Peccadillo Gets Two Movies Into The London Film Festival

Until fairly recently, one of the main reasons to have LGBT film festivals was because of the difficulty getting decent representation for gay movies in mainstream fests. However last year LGBT/indie specialist distributor Peccadillo had three of their movies included in the London Film Festival programme (She Monkeys, Weekend and Beauty) and this year they’ve got two more.

The 56th BFI London Film Festival, which runs October 10th-21st, will include screenings of the acclaimed Keen The Lights On from director Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue), as well as Our Children, starring A Prophet’s Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup. It also features also a blistering performance from Emilie Dequenne (Rosetta), who took home the Un Certain Regard Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

In Keep The Lights On, it’s 1997 and New York City is in a state of intense flux when documentary filmmaker Erik Rothman (Thure Lindhardt) first meets Paul Lucy (Zachary Booth), a handsome but closeted lawyer in the publishing field. What begins as a highly charged first encounter soon becomes something much more, and a relationship quickly develops. As the two men start building a home and life together, each continues to privately battle their own compulsions and addictions. The movie has already won the Teddy Award (for Best LGBT Film) at the Berlin Film Festival and a couple of gongs at LA’s Outfest. You can watch a trailer here, ahead of its UK cinema release on November 2nd.

Here’s the synopsis for the less explictily gay Our Children, ‘Young, effervescent and full of life, Murielle (Emilie Dequenne, Rosetta) has a promising future ahead of her when she meets and falls head over heels for the handsome Mounir (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet). A wedding soon follows, and the happy couple quickly set about preparing to make a family. However, with family comes ties, and none come so tight as that between Mounir and the mysterious Doctor Pinget (Niels Arestrup, A Prophet, Sarah’s Key), his adoptive father. As Murielle continues to bring new life into the family, in the form of four beautiful young girls, frictions between Mounir and Doctor Pinget reach boiling point. Helpless to extract her husband and children from the wealthy nest that Doctor Pinget has provided for them, Murielle is drawn deeper into an unhealthy three-way relationship. With Doctor Pinget acting as Murielle’s personal pharmacy, and Mounir taking extended trips abroad to Morocco, Murielle becomes increasingly alone and unstable. There is only one way out of this nightmare, and for Murielle, all sense of reasoning must be abandoned.’ It’ll hit UK cinemas March 2013.