Frameline: The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival starts this Thursday, and is celebrating its 32nd year with screenings of over 200 films from around the world (some of which, like the delirious musical Were The World Mine, were also part of NewFest, which we blogged about two weeks ago). For a complete listing of the schedule, and info about tickets, visit the website, but here a few choice selections.

On The Other Hand, Death: A Donald Strachey Mystery

Before it premieres on Here July 11th, you can see out actor Chad Allen in his third Strachey mystery.

"Even before the opening credits roll, Strachey (Chad Allen) finds himself surrounded by cops with guns drawn when the shadowy female he’s tracking through the city’s gritty back streets turns out be an officer of the Albany Police Department. Under arrest, he explains that her husband hired him to follow her to see if she was having an affair. The only problem is, she isn’t married. To save his hide, Strachey has to figure out who the so-called husband really is and why he hired him to tail a cop. He gets thrown off course when a small-town lesbian couple (Margot Kidder and Gabrielle Rose) becomes a target of homophobic vandalism and threats. Strachey can’t resist volunteering to help track down the perpetrators, even as he continues his search for his phantom client. Seeking both of them at once proves to be tough, but as the violence escalates, his twin investigations start to seem suspiciously like one and the same case."

All My Life

Described as "most daring and sexually explicit portrait of homosexual life in Egypt yet put on screen", All My Life is about the political and sexual lives of some gay friends in Cairo.

"Maher Sabry’s film evocatively details the tribulations of 26-year-old Rami, an accountant and dance student living in Cairo. Rami’s boyfriend, Waleed, has just ended their relationship in order to get married. His best girlfriend Dalia is leaving Egypt for San Francisco. And his doctor pal Kareem is pestering him to be more involved in the city’s quasi-underground gay community. As Rami pursues his own romantic path of one-night stands with closet cases and fetishizing tourists, Kareem is arrested in a police raid on a floating discotheque called the Queen Boat (based on an actual incident in 2001, which catalyzed gay Egyptians and a variety of international human rights organizations into action). In his ambitious profile of the multifaceted world of his main character, Sabry’s wide-reaching story also includes a devout man living upstairs from Rami, who is trying to quell his longing for women, and an unhappily closeted kid named Mina, who lives across the way. All of these characters are portrayed with palpable compassion — and often in various states of undress — with a variety of dramatic denouements."

You can see more festival entries and a couple of trailers (including one for a gay horror movie featuring Tori Spelling, after the break

• Out designer (and former Top Design judge) Jonathan Adler will appear on tonight's episode of Welcome to the Parker. Here's to hoping he refers to someone on the staff as "the concierge of the Excuses Hotel."
• Transgender filmmakers and artists are being excluded from LGBT events like Frameline for not being "queer enough" in their work. In related news, some porridge "too hot," other porridge "too cold."
• On the other end of the spectrum, there's a debate going on at Queersighted over the gay short film Two Big Fags. Thoughts?
• NewNowNext has former pornstar (and current castmember of The Lair) Colton Ford's video for his first single, "The Way You Love Me".
• If, like me, you thought that the funniest thing about Chuck & Larry was the idea that Adam Sandler was the hottest guy in the firehouse, this Today Show clip of the pinups from the 2008 FDNY Heroes Calendar is a nice reminder that it was all just Hollywood magic.

It started with a few gay men, a sheet for a screen, and a bunch of homemade films. Today, it's a huge and prestigious international event, held in the week and a half leading up to Pride in the gayest city of all, my hometown of San Francisco.

Frameline has been teasing us all month with its promised new website (their old website really was so Web 1.0), and they finally made it live. And if you go there, you can see all kinds of very beautiful things, such as all the festival trailers back to 1990 (this year's is at the end of this post), a place to buy tickets starting this Friday, an interactive Festival calendar so you can keep track of all the films you want to see and find out before it's too late if two of them are at the exact same moment so you can have yourself cloned, plus breaking news on schedule changes and ticket availability.

It's also very pretty.

So, what's playing this year?

We've already blogged about The Witnesses (showing June 14) and The Bubble (showing June 18), but the one I got all excited reading about is an American film by Robert Gaston called 2 Minutes Later (pictured at top).

I totally want this film to be brilliant, because the description alone makes me all breathless. Frameline describes it as "an episode of 'Silk Stalkings' if it were directed by Robert Mapplethorpe" and it's not impossible that could be the perfect idea for a movie. Here's the plot:

When semi-closeted insurance adjuster Michael Dalmar lands a case in Philadelphia, he reaches out to his estranged twin brother Kyle, a successful — but abusive — photographer in the City of Brotherly Love. When Michael finds Kyle missing and is mistaken for being the swinging photographer himself, he decides to use his brother’s identity to work the Philly art scene for clues. With the help of lesbian repo girl-turned-P.I. Abigail Marks, Michael discovers a long line of jilted male models who could have had it in for Kyle. Danger and drama lurk around every corner, but Michael soon learns to loosen up and enjoy the pleasures of his much naughtier brother’s life.

It's showing Thursday, June 21, 9:30 PM at the Victoria Theater, which is very much the festival's third string venue, so it made me worry this movie won't be as fabulous as it sounds. Still, it's not like I haven't done worse things for much longer periods of time, so I'll probably see it either way.

So check out the new website and the full schedule, and also this year's trailer:

The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival will launch its fourth decade on Thursday, June 14, with the North American Premiere of The Witnesses (Les Témoins), the latest film from director André Téchiné (Wild Reeds, 1994).

From Frameline:

Paris, 1984. In a cruisey city park, Adrien, a sophisticated, middle-aged doctor, meets Manu, a buoyant 18-year-old. Manu turns down Adrien’s proposition—then asks him to hold his jacket while he joins an orgy in the bushes. Not the best way to start a relationship, yet Adrien takes Manu under his wing. Manu needs guidance, and Adrien comes alive as he tromps around Paris with this energetic newcomer. Adrien’s friend Sarah worries that he’s being taken advantage of, but Adrien disagrees: “You can ask anything of your friends.”