Review: Short Films Explore Coming Out, the Birth of Adult Filmmaking and Pedophilia.

Man and Boy

The Tribeca Film Festival ended on Sunday after screening a number of gay-themed films (including the documentary Gone, which I liked a lot). Several gay-themed short films were represented as well:

Man and Boy, which won the festival's best narrative short award, was "inspired" by a 2008 incident in the UK in which a man accused of sexually molesting a teenage boy and subsequently fleeing an angry mob, jumped to his death from an apartment building.

In the film, written and directed by David Leon (with co-director Marcus McSweeney), a teenage boy strongly implies to his father that something nefarious happened in the apartment of the man who has recently moved in upstairs. The outraged father takes a baseball bat to the door of that apartment with the man cowering inside. But what really happened between the man and the boy?

The Tribeca judging committee liked the film much more than I did: I thought it jumped around too much in time, especially given its brief length, with too much emphasis on the least interesting character: the outraged father. Meanwhile, the "secret" of what really happened between the man and boy is both mostly what you'd expect, but also not developed enough. Still, it's terrifically acted and shot.

Meanwhile, the cleverly-titled  Smut Capital of America, a short documentary by Michael Stabile (the editor of GayPornBlog), argues that the existence of hard-core pornography today can be traced to ... San Francisco in the the 1960s and 70s. With its free-thinking ways (and predominantly male and often gay population, as a result of an influx of military men following World War II), the city was the perfect breeding ground for film producers and viewers willing to push the limits of social (and legal) acceptance. Gay men were in the middle of the action, as both producers and consumers of these films.

The topic is certainly interesting, and the film effectively makes its provocative case using interviews (including the always-insightful John Waters) and digs up some fascinating old footage (including Dianne Feinstein, the first female president of the city's Board of Supervisors, who first made a name for herself fighting said pornography). Porn documentaries are suddenly all the rage, and while this straightforward, modest, gay-inclusive film doesn't reach the heights of the brilliant Inside Deep Throat, its subject matter alone will probably draw it plenty of attention. It's hopefully just the start of the longer documentary this topic deserves. (The trailer, below, is NSFW.)

Finally, in Coming Out, a film by Jerry Carlsson, a young man has decided to come out to his parents. The film shows us all the things that are running through his head as he prepares to do so — the urgency, the fear, the anxiety — and ultimately leaves us deciding for ourselves whether or not he finally goes through with it. It's certainly earnest, and it would probably provoke an interesting discussion in a seminar on coming out or homosexuality. But as drama, the film is relatively static and one-note, even given its mere four-minute length.