Last night, crystal_storm and I went to a session of MQFF and watched the boys’ short films. As a whole it was good: the first few films were the usual fare, narratives of first love and teen crushes, of older man meets younger man, of older inexperienced man seeking love through a hotline — although each had its twist… I especially liked the film about a young English guy who’s out enjoying himself in the grass near his Mum’s house when a spacecraft crash lands and on investigating, he finds a NASA astronaut. “Mum, I’ve brought home an astronaut who crashed. He needs to use the phone.” “Oh, okay, love, does he want dinner?” When the astronaut is happy to share his bed, too, it’s a dream come true — or at least, his prayer to Ziggy Stardust answered.
But the last two films, both from New Zealand, were in a class of their own, sensual and magical and beyond the realms of the ordinary tale.
The first was “Little Gold Cowboy”, Michael Reihana’s first film, six minutes of magical bliss as the cowboy with the sexy eyes gets a letter slipped under his door, carefully puts on his gold paint and his eyeliner and his six-shooters in their glittered holsters, strokes his raised, scarified sheriff’s badge, cut into his skin and stitched with black thread to look a little like barbed wire, puts on his white angel’s wings, packs his pulsing heart into a water-filled bag along with a guardian goldfish and sets off on a walk through the New Zealand country town, filled with disapproving old men, Bonnie and Clyde in full 30s get-up with a classic car, two sexy school girls making out on the side of the road, walks into a saloon where he encounters his mirror image and succumbs to the risks of carrying your heart in such an unprotected way. Even better for me, our cowboy had shoulder-length dark brown hair and gorgeous green eyes. Pity I can’t find a photo online…
The second was “Boy”, written and directed by Welby Ing, a meditative film of dreamy horror, a poetic film of broken dolls with black angel’s wings, a hit-and-run, boys’ cruelty, sordid sex in beats, the quiet stifling silence of a small town and the cross-fading phrases in bickley script, carved in white out of the heat of the New Zealand summer, speaking of angels and silence and truth. A truly creative and innovative film and possibly the saviour of poetry as a written form.
And then we went and talked about friendship and the universe and the connectness of all things until 3 in the morning. It’s all good.