Give Up the Ghost (2020)

Closing Dynasty

On a school day, a seven year-old girl, Queenie, hustles and schemes ways to make money on the streets of New York City.

Just My Luck

Manhattanite Ashley is known to many as the luckiest woman around. After a chance encounter with a down-and-out young man, however, she realizes that she's swapped her fortune for his.

The Perfect Gentleman

Jonathan is poised to marry the daughter of a wealthy tycoon. The couple appears picture perfect, until the eve of their engagement party, when an unexpected guest threatens to destroy Jonathan's plans for the future.

The Illiac Passion

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

Military Dog

New to BDSM, military officer Lee Jun Zhong meets DT, master of human dogs. One late night, Lee calls DT. Given a task to prove his loyalty to the master, will Lee be able to overcome his doubts and fear?

The Invitation

Jacob is dying and due to his sever case of social anxiety is unable to interact with others. After finding out that he is going to die, he organizes his funeral and invites the public.

Mars Colony

Sixteen-year-old Logan is an adolescent uncomfortable in his own skin. Only his science fiction dreams of a better life on Mars draw him away from his ordinary life, which is as equally difficult at home or at school, where he's only seen as an aggressive loser. One evening, he receives a visit from a mysterious man who insists that he has come from the future and that he is also Logan, but forty years older. He then asks the younger Logan to carry out a mission as unexpected as it is important: to save humanity.

Here Comes the Sun

An old man in a seaside village reunites with a deceased person on an uneventful afternoon, which is fleeting but rippling and presents a warm picture of time in the midst of memories and reality.

Swell

Swell is a smartphone app that changes your mood through sound. When a young couple tries to control each other’s settings, they find their relationship threatened by an unintended cacophony of emotions.

Fatima, Queen of the Night

Based on the short story of the same name by Miguel Barnet, in which Fatima - the Queen of the night, a young homosexual and transvestite, who is a prostitute to earn a living, and to maintain economically to the man whom he loves. While facing all the complexities arising from their decisions. Born in the provinces as Manuel García, nicknamed Manolito, to whom the Virgin of Fátima appeared as a child moves to the capital Havana where he meets and falls in love with Vaselina, who encourages him to cross-dress and start a new life in the world of entertainment and prostitution.

Sun in My Mouth

A young man confesses his sexual past to an unseen phone sex operator. He reflects on his sexual identity as we follow him on a solitary excursion to a beach.

The Tram

A psychiatry student gets on a tram that delivers him twenty-five years into the future, where an unexpected encounter awaits him.

Catopolis

A cat named Penny living in a desensitized, unstable world has to find a new job after she gets fired in order to make her dad proud.

Everything Is Illuminated

A young Jewish American man endeavors—with the help of eccentric, distant relatives—to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II—in a Ukrainian village which was ultimately razed by the Nazis.

Summer Storm

Tobi and Achim, the pride of the local crew club, have been the best of friends for years and are convinced that nothing will ever stand in the way of their friendship. They look forward to the upcoming summer camp and the crew competition. Then the gay team from Berlin arrives and Tobi is totally confused. The evening before the races begin, the storm that breaks out is more than meteor-logical.

Mala Noche

Walt is a lonely convenience store clerk who has fallen in love with a Mexican migrant worker named Johnny. Though Walt has little in common with the object of his affections — including a shared language — his desire to possess Johnny prompts a sexual awakening that results in a tangled love triangle.

Plein soleil

Under the leaden sky of a summer day, Eric goes to work to defend a great issue. But, blinded by stress, Eric is forgetting the most important thing...

Lifeline

A nervous job candidate is forced to show much more than a positive attitude to save the life of her competitor.

Brokeback Mountain

In 1960s Wyoming, two men develop a strong emotional and sexual relationship that endures as a lifelong connection complicating their lives as they get married and start families of their own.

The Blind Owl

Ricky is a young man who takes care of his sick mother. His father hovers at the edge of the picture, so Ricky provides for himself and his mom through prostitution, running errands, and acting as a caregiver for a blind man. Through the course of the film, Ricky befriends Janey, a young woman he finds beaten by her ex-boyfriend, and Trenn, a mysterious young man in trouble with the law. The three of them navigate a dark and confusing world. It uses many of the actors who have come to constitute the Dar A Luz company, including Tony Torn, Tom Fitzpatrick, Juliana Francis, and Tom Pearl. It will disappoint those who approach it looking for a film analogue of the “faster and louder” aesthetic that critics have used to characterize much of Abdoh’s stage work. The Blind Owl does use a variety of techniques reminiscent of his stage direction, giving it an unusual theatricality.

Crossed Wires

A misunderstanding leads to sombre consequences as two flatmates recall very different turns of event from the previous night.

The Man with the Answers

Ex-championship diver Victoras whiles away his days on the Greek coast, toiling away at a factory with only his dreams, medals and grandmother for company. When a phone call summons him to Germany, a simple road trip is the answer - that is until he crosses paths with the handsome Mathias - a free-spirited hitchhiker who tempts Victoras to take the road not taken.

Are We Ok?

Temmuz is an openly gay sculptor living at a flat with his dog in Istanbul. He lives a bohemian lifestyle and has a happy go lucky, carefree, eccentric (such as believing in good luck charms) character, frequently distracting him from his work as a children's book illustrator, and eventually leading him to be abandoned by his boyfriend via e-mail. He is given solace and affection by her wealthy mother, who is fully supportive of him, and best friend and co-worker, Beste. In the meantime, he keeps seeing a young man in his dreams, who repeatedly calls him for help and rescue. One day he runs into this guy while getting on the bus, who is accompanied by his mother, and helps them get into their home as the young man was born without limbs. From then on, two lives would collide into each other, starting a brotherhood full of discoveries and mutual help.

Artemide’s Knee

Mourning the death of his partner and collaborator Danièle Huillet, Straub finds tender mercy in music and nature. Out of the abyss, Kathleen Ferrier sings “The Farewell” from Gustav Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth”, (which the composer wrote in 1909 after the death of his daughter) and Heinrich Schütz’s Lament on the Death of His Wife. The landscape also provides solace: the mountain grove where Endymion pines for his beloved Artemis, “a wild thing, untouchable, mortal,” appears to embody the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’ — a wistful acceptance of the fleeting beauty of things.

Limbus

As Alex struggles with disturbing hallucinations, his wife Vera tries to help, until they both experience their own profound revelations.

The Circle

A young teacher in Zurich in the 1950s falls in love with a transvestite star but is torn between his bourgeois existence and his commitment to homosexuality. He joins a gay organization that is eventually seen as the pioneer of gay emancipation in Europe.

Carne

After a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, a butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.

A Tale of Yearning

This is a sad tale of a noble lady who is entranced by an opera singer. Hoping to get closer to the singer, the lady takes up lessons with her. Despite their affection, they must face obstacles.

Synonymous With

A student's increasingly intimate line of questioning causes his interview with a local horror host to take a vulnerable turn.

A Search Through Nine Lifetimes

For love to travel for thousands of years, they will eventually meet.

I Don't Know Who You Are

Benjamin, a working class gay man living in Toronto, struggles to obtain expensive healthcare after being assaulted by a stranger.

Whisper

Anna, a 16 year-old girl from the sticks, trades her military education for life in the big city Running away to Prague opens a whole new world where she drinks her first cappuccino and meets the kind of people she has only seen in movies.

Requiem for a Dream

The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island residents are shattered when their addictions run deep.

Midnights with Adam

Over the course of one night, a newly out-of -the-closet young man struggles to hold back his feelings for his straight best friend while dealing with the problems and complications of being different in a hetero-normative world.

Memorable

Aging painter Louis and his wife Michelle struggle to cope with Louis' advancing dementia.

Burning Blue

Two Navy fighter pilots find themselves in the midst of a forbidden relationship throwing their lives and careers into disarray.

Common Causes for a Clinical Condition

María rehearses Antigone the same way as she criticizes the government's actions; Ismene listens fearfully just as Irving reluctantly accepts the official version of a lie. Love only has consciousness in its disappearance; in the end the causes will be known, and only the memory of those who refuse to forget will be left with no consequence.

Drawn Out Love

Felix has been raised by his grandmother and has never met his father. His father Johan, doesn't even know he exists. Felix decides to become a regular in his father's bar in Amsterdam to secretly learn more about the man he has never known.

We Are Not Here

We Are Not Here is a short film about a small derelict town, waiting for a road. Through a series of vignettes we take a glimpse into the life of the town and its residents.

Withered in a Blooming Season

Brotherly love goes too far when Feng gets his twin sister pregnant while both of them are still in high school, creating a problem that's bigger than both of them. Convincing his gay friend Le Le to take the blame seems like the best option.

Dawn

As dawn creeps across London, two lost outcasts meet in the darkness, more afraid of themselves than each other. As the sun begins to rise, and the veil of the night is lifted, the pair look into the cold light of day for hope and it takes more than just the eyes to see inside a soul.

Don't Look Down

Four gay men and a straight woman who barely know each other find themselves in an apartment in the sky above Paris. They have all been the victim of the same domineering pervert who is locked in a room. That night, they decided to finish it. In turn, they tell each other memories that bind them to this man and enter the room to confront him. But what happens between the monster and them remains their secret.

I'm Sorry, My Love

A solid middle American couple meet a stranger who will have a big role in history as we know it.

La León

Deep in the lush river jungles of Argentina, Alvaro lives a solitary existence fishing and harvesting reeds. What sets him apart from the rest of his village is that he is gay. There are no other gay men in his world, his only means of expression is with the occasional outsider who passes through. Most of these men come via the river taxi El León, whose captain El Turu is a mean man with a homophobic streak and a secret. When illegal loggers appear in the jungle El Turu accuses Alvaro of aiding them, a dispute which leads both men towards confrontation.

Macho Caponata

Takeshi runs a popular Italian restaurant in a port town. His ex-lover Kazuyoshi went to Italy to train as a chef seven years ago so he is single. His sister is pregnant with the baby of Kazuyoshi’s younger brother and a wedding between the pair will happen before the birth. Due to this, Kazuyoshi returns from Italy and invites Takeshi to go to Italy with him.

An Eye for an Eye and a Hole for a Hole

Kenji, the young head of Kato yakuza organisation, just got out of the jail. He comes home and founds out the opposing Sawaki yakuza is invading Kato's territory. Sawaki recruited Ikeyama and asked him to kill Kenji, but Ikeyama was Kenji's lover who exchanged the cup of brothers in a jail.

Daughter

A young girl buries in her soul a memory of a painful moment, when as a child she brought home an injured bird and her father burdened by his own weight of worries didn’t notice her feelings and longing for understanding. The girl took her father’s reaction as indifference and closed herself in her inner world longing for her father’s love and its manifestations. Since that moment she and her dad continued to grow apart, and as an adult she is no longer able to accept his endearments. The father suffers from guilt and searches for a way back to his daughter, trying to revive their lost relationship.

The Ghost

12-year-old Clarice Cheung feels like she’s invisible — especially next to her older sister Naomi. But when a fight breaks out at the dinner table, it awakens a ghost that begins taking the family, one by one. Now Clarice and Naomi must work together to stop this powerful spirit, before their family is torn apart forever.

Symbiosis

A betrayed wife begins to investigate her husband’s mistresses. Her jealousy is gradually replaced by curiosity.

Time to Leave

Romain, 31, a fashion photographer with terminal cancer, elects to die alone, preparing others to live past him rather than prolong the inevitable with chemotherapy or be smothered in sympathy by those who know him.

Naked Lunch

Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.