Gay Movies at This Year’s Sundance

The Sundance Festival kicks off today in Park City, Utah, with an itinerary full of LGBTQ-centric flicks. I did a little digging around to find info and trailers (when available) from some of the most-talked-about offerings so you’ll be in the know when they make their way to Philly later in the year.

Big-time gay ally James Franco co-directs and stars in the racy “art film” Interior. Leather Bar., which is a re-imagining of the S&M scenes that were allegedly cut from Al Pacino’s 1980 sex thriller, Cruising. He shares the directors hat with gay-film auteur Travis Mathews.

In the above video, Harry Daniel Radcliffe talks about Kill Your Darlings, in which he plays a 19-year-old Allen Ginsberg. He describes it as an “Origins movie but for poets … It’s about a murder that was the catalyst for forming the beat generation.” In the film, he meets and falls in love with Lucien Carr (Dane DeHann), who introduces him to William Burroughs (Ben Foster!) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston).

Mike Lerner, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s documentary A Punk Prayer chronicles Russian feminist group Pussy Riot’s global-headline-making performance of  “Mother Mary, Banish Putin!” to protest the reinstallation of the Russian president. They sang it in a renowned theater  and, as you can imagine, the conservative backlash was brutal.

James Cameron Mitchell’s beautiful short Seraph follows a young, presumably gay boy as he grapples to accept himself in a world that constantly tells him he’s wrong. Icelandic electronic group Sigur Rós provides the dreamy soundtrack.

James Franco has a second offering at this year’s Sundance, Kink, in which he and co-director Christina Voros “pull back the curtain on the fetish empire of Kink.com, the Internet’s largest producer of BDSM content.” You can see the trailer here, but I wouldn’t suggest playing that bad boy at work.

Based on a short story in David Sedaris’ Naked, C.O.G. marks the first page-to-screen adaptation for the funny gay essayist. The real-life story follows Samuel (Sedaris’ character played by Glee‘s Jonathan Groff) as he goes to work as an apple picker in Oregon. There, he finds himself at odds with the conservative, religious locals. Directed by out filmmaker Kyle Patrick Alvarez.