Romas Zabarauskas, the prolific queer artist and filmmaker behind Porno Melodrama, The Lawyer and We Will Riot – who loosely based it around some of his own real-life experiences.

Zabarauskas funded the movie though Kickstarter… even going so far as to get naked on camera for donors in order to raise the necessary money (something, you’ll be happy to know, his incredibly attractive cinematic counterpart also does in the film).

Watch the trailer for You Can’t Escape Lithuania below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Short Film Spotlight: Incomplete

From talented actor, writer, director and dancer Sasha Korbut, the new 15-minute short Incomplete examines feelings of loneliness in a crowded world that’s simultaneously connected and apart.

A young man, alone in a phone booth on a New York City street corner, holds a hand-written letter that expresses his longing and desire for a man he’s yet to meet. As we hear the letter read aloud, we’re invited to watch his fantasies of connection in quick bits of dance with random men – pairings that instantly come and go, never quite right.

Each of the three main dances in the film explore different aspects of connection – intellectual, physical and spiritual. Finally, in a crowded square, the young man begins to dance on his own. His movements become a scream of desperation, a way to be seen and heard. Soon, he finds an inner peace that he never imagined and learns that he’s not really as alone as he thought.

A heady experimental film with gorgeous production values, Incomplete asks the question: do we need another person in our lives to feel complete, or are we really missing a connection within ourselves?

Watch a short trailer for Incomplete below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.