Monthly Film Bulletin: GagaOOLala

By Miruna Tiberiu

GagaOOLala is a Taiwan-based streaming service which aims to bring together queer stories of all genres from around the world. As the first LGBT-focused media platform in Asia, GagaOOLala curates feature films, shorts, documentaries, and series from the past few years, as well as producing its own original content. This month, Miruna Tiberiu is back with more recommendations of the freshest queer cinema out there. 

Incendios (2021), dir. Mateo Vega

It is post-industrial summer and two unnamed boys amble about their small town, easing into the elasticity of summer’s time now that they’ve graduated from high school. Amidst the glaze of summer heat, they skateboard, smoke weed, and explore an abandoned factory, beer cans in hand. Empty time is slowly filled with the uncertainty of the future and the realisation that their time of freedom is not as endless as they’d initially thought. Faced by the threat of separation – one of the boys is driven away from his hometown by gentrification’s property price spikes and forced to relocate with his mother – a sense of immediacy permeates the screen. It is now or never, we are made to feel. Then, the film cuts, just as this immediacy is about to spill over. Incendios’ DIY aesthetic aids this slice-of-life feel, opting to capture an atmosphere of the ‘summer before everything changes’ before sowing the narrative seeds of the film’s central (implicit) romance. This slice-of-life equally garners a sociopolitical edge, following the pair’s uneasiness in the face of changes in their individual lives and relationship with the changes of the world around them. In turn, these two parallel changes become intertwined, and the political becomes personal.

Watch Incendios here.

27 (2023), dir. Flóra Anna Buda

This Palme-D’Or-winning, ARTE-funded Hungarian short film is similarly anchored in themes of change and impending adulthood. It follows, as the title suggests, our protagonist Alice’s 27^th birthday, portrayed as the edge of the cliff that is youth and to which Alice clings on, refusing to grow up. She still lives with her parents and annoying tween brother, still passes her days gazing atmospherically out of her window blasting electronic music and smoking languidly as if she is being watched by the crew of a coming-of-age film. She still turns to the quintessential teen’s antidote to the pressures of authority, escaping her days through dreams, at times waking, at times drug-induced. Within the film’s animated dreamscape – painted with abstract, watercolour-like brushstrokes – we are never really sure if we are in Alice’s dreams or not. We feel every texture, from cigarette smoke to the feel of a swig of wine as it goes down her throat to the crackling of beetles that signals the heat of the summer. We are jolted to and from psychedelic parties on the rooftop of an abandoned factory to a fantasy involving a male and female police duo in a field to the whispers thrown about in the early hours of the morning, never to be remembered henceforth. We feel the thickness of the air as Alice sways to a delicious soundtrack – one of the most impressive feats of the film’s ingenious animation style – as much as we feel Alice’s foggy brain as she staggers home after a tumultuous night. 27 is a film about what adulthood means in the twenty-first century, about submission to authority and the prescriptive rhythms of the 9 to 5 pillar to a so-called ‘successful life’, and a testament that the fun never stops after one’s 27^th birthday.

Watch 27 here.

 Longing (2023), dir. Courteney Tan

That night I realised I had been longing for something I did not know how to have. I think she knew that too.

Described as a “queer version of Past Lives (2023)”, Courteney Tan’s exhilaratingly-human short film follows another romance that ends before it has even really begun. Lena and Eve meet at the cinema, drawn together by a screening of a film about fleeting love across the borders of space and time. Lena, hilariously awkward, convinces Eve to get a drink after the film, and the two end up spending the rest of the night traversing the streets of London hoping that the sun won’t rise for a while longer. Eve must return home to Malaysia and her husband and children, but the pair know that they will always regret not having known each other if they didn’t try even for a night. Longing treads confidently between hilarious and genuine and tender; it feels like catching a glimpse of strangers sat across you in a bar sharing a drink and wondering who they are and how they got there. Punctuated by a delicate retrospective voiceover from Eve, we begin to realise that this is an ode to the people who briefly stumble into your life before disappearing forever yet forever continuing to linger as a ghost or perhaps a memory. Seldom have I felt 12 minutes pass so quickly; like Eve, we too are left with only our imagination at our disposal, imagining and reimagining all the ‘what ifs’ that trickle out of this brief encounter.

Watch Longing here.

If you liked the sound of these, check out more of what is on offer on GagaOOLala!