Movie Reviews -
Gay Themed

This is an experimental queer musical film that uses opera/documentary and other styles to explore gay relationships and polyamory in a contemporary Arab context. The film’s artistic, nonlinear narrative incorporates a combination of live action, animation and music video-style sequences, along with more than its share of sexually explicit sequences. Even though I found the style and experiment quite interesting, including the narratives but overall I wasn't sure why this was made. In the sense that it had interesting representation of urban gay life and relationships but it was very confusing and one of those art for art's sake pieces. A glance leads to a smile, a smile to a rendezvous: every love story begins the same way. At the center of it all, from what I understood, this Arab love story is about a group of men trying to navigate a polyamorous relationship. Three men in a relationship and what each oof them thinks about it, how they got into it, how the meetings happened,...

Internalized homophobia can be a powerful force. We tend to think of it simply as lingering shame, or even as something that goes away upon coming out, but in fact its can take many different forms and is often culturally specific. We have seen many films about homosexuality and religion.  Add to that superstition and witchcraft and you get a nice little new genre that we probably have not seen before in gay films in recent times. With Egypt as the background and it looks visually stunning, this film is a taut, suspenseful thriller about gay men trying to reconcile their homosexuality against their family’s religious beliefs. It gets intense with several jump scares, but it is artfully made. Mo and Hisham are a couple who are visiting Egypt to meet Mo's mother after his father's death month ago. They need to pretend to be just friends in order to stay safe in Egypt’s very homophobic environment. Coming back to Egypt, however, leaves Mo especially anxious and uneasy, because he ...