I am very excited by three movies which will compete for an Oscar in the best foreign language film this year: I am thinking of the German movie The White Ribbon, the French movie A Prophet and the Canadian movie I Killed My Mother. Each one of these movies can be interpreted and appreciated as a queer delight in spite of their numerous differences in both style and content! Here are some thoughts on each of them.

Let's start with The White Ribbon, directed by Haneke and already rewarded by the prestigious Palme d'or this year. Haneke, trained as a philosopher and haunted since his first movies by the subjects of evil, lost innocence and eroticism, has the well deserved reputation of being a Master in the realm of perversions. In The White Ribbon, certainly inspired by the crossed readings of Un Roi Sans Divertissement and Le Roi des Aulnes, Haneke takes us for a visit in lost, rural pre-WW1 German village where Puritan adults live hard social life ruled by professional submission and religious devotion. The adults living in this small, isolated community do their best to educate children and teach them the love of pure love, and the passion of truth, sincerity and decency.

Paradoxically - not so much from our blasé bitchy point of view - this obsession about purity turns the education into an edu-castration in which children are often punished and subjects to tears, guilt and fear. One of the darkest scenes of this extremely dark movie - yet filled with the light of fields and snow all along the story - is when the pastor forces his son to confess his masturbatory habits in a very sly way before making the decision to make him sleep with tied hands. The movie is a series of hostile accidents in which sadistic acts happen to inhabitants of the village: but the thriller becomes almost metaphysical as the search for the serial torturer becomes a pretext to highlight the darkness of human soul, of every human soul raised and tamed in a puritan obsession for purity which ends up in the promotion of a clandestine ethics of cruelty. If purity is based on repression and guilt, and love has to be impossibly chaste, then society produces in the soul of innocent children a precocious taste for forbidden pleasures. All this is extremely well shown in this amazing movie in which the denunciation of a puritan vision of life does not condemn the fascination for evil angel-faced children.

The second movie, A Prophet, directed by Audiard, was sometimes introduced as a French Scarface (or anti-Scarface) because of its focus on an ethical odyssey instead of a gangster narrative starting with the rise and fall of an ambitious, smart outlaw. Malik is a young orphan who enters jail at 19 and doesn't know much about prison as a social universe with its values and rules. "Recruited" by a gang (the Corsicans), his initiation starts by a startling mission: he is ordered to kill with a razor Reyed, member of the other gang (the Muslims). Although Malik is an Arabic boy, and he should be expected to join the Muslim community, he is elected by the racist Corsican boss, Cesar, as a potentially brilliant recruit. And indeed, little by little, Malik takes up difficult challenges, learns how to speak Corsican and gain Cesar's trust, and becomes in the end smarter and stronger than his defeated boss.

If A Prophet was just the story of the social ascension of a gangster, it would be an excellent action movie, but thank you God it happens to be, on top of that, as I mentioned earlier, an ethical odyssey - more precisely the quest for dignity, autonomy and respect in the corrupted, ultra violent, ultra masculine universe of prison. Malik kills Reyeb as he was told, slaughtering him with a small razor blade, because inside his mind he has to live with a troubled consciousness, haunted by the spectre of Reyeb in his mind, and starts living with him after having killed him in the most disgusting way and against his will. Before being killed, Reyed had told Malik that he would be willing to give him some pot to smoke if Malik was willing to give him a blow job. When Malik visits Reyeb in his cell, hiding his razor in his mouth, he wants to start blowing him but Reyeb stops him, postpones the blow job and prefers to start talking in a friendly, paternalistic way, suggesting Malik he could use his time to read and increase the freedom of his soul while being in jail. All of a sudden the revolting side of the blow job as a prostitution thing in order to get some weed turns into an opening space for solidarity, exchange and trust. But malik has a mission to accomplish and, as his mouth starts bleeding, he kills Reyeb without sparing us with gore and sighs. If pedagogy in Ancient Greece was pederastic, the aborted relationship between Reyeb and Malik was opening a queer space in which a young straight boy was to be initiated to a sexual friendship with an "older brother" willing to share his sperm and knowledge as a specific training. Malik did not kill Reyeb because he was against this special bondage but because he would have been killed himself if he did not accomplish his mission. Once Reyeb is killed, Malik learns how to live with him, not just the spectre of his bad consciousness but also the humanist light, acting like a guide and a close friend in the competitive and stressful context of gang wars. If Malik, in the end, takes his revenge against Cesar, it is not merely a question of power struggle, but the payment of an ethical debt he had vis-à-vis Reyeb: the ghost, the missing father, the older brother, the taboo lover, definitely the queer friend.

Last but not least, the fabulous, talented, unforgettable J'ai tué ma mère ("I killed my mother"), a movie in French Canadian directed by the main actor and screenwriter of Xavier Dolan. Hubert is a teenager who attends high school and lives with his divorced mother, Chantal, somewhere in Québec. The whole story of this love story is how Hubert and Chantal hate each other in a devastating way. And yet, the hatred between them, however intense and straightforward it can be, reveals a mistaken alphabet of confused feelings about the extreme emotion that bonds the hysterical mother and her drama queen, gifted gay son. They both over react, are ashamed of each other, suffer from being misunderstood and crucified by the other's cruel blindness, but as the drama gets bigger and dangerous for their mental health, the spectator starts suspecting that this tempest of threats and insults hides the impossibility to express a stormy love which is doomed to express itself through a kind of SM relationship. Both actors are extremely convincing, the dialogues are vivid and written with an amazing sense of hurt feelings, the spectator does not stop being moved and splashed by the fusion-confusion between mummy dearest and her unbearable Rimbaud, and also by the poetry that structures the expression of these tormented hearts. The subject may seem cliché and predictable, but its treatment is clearly a tour de force.

If one of these three movies could be rewarded with the Oscar for the best foreign language film, that would be good news!

When I studied abroad in Germany two years ago, HIV prevention advertising immediately stood out to me. Large ads targeting gay men as well as other demographics were displayed in public locations. None of them were condescending. Nor did they employ the "HIV-as-perpetual-crisis" technique so many gay men have found alienating.

This morning before I helped my mom into a cab to the airport, we stopped in Giovanni's Room, Philadelphia's largerst queer bookstore. I picked up a copy of Männer, a German magazine for gay men, which updated me on HIV prevention in the country. I really like the Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe's latest slogan: "Ich weiss, was ich tu," or "I know what I'm doing." Succinct and empowering. Here's a link to the campaign's website.

[ Image redacted -- see here ]

Canadian activist and writer Shawn Syms has penned a very thoughtful and insightful essay for Xtra.ca on the horrific AIDS campaign out of Germany that compares AIDS to Nazi Germany. It's a very smart essay - and a must read. Here's a peak:

This campaign is a joke. There is nothing shocking or cutting edge about it. Its horny Hitler is hilarious. The fact that he, Hussein and Stalin are all deceased adds a certain necrophiliac irony to the whole cartoonish exercise. For a campaign with a digital component, they seem to have forgotten the lessons of Godwin's Law, which points out the absurdity of making online comparisons to Adolf Hitler. If anything is disturbing, it's the fact that the "logic" behind this campaign makes sense to anyone -- especially an AIDS-awareness group like Regenbogen, whose members include people with HIV.

"AIDS" is not a "mass murderer." It's a health condition caused by an untreated viral infection. HIV is the virus that can lead to AIDS, usually after many years and in the absence of medication. HIV is a significant medical condition, and there are countless reasons why anyone who doesn't have that virus should avoid getting it, and that anyone who does have it should avoid passing it on to anyone else.

But it doesn't help anyone to confuse HIV and AIDS with one another, or to exaggerate the impact of HIV by inextricably linking it to death. Dr Joseph McGowan of North Shore University Hospital recently counselled a parent about her 10-year-old son's HIV infection on the medical website TheBody.com: "If he is monitored carefully there is no reason your son ever has to progress to AIDS. He can expect to live a very long life." This is the current reality of HIV for most people in developed countries. The constant, hyper-emotional assertion that HIV equals guaranteed death ought to be calmly challenged every time it rears its insistent head. Neither is it "murder."

And since "AIDS" is not a person, let alone a "murderer," who are we really talking about here? Of course, we are talking about people who have HIV in their bodies. The Regenbogen campaign isn't actually about AIDS itself at all. It's about the risks of (presumably unprotected) sex with regard to HIV transmission, arguing that passing on HIV is akin to Nazism, and suggesting that the other person engaging in sex has no role other than that of victim. Notably, the mass murderers in the campaign are all men and their victims are all women. Meanwhile, the most recent high-profile HIV-criminalization case in Germany targeted a woman, Nadja Benaissa of the pop group No Angels.

Did the campaigners not think twice about wrongly comparing human sexual behaviour to the Holocaust, and inappropriately demonizing people with HIV in the process? The insistence on seeing HIV transmission as villainy obscures the most stubborn fact about the epidemic -- far from being the realm of malevolent or sociopathic people, HIV is transmitted through behaviours that are otherwise completely natural and normal, such as penetrative intercourse -- or behaviours that may often be hard to control rather than "intentional," such as needle sharing in the context of addiction. We already know that those most infectious with HIV usually don't know they have it, and that most people with diagnosed HIV take great pains to prevent further transmission.

If you haven't seen the disgusting video included in the campaign, you can see all the ads and the videos here.

Amazing:

"It all began happening when I moved to Berlin for three months. I thought, I need to go out, take a bunch of drugs and have fun. I fell in love with dance music again and stayed out until the sun came up going to these insane sex parties. I've seen some things in my time, but i saw stuff there that made my jaw fall to the ground. These people aren't fucking around"

- Jake Shears to Q magazine, on the new Scissor Sisters Album, coming out in March

He's quite right about Berlin. That place is a sex palace -- and they don't fuck around when it comes to raunch!

I'm working on an entry about Bruno, but in the mean time please enjoy this banned, German, Sprite ad. You know if the German's banned it, it must be bad!

"LIGHT GRADIENT"
Director: Jan Kruger
Trevor's Rating: 1.5 / 5 Stars

This could have been the perfect easy, breezy summer gay flick! The setting was magnificent: Rural Germany, Brandenburg to be precise. But from the moment this film started I could tell it was going to be a disaster. Shoddy camerawork, generic autofocus, and pixellated images due to subpar equipment all work together to poison this film from ever excelling past the made-for-TV level. From the start, I kept screaming in my head to "BACK UP!" The shots were always so close-up and cramped, it made me uncomfortable in my seat. I guess this decision was the result of a crappy camera that couldn't get much detail from far-away, but it made for a very unpleasant viewing experience.

Light Gradient's story is a simple recipe that's been attempted dozens of times. The film chronicles the journeys of Johann and Robin as they travel the countryside together. I expected some awkward rolls in the hay, and they were certainly present. But mostly we got a weird contradiction between general freedom with full frontal male nudity while showering, but when the sex actually got started the camera panned over to farm animals. WTF? With a film so bad, a hot sex scene could have at least made it worth my time. Alas, there was to be no sexytime on film.

The boys -- played by Sebastian Schlecht (Johann) and Eric Golub (Robin) -- are cute, but in a generic kind of way. They never find their stride in front of the camera, and even when making out they lack any kind of screen presence. They seemed to be straight out of bad German porn -- you know, the kind with the dubbed moaning and generically cute boys. That's this pair. Perhaps it's the result of bad direction, but the two are the thespian equivalent of a painfully flat note.

But halfway or so through the film, they wander onto a farm in search of food. We're introduced to Henri, the young boy who lives on the farm. There's an incredibly contrived scene in which Henri -- a beautiful waif of a boy -- holds up Robin and Johann at gunpoint to prevent the two from running away. "Now," I thought, "we're going to see some action!" It was totally the plot of a thousand terrible gay porn flicks from Eastern Europe. "Oh, please! Don't make me do that!" Alas, my thirst for a threeway was never quenched.

But I must say here that Denis Alevi, who plays Henri, is truly beautiful. Unlike Schlecht and Golub, who never shined on camera, Alevi's face comes to life on screen. It's not that Schlect and Golub aren't sexy -- they're very much so -- but Alevi just translates on film. He's got the beautiful hair, the olive-toned skin, and the heart-shaped face that all work together to make him quite appealing. And while his first moments on film are a total disaster, he warms up quickly and finds his stride. I'm not saying his performance changed my life, but in relation to the rest of the film, he was a glimmer of hope.

All in all, I have to say this was a real lemon of a film. Which was disappointing, given the fact that a few reworked elements could have really changed its fate.