UPDATE: after 12 hours, here’s how the first 700 voters ranked the Top 15 Gay Films of the past 3 decades. With 170 titles on the poll, check out your choices for the Top 50 LGBT Films of the past 30 years.
Since this list kept growing the longer I fiddled with it, you can choose up to 20 of your fabsolute favorite gay films. (Incidentally this is lengthiest poll we’ve ever posted, on my laptop measuring up to roughly 9 inches per decade)
One missing from your list which I consider one of the best, and which I wanted to include in my allowed 20 voted for, was from a Spanish filmmaker in 2000 (I believe): “Food of Love”. It was adapted from a stageplay or book — not sure which — about an 18-year-old young man in San Francisco who was an aspiring concert pianist, and who was invited to be a “page turner” at San Francisco’s Symphony Hall for an older, famous British concert pianist on tour. Some months after that event the younger man toured Spain with his mother and came across the pianist he had turned pages for, and carried-on an affair with him beneath his mother’s nose, but without her knowledge.
Your list is quite helpful. One major director whose films are missing is the Turkish-Italian director Fernan Özpetek …
2010 Loose Cannons
2007 Saturn in Opposition
2005 Cuore sacro [The Sacred Heart]
2003 Facing Windows
2001 The Ignorant Fairies: His Secret Life
1999 Harem suaré
1997 Steam: The Turkish Bath
Also Werner Rainer Fassbinder’s better “gay” films:
1972 The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
1975 Fox and His Friends
1978 In a Year with Thirteen Moons
Also István Szabó’s Colonel Redl (Hungary,1985)
From Paraguay, I recommend the interesting documentary “Cuchillo de palo / “108”, directed by Renate Costa, Paraguay/Spain, 2010, 108 min.
Thanks, robert g.
happy to see this thread still alive after nearly a year.
I know half the titles you name are great, so I’m eager to seek out the others you recommend that I never heard of.
OOPS, showing my age a bit. especially since it doesn’t seem all that long ago i stood in a line around the block to see it, against my will, i might add. the performances were so much more nuanced than birdcage. i laughed with tears streaming down my face.
One of those rare instances in a movie theater when it can honestly, literally be said, “I’ve never been anything like this before.”
If there’s any major precedent, I’m unaware of it and need to be educated. Groundbreaking. I expect part of it’s impact most certainly must derive from how well the moment of its premiere so perfectly mirrored the mood of times, do you think?
Looking back, even when I first saw it, La cage aux folles felt so celebratory and revelatory.
OOPS, showing my age a bit. especially since it doesn’t seem all that long ago i stood in a line around the block to see it, against my will, i might add. the performances were so much more nuanced than birdcage. i laughed with tears streaming down my face.
One of those rare instances in a movie theater when it can honestly, literally be said, “I’ve never been anything like this before.”
If there’s any major precedent, I’m unaware of it and need to be educated. Groundbreaking. I expect part of it’s impact most certainly must derive from how well the moment of its premiere so perfectly mirrored the mood of times, do you think?
Looking back, even when I first saw it, La cage aux folles felt so celebratory and revelatory.
i missed trick or i’d have voted for it. more importantly, the MUCH funnier inspiration for birdcage, la cage aux folles, isn’t on the list.
if you have missed it, by all means hasten to see it. don’t let subtitles put you off. at times you will be laughing so hard you’ll need them to know what you didn’t hear
bandanajack
Wholeheartedly agree the original La cage aux folles is one of the warmest and funniest films I’ve ever seen. It missed inclusion here because it fell outside our arbitrary range covering the past 30 years.
i missed trick or i’d have voted for it. more importantly, the MUCH funnier inspiration for birdcage, la cage aux folles, isn’t on the list.
if you have missed it, by all means hasten to see it. don’t let subtitles put you off. at times you will be laughing so hard you’ll need them to know what you didn’t hear
bandanajack
Wholeheartedly agree the original La cage aux folles is one of the warmest and funniest films I’ve ever seen. It missed inclusion here because it fell outside our arbitrary range covering the past 30 years.