Looking for Simon (2011)

Thaddeus Mackenzie, a wealthy lawyer, learns that he is dying and decides to sell all of his property and visit his old friend Allen Hayden. Allen is a struggling artist with a passion for life who once survived by working the streets, but now is romantically involved with Eva, a wealthy European gallery owner living in L.A. Thaddeus implores Allen to find Jamie, a young street hustler that Thaddeus had once tried to rescue. Allen returns to the streets to face the dark corners of his past where he must choose between what he left behind and the uncertainty that lies ahead.

The story begins with an experiment. A filmmaker in the country of Georgia posts an ad inviting youth to audition for her film. Facing the camera, the hopefuls confess their struggles and dreams. These raw interviews unfold seamlessly into cinematic slivers of Georgian life.

A psychological drama of a family in crisis. Kawa, a successful Māori businessman in Auckland, New Zealand, is forced to reveal his lifelong secret - that he is gay.

17-year-old Eric follows his parents to immigrate to Canada and is thus forced to confront different emotional and cultural problems. He must not only adjust to the new environment, but also come to terms with his homosexuality. Standing at the brink of adulthood, he encounters a series of potential romantic interests - his handsome cousin, a schoolmate, a middle aged lawyer and finally a kitchen helper. They represent different stages in Eric's development, from infatuation, sex, love to a sense of responsibility.

Twenty-year-old Cal returns from France to Britain after receiving news that his mother is ill. His finds his home city of Bristol facing hard economic times brought on by the global economic crisis, with poverty and crime on the rise and rioting and looting almost a nightly occurrence. It is not a warm homecoming as his sick mother remains stubbornly homophobic and wants nothing to do with the now openingly gay Cal while his battered Auntie Jane, now living in a run down council house, dulls her stagnation with welfare funded booze and disturbing attempts to sexually seduce her nephew. Navigating his way across this new landscape he meets a young student who needs his help. However his act of kindness brings him into contact with a lawless drug dealing pimp and a race against time to make peace with his mother and get out of town as quickly as possible. An intense tale of a family mired in poverty, angry and lost but still searching for love, respect and acceptance.

At an elite private Border School four students form a clique to sneak out of school after hours to meet, drink and play. By trying to escape the golden cage which their wealthy parents have stuck them in, they search for the Extreme. In the course of time their excessive games grow more and more violent and soon they turn against the weakest of the group.

Friends and family gather around the death bed of Gavin, where they assist in the dying man's suicide. But though Gavin's pain has been laid to rest, the grief felt by everyone there has only begun, and Walking on Water compassionately follows the attempts of Gavin's closest friends Anna and Charlie to recover from their loss.

In the midst of a freezing winter on the island of Sylt, Cem comes across Jesús, who is on the verge of committing suicide. The two young men become fast friends, with their friendship unexpectedly threatening to develop into something more. Cem and Jesús - laconic, alienated loners - find their previously uneventful lives starting to spin out of control now that each has someone who means something to him.

Set in Sicily in the 1930's, Aurelio Grimaldi's feature debut chronicles the harsh story of twelve-year-old boy, Aclà, sold into slavery by his destitute parents to work in the underground Floristella sulfur mines. Overworked and underfed, Aclà toils from Monday to Saturday in the steamy, candle-lit labyrinths. Repeatedly beaten and abused by his "owner" and with constant threats of being raped, Aclà plots his escape to the sea...

Perhaps the most ebullient “musical” you’ll see this year, Marc-Henri Wajnberg’s singular documentary/fiction hybrid follows a group of street children in the Congolese capital.

A group of boys, roughly seven to eleven years of age, go skinny-dipping in a river near their small Mexican town one afternoon and there find themselves the butt of an old vagabond's practical joke, the man stealing all their clothes from them. Humiliated about having to walk home in the buff, the tykes decide to get even, declare war. Yet, as the generations battle it out, a mutual respect develops, the depth of which is evident once the man has a heart attack during one of his romps with the kids. Will the boys' older pal recuperate so that they can engage in one final battle.

If the scorpion could see and the viper could hear, there would be no escape". The viper is deaf and the scorpion can't see, so it is and so shall be, the same way the countryside is peaceful and the city bustling and the human being impossible to satisfy. Lacrau demands the return "to the curve where man got lost" in a journey from the city towards nature. The escape from chaos and emotional void we call progress; matter without spirit, without will. The search for the most ancient sensations and relationships of mankind. The amazement, the fear of the unknown, the loss of basic comforts, loneliness, the meeting with the other, the other animal, the other vegetable. A dive looking for a connection with the world. Where beginning and end are the same, but I am not.

In 1939, José Garcés is in French prison camp after the defeat of Spain's Republicans. To entertain and inspire his fellow prisoners, he tells the story of becoming a man in 1919, the year he realized that learning to live is the same as learning to die. His stiff and demanding father loses a fortune in German war bonds, takes a job in Caspe, and leaves José on his own in Zaragoza to finish high school while apprenticing in a pharmacy. José courts his beloved Valentina via letters, becomes intimate with Isabel, a maid he meets in a cinema who shares his ideas of free love, and comes under the influence of El Checa, an anarchist and gentle teacher who leads a doomed revolt.

Alejandro Gerber Bicecci's "Vaho" (Becloud) tells the story of three childhood friends, Andres, Felipe, and Jose, and their lives in a dusty, run down corner of Mexico City. The boys were inseparable until they witnessed a tragedy that haunts them to the present day. The tragedy shaped each boy differently, and had a profound effect on their lives.

Gay man in Soho tries to come to terms with new reality after 9/11.

In Paris, in 1942, on a Thursday, the Parisian police herded together some 13,000 Jews for deportation to German territory. In this story, Paul (Christian Rist) is a teenager who tries to prevent this from happening. At first he attempts to save two elderly Jews, but they are resigned to their fate and comply with the order to assemble. For a short while, he is able to keep Jeanne (Christine Pascal) from joining them, but, after a long and strenuous day, she finally escapes from him he is too tired to chase after her.

An Air Force officer returns to his father, son and remarried wife in Vermont after 17 years in Vietnam.

The screen story of four teenagers, on whom the horrors of war had left an indelible mark. Their relatives’ deaths and their yearning for fighting the Nazis led them, one way or another, to a sea cadet school that had been opened on Solovetski Islands at the start of the war. This film tells of men’s friendship, the boys’ first baptism of fire, and the victory…

Jay is the name of the two protagonists in the film, one is living, the other dead. The living Jay is producing a documentary of the dead Jay, a gay teacher who was brutally killed. As Jay recreates and examines the life of his subject, his own life is affected when he unravels his subject's hidden life and secret love.

Surreal tale of a 14 year-old boy who dreams of escaping the loneliness from an unhappy home & sexual abuse (from his mother's boyfriend who is also his school swimming coach). One day his back mysteriously sprouts feathers and he can metaphorically fly away from it all.