London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival preview

27 March - 10 April

Less than a week to go before the 22nd LLGFF at London's South Bank and there is much to anticipate, from Alek Keshishian's rom-com Love and Other Disasters to Angelina Maccarone's sensitive drama, Vivere.

Between these two bookends one finds an array of new queer films and material ripe for reconsideration, with films by Seidelman, Bergman and Altman given an airing.

Among the new offerings that catch the eye are: Otto, the latest from aging enfant terrible Bruce LaBruce, in which a queer zombie runs amok in Berlin; Viva, Anna Biller's feminist satire on 1970s' sexual mores; A Jihad for Love, Parvez Sharma's doc which investigates the intersection of Islam and queer identity; and Derek, Isaac Julien's doc on auteur Derek Jarman.

Experimental filmmakers Bev Zalcock and Su Friedrich get retrospectives looking at their decades-long practice, while other strands looks at Queer Dance and Lezploitation. And there's even an all-night musical programme, featuring such guilty pleasures as Can't Stop the Music, for those who don't want to go to bed.

Of the films I have seen, highlights include the closing night gala, Vivere, previously reviewed and recommended. Angelina Maccarone has built up an enviable body of work as a writer/director and it's a mystery to me why she is not as feted as Fatih Akin and other celebrated young German directors and why her work has not reached a wider audience. Having appeared at the LLGFF in 2006 with the brilliant Unveiled, she returns with three intertwined stories of women on the road from Germany to Rotterdam over an eventful Christmas.

Zero Chou won the Teddy at the 2007 Berlinale with Spider Lilies, a highly stylised depiction of online lust and troubling reality between two women in Taiwan.

Lucia Puenzo's XXY, Argentina's entry for the Academy Award, is a ponderously paced but engaging drama of intersex identity and family relations on an island off Uruguay.

The World Unseen (dir Shamim Sarif) features beautiful cinematography and smouldering drama in South Africa. Adapted from her own novel, Sarif's film looks at a growing attraction between two Asian women in 1950s South Africa. As she explained to me, it's partly based on stories her parents told her of living under apartheid and negotiating the thorny social structures. Enjoyable, although the two leads appear to be acting in two different films.

A Walk into the Sea is a very personal film by Esther Robinson exploring her uncle Danny Williams' troubled and mysterious life. A fringe member of Warhol's Factory, Williams shot several short films before he disappeared in 1966 while on a visit home. Robinson explained to me she wanted to make space for his films in her documentary, and his previously unknown footage appears for the first time, alongside sometimes conflicting interviews with survivors of the Warhol scene.

German Film Festival

London
Through 29 November

Vivere
dir Angelina Maccarone

Having seen Unveiled, one of her previous films, I was keen to see this latest work from the prolific writer/director Angelina Maccarone and it didn't disappoint. Family relationships, loneliness, Christmas Eve, a road trip to Rotterdam.... From these various strands she has crafted a subtle, complex and delightful film shining a light on the things people often keep hidden from themselves and others.

Francesca and Antonietta are two squabbling siblings stifling in their small town until Antonietta runs away to Rotterdam to join her musician boyfriend on tour. Francesca, a stand-in parent for her since their mother left and their father went to pieces (this character spends much of his screentime mumbling in Italian and German and is truly sorrowful), follows her in her cab and encounters a car-crash victim along the way. This is the mysterious Gerlinde (a resplendent Hannelore Elsner), who is having woman troubles in a big way.

Francesca finds herself attracted to Gerlinde and also responsible for Antonietta and the film takes unexpected turns as these three characters try to sort their lives out. While the film starts from Francesca's point of view, it retraces its steps to show the same scenes from the other two characters, and also fills in the backstory, giving depth to the character's actions. Very impressive.

After the Fall
dirs Frauke Sandig / Eric Black

Less story-driven but brilliantly shot is this documentary, a retrospective piece from 1999 looking at the Berlin Wall ten years after its fall. Sandig and Black focus a lot on images and gradually a story emerges of how people view the wall now, how they viewed it from opposite sides pre-unification and then, most bizarrely, how opportunists are seeking to preserve and make money from it.

This last strand features the most bizarre array of characters, including Bavaria's answer to Del-Boy, a man with a "recycling machine", who is extremely frustrated by the refusal of German museums to buy pieces of the wall from him.

In possibly the funniest scene, he plays his accordion while recounting how he stood in the former Death Strip making a toast to the wall with various officials.

However, this pales in comparison to the appearance of the two homeopaths from Tunbridge Wells who explain how the dark energy emanating from the wall makes a useful but dangerous remedy. Every word out of these people's mouths sent the audience into raptures of merriment. It was not a great advert for alternative medicine.

Anyway, the film looks beautiful, with many dusk and dawn shots of Berlin under (re)construction in the late 90s and some thought-provoking commentary from an historian about the way the east was left behind and had its history consumed by the western part.