The features at Iris were also consistently high quality. Of the ones this writer watched, there weren’t any considerable duds. At worst, Evening Shadows (India, Sridhar Rangayan, ***) struggled at times to overcome its Bollywood trappings – it certainly reads as a film made for the Indian market rather than the international one, and that means a certain style of editing, storytelling and narrative tropes that doesn’t necessarily translate well over here. It can come across as sluggish, soapy and overcooked (this may have also been my searing hangover, a 12 noon screening on Saturday that did not find me in my best mood). But the sheer rarity of LBGT+ films coming from India does give the story a certain extra kick, especially as homosexuality was only made legal in Indian last month. Indeed the court proceedings behind this (which have been rumbling along in the Indian Supreme Court for years) provides a subplot for Evening Shadows. It’s also nice to see a positive story arising here, rather than one of anguish and terror that you so often get from countries where LGBT+ people face a great deal of danger. It’s slight but good fun.

Then there was the absolutely nuts Favola [Fairytale] (Italy, Sebastiano Mauri, ***), starring Filippo Timi as an archetypal ‘50s-style housewife called Mrs. Fairytale. A Technicolor Sirk-riven fantasy ensues, as her seemingly perfect heterosexual lifestyle begins to collapse as she doubts herself and falls in love with her neighbour, Mrs. Emerald. It is derived from a stage play of the same name (and with the same lead), and with most of the film in one set, it is possible to see the joins at times. It is also occasionally a bit repetitive, with a few scenes serving the same purpose to no betterment of the film’s themes. That said, anything which is a Sirk-inspired satire is bound to please a Sirk fan like me and the film looks garishly stunning. Timi’s performance is a high-wire act of comic excellence, and the way the film’s critique of heteronormative lifestyle begins to wrap around its themes of a stifled identity crisis is excellent. Good stuff.

French actor Felix Mariteaud won best performance in a male role from the judges for his stunning portrayal of Leo in Sauvage (France, Camille Vidal-Naquet, ****). Leo is a 22-year-old prostitute living on the French streets, addicted to drugs and sex and seemingly with no ambitions or hopes beyond just existing. The film as a whole is merely solid. The writing, cinematography and storytelling tends to stick towards a fairly well-trodden path of grim social realism, without much to elevate it beyond the crowd of many similar looking French films. I say without much, because Mariteaud’s performance is frankly staggering. It is full of such tenderness and so many left-field choices that you never quite know how Leo is going to react next, but it always feels honest and true to the character. And if there’s one way of determining whether an actor has done their job, it’s when you can remember the character’s name without effort: Leo.

Equally touching is A Moment in the Reeds (Finland, Mikko Makela, ****), which also features another superb performance, this time from Boodi Kabbani as Tareq, a Syrian immigrant who arrives to help renovate Jouko’s (Mika Melender) summer house in the Finnish countryside, where he meets Leevi (Janne Puustinen). Whilst the conservative Jouko is away, the two start a tentative relationship – the similarities to last year’s God’s Own Country are obvious, though director Makela stated in the Q+A afterwards this was more coincidence than anything else; he was already editing by the time he had even heard of the film. Yet this is still a touching, slowly-paced look at the birth of a relationship and the inevitable heartbreak when its two protagonists realise they are at different moments in their lives, an unfortunate happenstance of time and space. It looks beautiful too, capturing the summery glaze of Finland’s low-lying lakes in the hazy evening.

Moving on are two uniquely queer visions are two capital cities, London and Berlin, which start from a similar visual observation but take completely different responses to it; Postcards from London (UK, Steve McLean, ****) and M/M (Canada/Germany, Drew Lint, *****). In both cases we have a queer city, submerged into the darkness of its nightlife, with the masses of the outside world completely non-existent onscreen – the ‘straight Others’ of the city do not exist. But where Postcards from London is shot entirely in a studio, a vision of Soho (where the film is set) that is somewhere between having once existed and having only ever existed inside McLean’s mind, M/M is shot entirely on location around Berlin. Postcards is a charmingly effective tale of rent boys in London who are noted for their special qualities – that is, they are capable of intellectual conversation with clients. It fuels a film full of rampant and unashamedly pretentious art conversation, all done with charm and humour. It does run out of steam in the last act, but the journey there is a dizzying exercise in style that I couldn’t help but be won over by.

Now M/M is a darker and much more belligerent beast. Matthew, a French-Canadian émigré to Berlin, comes across Matias. He becomes increasingly obsessed, eventually melding his identity in Matias’. There’s plenty of Vertigo, Zuwalski’s Possession and Altman’s 3 Women here, but more than anything this is a film about Berlin, about an outsider’s perspective of Berlin and its queer nightlife, melded with elements of body-swap thrillers. Here, we have a cold, grey, inhospitable city, weighed down with oppressive concrete and the never-ending thud of techno. The tropes of urban alienation (now allied with extra alienation courtesy of the social media!) places M/M in a rich (some might say overdone) tradition, but Drew Lint brings such an imaginative eye to proceedings, picking up on all these minor details and close-ups. This is style as substance done right.

But perhaps the highlight of the festival, one which deservedly won best feature, is 1985 (USA, Yen Tan, *****). Filmed in black-and-white, it also captures a very specific geography. But its geography is one of Midwestern USA, and the loneliness and emptiness of growing up gay in these often more conservative areas. Cory Michael Smith stars as Adrian, who returns home from New York to see his family and friends. It’s an exquisite performance, the secrets thundering underneath his reserve. Every scene seems to play out with a sense of impending loss, with long takes and high-contrast lighting increasing the sense of perpetual worry. It’s probably fairly obvious what the cause of the impending loss might be considering the film’s title, but hey I won’t spoil it for you anyway. It’s a stunning film that will hopefully get proper distribution in the UK to allow audiences to see it on the big screen. Heartbreaking.

words Fedor Tot

An overview of Iris is available here

Reviews of the shorts here