It is nothing new for award-winning actor Neil Sandilands - he of the television soapie, 7de Laan - to play gay.
He first did so on the Cape Town stage in the bilingual pairings of the British gay play, My Night With Reg and its Afrikaans translation, My Aand met Reg. Now Sandilands, seen on stage here earlier this year in Saturday Night at the Palace, is playing gay again, this time in the South African gay movie, Proteus.
The film is one of a number I have seen which will be screened in the Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, opening at Ster-Kinekor's Cinema Nouveau complex in the Waterfront from Friday until March 28.
Proteus, made by local filmmaker Jack Lewis and Canadian director John Greyson, is based on a court report found in the Cape archives dealing with the 18th century prosecution of a Dutchman, Rijkhaart Jacobs (Sandilands), and a Khoi worker, Claas Blank (Rouxnet Brown), for sodomy.
The plot is rather complex but interesting nevertheless and the settings, particularly the Robben Island sequences, are effectively bleak, highlighting the plight of the unlikely lovers.
Sandilands is believable as a man at the end of his emotional tether but Brown's sometimes wooden performance is less satisfying.
The filmmakers have chosen to anachronise their picture with, for instance, the inclusion of a 4x4 pickup, a modern yacht and policemen who are clearly not from the 18th century. Unnecessary departures, I thought.
One of the quirky delights of the festival is Party Monster which I saw immediately after having to endure a preview of the gorily unpleasant Mel Gibson opus, The Passion of the Christ.
Party Monster, which United International Pictures will release in South Africa on April 2, is also based on a true story. Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, it focuses on a small-town boy, Michael Alig, who arrives in New York to re-invent himself as a party animal.
James St James, a poor little rich queen, sets Michael on his way, and, with the indulgence of club owner Peter Gatien, established the Club Kids, a weird bunch who flit across the party scene in outrageous costumes.
Of course, drugs are to the fore in all of this, and the whole silly process really comes unstuck when a drug dealer is murdered.
Macaulay Culkin, now 23, is delicious as Michael. He looks like a large baby and, at times, like Holly Hunter in drag. Seth Green as James makes an outrageous poofter, Chlo Sevigny a ditzy party groupie, and Dylan McDermott, black eyepatch and all, tries hard to fit in as the indulgent club owner.
Another amusing (though desultory) flick is O Fantasma (Phantom), the directorial debut of Portuguese filmmaker Joo Pedro Rodrigues.
It centres on the dishy Sergio, a young trash collector, who indulges his sexual fantasies at night by dressing in a body-
hugging black latex suit and mask and going about pouncing on other boys.
There are a couple of erotic sequences but tighter editing would have been helpful.
You don't see many black-and-white movies these days but Leather Jacket Love Story is an absolute delight. Made in 1997 by David DeCoteau, it is a light-hearted gay romance centring on Kyle, a young gay poet who comes to Los Angeles to get a life and maybe a little love.
He gets in tow with three outrageous drag queens who mother him and even practise their martial arts skills defending him from lurking gay-bashers. Love comes in the form of the hunky Mike, who wears a black leather jacket which triggers Kyle's lust for him.
Canadian-born Sean Tataryn is endearing as the innocent Kyle. He looks like a younger version of a well-known Cape artist now living in France. No prizes for spotting who this is.
Christopher Bradley as Mike spells hunk from his first appearance, and whoever the actors are playing the drag queens, they deserve better billing.
A re-run that is bound to be popular all over again is Man of the Year, the wry documentary by Dirk Shafer who is its subject, the girlie magazine centrefold who turned out to be as bent as a hairpin.
Other festival movies I've already written about include:
- Goldfish Memory (2003): Liz Gill's amusing Irish comedy nvolving gay and lesbian relationships. Goldfish are reputed to have three-second memories - like some of the characters in this film set in Dublin.
- Latter Days (2004): a charming gay romance about a randy young waiter who falls in love with an unhappy Mormon boy who is deep in the closet. But love triumphs over quirky religion.
- Beautiful Thing (1996): a worthy re-run of Hettie Macdonald's superb British film, based on a play, about emergent teenage homosexuality in a high-density working-class neighbourhood.
- The Experiment: Gay and Straight (2003): The Chicago studios of Fox TV made this fascinating documentary on a group of gay and straight people who live together Big Brother-style for a week and thrash out their various perceptions of each other.
- The Celluloid Closet (1996): another worthy re-run, this absorbing documentary is based on the book by the late Vito Russo, who exposed the unflattering Hollywood approach to homosexuals over the years.