Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 19/3/2015)

The Gala quartet includes I Am Michael, the directorial debut of Gus Van Sant protégé Justin Kelly that stars James Franco and Zachary Quinto in a biopic of Michael Glatze, the crusading gay journalist who became an anti-gay pastor. Fact also plays a key part in Jim Chu Chu's Stories of Our Lives, the winner of the Teddy Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, which draws on a range of personal testimonies to explore the reality of being homosexual in modern Kenya. Continuing the documentary theme, Malcolm Ingram meets Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, David Kopay, John Amaechi and Jason Collins to discuss the added pressures facing LGBT people competing at the highest level of professional sport in Out to Win, while David Thorpe seeks out the opinions of Margaret Cho, David Sedaris, George Takei and Dan Savage in Do I Sound Gay?, as he tries to ascertain whether there is such a thing as a `gay voice'.

The Hearts strand focuses on films about love, romance and friendship, with the pick of the strand being Carol Morley's The Falling, which follows up the extraordinary Dreams of a Life (2011) with a tale of a teenage friendship that is placed under severe strain when Florence Pugh sleeps with Maisie Williams's white magik-obsessed brother, Joe Cole, and a tragedy occurs in the midst of a mysterious outbreak of a fainting sickness at the school run by Greta Scacchi. Maxine Peake co-stars as Williams's agoraphobic and neglectful mother, while the stylised imagery is provided by the estimable Agnès Godard. Also worth checking out is Mark Christopher's Director's Cut of 54 (1998), a hark back to the late 1970 when Studio 54 was the hottest disco in New York and 19 year-old Ryan Phillippe finds himself caught between coat check girl Salma Hayek and soap star Neve Campbell, as he rises from busboy to bartender. Mike Myers co-stars as Steve Rubell, the co-owner of the club who falls foul of an IRS investigation. And the music is equally memorable in Alexandra Kondracke's feature bow, Girltrash: All Night Long, which has been scripted by her partner Angela Robinson, who has brought a few L Word friends along with her for the story of sisters Lisa Rieffel and Gabrielle Christian trying to find love while winning a Battle of the Bands.

Written and directed by Visakesa Chandrasekaram, Frangipani is the first gay-themed film to be produced in Sri Lanka. In many ways, it's a reworking of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, as it centres on a doomed love triangle and demonstrates once more than hell is other people. However, there is also a large helping of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in here, too, as Chandrasekaram challenged Sinhalese attitudes to arranged marriage, same-sex relationships and the role of women in village society.

The daughter of wealthy parents, Yashoda Rasanduni is desperate to avoid being married to someone she doesn't love and has high hopes of Dasun Pathirana, who lives in the same provincial village. However, he has ambitions to become a dressmaker and seek fame and fortune in the big city. Moreover, he is gay and takes a shine to mechanic Jehan Srikantha when he comes to work at the nearby Buddhist temple.

Realising that Pathirana does not reciprocate her feelings, Rasanduni makes a play for Srikantha, who makes little secret of the fact that he is primarily interested in her money. The pair marry. But, five years later, all three are deeply unhappy and, while Pathirana becomes a laughing stock, Srikantha idles around on the beach and Rasanduni is rushed to hospital for an emergency operation. However, circumstances thrust them back together and they have to face the consequences of their foolish and selfish actions.

Such melodramatics tip the action in the direction of Bollywood, but Chandrasekaram is to be commended for trying to focus on the human side of the story rather making gauche political statements. The performances are as splendid as Kularuwan Gamage's lustrous photography, which makes evocative use of the distinctive milieu. Shantha Peris's score is also effective. But it is always a touch too apparent where the storyline is heading, while the revelation that life and love rarely run smoothly is hardly revelatory.

The locations also prove key to Karim Aïnouz's fifth feature, Futuro Beach, which makes telling contrasts between the tropical paradise of Fortaleza, where the three-part story opens, and the wintry chill of industrial Berlin, where it ends several years in the future. Proudly flaunting the influence of Michelangelo Antonioni and Clare Denis, among others, Aïnouz offers few psychological insights into his characters. But he roots them so thoroughly and thoughtfully in their milieux that Ali Olcay Gözcaya's widescreen imagery almost feels more eloquent than the screenplay written in conjunction with Felipe Bragança.

At the start of the first chapter, `The Drowner's Embrace', two motorbikes roar through the dunes abutting the north-eastern coastline of Brazil. However, it's not long before lifeguard Wagner Moura has to swim out to rescue Fred Lima and his friend Clemens Schick when they are swept away by the deceptive current. Moura manages to save Schick, who seeks solace in his arms as the search for Lima proves fruitless. But Moura is reluctant to follow his lover back to Germany, as he has a sickly mother and doting 10 year-old brother (Savio Ygor Ramos) to provide for.

As `A Hero Cut in Half' promptly reveals, however, Moura does move to Berlin and the misty chill conveys the difficulty he is having in acclimatising to Schick's home city. He protests that he cannot live far from the sea and suffers so badly from homesickness that he keeps threatening to leave. But Natascha Paulick reassures him that everything will work out and he is still in the German capital when, eight years later, `A German-Speaking Ghost' opens with teenager Jesuita Barbosa arriving to find his brother to break some inevitable news. He tracks him down to the aquarium at Berlin Zoo, where Moura is working as a maintenance diver. But it's not until Barbosa steals Schick's motorcycle that the trio come together and head for the coast in a bid to settle their differences.

More aesthetically seductive than dramatically involving, the first-ever Germano-Brazilian co-production feels like something concocted by the two nations' tourist boards. Quite what they would make of the vigorous bouts of love-making is another matter, however. Moura and Schick certainly throw themselves into the carnal sequences, although they also convey the sense that they have little in common outside their insatiable physical desire and it's only when Barbosa shows up on Alexanderplatz that any tangible conflict arises.

But this is as much a reflection on belonging and acceptance as a conventional narrative and emotional texture matters more than story arc or character depth. Consequently, while some of Aïnouz's land-sea symbolism is as arch as his top-and-tail use of tracks like Suicide's `Ghost Rider' and David Bowie's `Heroes', his gift for ambience proves as invaluable as Markos Pedroso's impeccable production design and the mournful score composed by Volker `Hauschka' Bertelmann. Gözcaya's exceptional photography also comes into its own in such sequences as the lifeguards' callisthenics session and the bookends depicting motorbikes on sun-kissed sand and a fog-shrouded autobahn. But, for all its alluring sensuality and beauty, this occasionally runs the risk of lapsing into superficial poetry and a touch more cross-cultural analysis and psychological insight might not have gone amiss.

Completing the Hearts line-up are Vincent Boujon's Alive! (about five HIV+ men preparing for a parachute jump); Inés María Barrionuevo's Atlántida (two sisters undergo very different sexual awakenings on a hot Argentinian summer's day); Mikel Rueda's Hidden Away (life changes for boys from Spain and Morocco when they fall in love for the first time); Carter Smith's Jamie Marks Is Dead (a reworking of Christopher Barzak's novel One for Sorrow that sees New York state track star Cameron Monaghan befriend the ghost of bullied classmate Noah Silver in order to escape the grimness of life with brother Ryan Munzett and their paralysed mother, Liv Tyler); Stephen Belber's Match (secrets emerge as Seattle couple Carla Gugino and Matthew Lillard travel to New York to interview retired dancer Patrick Stewart about his 1960s heyday); Colette Bothof's Summer (Sigrid ten Napel finds the courage to fight prejudice in her small Dutch town when she falls for biker Jade Olieberg); and Wade Gasque's Tiger Orange (a prodigal son story set in rural California that centres on stay-at-home Mark Strano and brother Frankie Valenti [aka ex-porn star Johnny Hazzard], who has been living it up in Los Angeles).

The focus switches on to studies of sex, identity and transformation in the Bodies selection, which is dominated by François Ozon's The New Girlfriend, an adaptation of a Ruth Rendell story that also offers a provocative analysis of issues relating to identity and desire. At its heart is the burgeoning friendship that develops between Romain Duris and Anaïs Demoustier after he is left to raise his newborn daughter by the death of her childhood friend, Isild Le Besco. But what makes their bond so unusual is that Duris is a secret transvestite and the fact that he wears Le Besco's clothes has an empathising effect on Demoustier, who starts to neglect husband Raphaël Personnaz in order to build Duris's confidence in his alternative persona.

Crossing the Kattegat to Sweden, Ester Martin Bergsmark follows up her documentary She Male Snails (2011) by placing another frowned-upon friendship in the spotlight in Something Must Break. Teenager Saga Becker ignores gender stereotypes and infuriates roommate Shima Niavarani by forever shifting between his alternating identities. However, even though he is resolutely straight, Becker falls develops a huge crush when Iggy Malmborg rescues him from a homophobic beating. But, while Malmborg is happy to have a left-field pal, he is spooked when Becker begins to feel the increasing dominance of his female side. Gender identity, of course, plays a key role in Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which is showing here to mark its 40th anniversary, alongside its lesser-seen sequel, Shock Treatment (1981), an eerily prescient satire on reality television that follows the now married Brad (Cliff De Young) and Janet (Jessica Harper), as they compete in a game show and he is incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, while she is transformed into a singing sensation by egomaniacal entrepreneur Farley Flavors (also De Young).

Rounding off the Bodies slate are Sydney Freeland's Drunktown's Finest (a snapshot of life on the Navajo reservation at Gallup, New Mexico, which centres on rebellious father-to-be Jeremiah Bitsui, trans woman Carmen Moore and bookish adoptee Morningstar Angeline Wilson); Martín Farina's Fulboy (a profile of the director's professional footballer brother, Tomás); and Silvia Chiogna's Mirco (a treatise on the boundaries of gender inspired by the directors own experiences of having her sex misinterpreted).

Art, politics and the community come rather awkwardly under the Minds banner. The standout picture is Céline Sciamma's third feature, Girlhood, a drama in four acts that follows 16 year-old Karidja Touré's quest for an identity and a purpose that she has chosen rather than having imposed upon her. Raised in the projects to the north-west of Paris, Touré plays American football with an all-girl team and struggles to get the grades to continue her studies. Sniffily dismissed by her careers teacher and hectored by brother Cyril Mendy, Touré would like to date his fit mate, Idrissa Diabaté. But she has been told to know her place in both her community and French society. However, everything changes when Assa Sylla invites her to join Lindsay Karamoh and Marietou Touré in a bande de filles and discover the benefits of shaking down fellow students, shoplifting and partying in a trendy hotel room to Rhianna's song, `Diamonds'.

Staying in Paris, Frédéric Tcheng reflects in Dior and I on the debt owed by a legendary French fashion house to gay men like Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano. However, this behind-the-scenes profile proves more compelling when focusing on long-serving staff and their skills and opinions rather than the race against time incoming designer Raf Simons has when he is given just six weeks to create his debut collection in spring 2012. A less likely partnership is forged between the London gay community and some striking Welsh miners in Matthew Warchus's fact-based Pride, which one could easily see being turned into a stage musical along the lines of Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham (2010). Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Paddy Considine shine among the residents of Onllwyn, a tight-knit backwater in the Dulais Valley, while George MacKay and Ben Schnetzer show well enough as members of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. But, while it potently champions the cause of solidarity in the face of conservatism, this too often teels like a 1990s bid to impart a little political spin on the old Ealing underdog formula.

This is one of the titles showing in a Best of the Year triptych, alongside Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy, which evokes the spirit of Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) and the Euro erotica of the ensuing decade to depict the dynamic between entomologist Sidse Babett Knudsen and her housekeeper, Chiara D'Anna, who also happens to be the passive partner in the couple's ritual sado-masochist role-play. But their cosy rural idyll on the edge of a village populated entirely by women comes under pressure when D'Anna takes exception when Knudsen begins to yearn for a more conventional romance. Making up the numbers is the debuting Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behaviour, in which the twentysomething writer-director also stars as a terse Iranian-American bisexual with a genius for upsetting lovers, parents, employers and neighbours. Fizzing with deadpan wisecracks and studded with random flashbacks, this is a hugely confident Lena Dunham pastiche that juggles clichés and taboos with reckless glee. But, for all the cynical exuberance, it's a touch too scattershot and sometimes comes close to misanthropy rather than equal opportunities satire. What's more too few of the jibes are particularly eloquent or insightful. Yet, despite her problem shifting through the emotional gears, this remains an entertaining, if one-dimensional view of a side of New York and its hipster and migrant communities.

Wrapping up the Mind section are Sophie Deraspe's The Amina Profile (which chronicles the friendship between the Canadian-Jewish director and Amina Arraf, a lesbian blogger who disappeared during the Syrian Uprising); Justin Simien's Dear White People (a satire on Obama's post-racial America that follows Ivy League activist Tessa Thompson, as she seeks to use her campus radio show to demonstrate that it is not okay for an all-white hall of residence to have an African-American themed party); Jenni Olson's The Royal Road (an experimental essay exploring the history and character of California and what it means to be a butch dyke who loves Alfred Hitchcocks' Vertigo, 1958); Jeffrey Schwarz's Tab Hunter Confidential (a profile of the 1950s Hollywood pin-up who remained in the closet to protect his career); and Kate Kunath and Sascha Wortzel's We Came to Sweat (a history of the pre-Stonewall Starlite bar and dance club in Brooklyn, whose 50-year tenure as a gay landmark is threatened by new landlords).

A new feature this year is Queer Books on Film, which offers audiences a chance to see on the big screen such gems as Alfred Hitchcock's take on Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train (1951), Steven Spielberg's contentious adaptation of Alice Walkers The Color Purple (1985), Jon Avnet's amusing translation of Fannie Flagg's bestseller, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1991) and Sally Potter's stylised interpretation of Virginia Woolf's billet doux to Vita Sackville-West, Orlando (1992).

Finally, there's a treat in store for silent cineastes, as Richard Oswald's epochal drama Anders als die Andern/Different From the Others (1919) is screening at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Widely regarded as the first feature to deal with homosexuality in an explicit and equitable manner, it followed on from the Aufklarungsfilme or Enlightenment Films that Oswald had produced during the Great War to inform German audiences about such taboo topics as prostitution, venereal disease and abortion. The majority featured an eminent doctor helping the hapless victim and Oswald fashioned his feature in conjunction with sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who had challenged the tenets of Paragraph 175 of the 1871 Penal Code by suggesting that gay men and lesbian women formed part of a third sex that should be accepted rather than discriminated against.

The story is predictably melodramatic, but clearly rooted in anguished experience. Conrad Veidt is a violin virtuoso, who reads a newspaper article about men committing suicide because of Paragraph 175 and he sees a procession in his mind's eye of great men who were also homosexuals, including Leonardo Da Vinci, Frederick the Great, Ludwig II, Peter Tchaikovsky and Oscar Wilde. However, he soon comes to have deep feelings for student Fritz Schultz, whose parents (Leo Connard and Alexandra Willegh) disapprove of his musical aspirations and wish to marry him off to a wealthy widow.

Schultz's sister, Anita Berber, loves Veidt and is dismayed when he reveals the nature of their friendship. However, Veidt starts receiving blackmail demands from Reinhold Schünzel and Schultz vanishes immediately after his first concert, as he has also been a victim of Schünzel in the past. He makes a living playing in taverns and sends Berber a reassuring letter, even though he is being tormented by memories of being expelled from school for sharing a bed with a classmate and trying to cure his same-sex inclinations through hypnotism.

Veidt gives Berber tickets for a lecture, in which she learns about lesbianism, transvestism and intersexuality, as well as the fact that homosexuality was legalised under the Code Napoléon. But it takes sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to convince her that Veidt can never be cured by her love and she vows to stand beside him when he goes public with Schünzel's extortion. However, having sentenced the serial offender to three years, the judge regrets that he has no option under the law as it exists to jail Veidt for seven days. Shunned by his erstwhile colleagues, Veidt sees himself joining the order of the ostracised before he takes his own life. A grieving Schultz wishes to commit suicide, too. But Hirschfeld urges him to take up the struggle to repeal Paragraph 175 and make Germany a more civilised place.

Despite Hirschfeld being the reputed head of the Institute for Sexual Science, Oswald had to distribute the film himself. But its depiction of drag clubs and juvenile kissing meant that it soon attracted the attention of the Weimar authorities, who launched a clampdown on Aufklarungsfilme that led to them being withdrawn from circulation and restricted to viewing by doctors and lawyers. Few copies survived the purge, although Oswald reused some of his original footage in the 1927 revision, Gesetze der Liebe/The Laws of Love, before both versions were banned by the Nazis. The sole surviving copy is incomplete, but its influence on the likes of Basil Dearden's Victim (1961) is clear.

Seen today, Veidt's fey aesthete seems more than a little clichéd. But the performances are committed and Max Fassbender's photography is undeniably elegant, as it had been in Oswald's 1917 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Indeed, it is hard to miss the parallels to Wilde's own fall from grace and even though large chunks of the action have to be supplemented with stills and intertitles, this remains a fascinating historical document and a bold plea for political reform, social justice and basic human tolerance in a country still coming to terms with the collapse of militarism and despotic rule.