Three powerful Brazilian short films from the early 1980s explore queer lives in the last years of the military dictatorship, showing in the UK for the first time.
From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a wave of radical short films, shot on Super-8 by queer filmmakers, emerged in north-eastern Brazil as part of a movement termed ‘Cinema Guei’. These films denounced conservativism and religious oppression that continued to prevail under the military rule and celebrated gay lives at a time of intense, machismo-fuelled prejudice.
This selection includes Closes, a punchy film that blends documentary and a fictional romance between two men, a screening of which was shut down by the military police. Baltazar da Lomba imagines the first historical record of the repression of homosexuality in the state of Paraíba during the colonial period while Era Vermelho Seu Batom (Your Lipstick Was Red) considers the prejudice that can come from within gay communities as a Carnival romance ends in tears.