

Filmmaker Andy Blubaugh documents a year spent looking for love in the personal ads.

Filmmaker Andy Blubaugh documents a year spent looking for love in the personal ads.
2006-01-21
5.5
6.1Benjamin, a rising star filmmaker, is on the brink of premiering his difficult second film No Self at the London Film Festival when Billie, his hard drinking publicist, introduces him to a mesmeric French musician called Noah.
6.4Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.
7.2Benny, a college freshman at the University of Akron, Ohio meets and falls for fellow freshman Christopher at a football game. With the support of their families and friends they embark on a new relationship. But a tragic event in the past involving their mothers soon comes to light and threatens to tear them apart.
6.8At a birthday party in 1968 New York, a surprise guest and a drunken game leave seven gay friends reckoning with unspoken feelings and buried truths.
7.5Tala, a London-based Palestinian, is preparing for her elaborate Middle Eastern wedding when she meets Leyla, a young British Indian woman who is dating her best friend. Spirited Christian Tala and shy Muslim Leyla could not be more different from each other, but the attraction is immediate and goes deeper than friendship. But Tala is not ready to accept the implications of the choice her heart has made for her and escapes back to Jordan, while Leyla tries to move on with her new-found life, to the shock of her tradition-loving parents. As Tala's wedding day approaches, simmering tensions come to boiling point and the pressure mounts for Tala to be true to herself.
5.8August tells the story of two former lovers, Troy and Jonathan, who reunite after a long ago painful breakup. After spending several years in Spain, Troy returns to Los Angeles and decides to phone Jonathan and meet for coffee. A seemingly innocent rendezvous turns into an attempt to revive passions past. Only this time it's not that simple as Jonathan has a new beau, Raul, and is trying to make the right decision a second time around.
6.6Alex Truelove is on a quest to lose his virginity, an event eagerly awaited by his patient girlfriend and cheered on with welcome advice by his rowdy friends. But Alex, a super gregarious dude, is oddly unmotivated. A magical house party throws Alex into the presence of Elliot, a hunky college guy, who pegs Alex as gay and flirts hard. Alex is taken aback but after a series of setbacks on the girlfriend front he takes the plunge and learns some interesting new facts about himself.
6.2This intimate drama follows Rebecca, a woman who has kept her sexuality a secret from her friends but chooses to reveal it to a stranger. While Rebecca's revelations may not yield the results she expects, a perfect ending is still in reach.
6.5Camp Belvidere is a lesbian romance set in the 1950s about the coming of age of Camp Leader Rose and her forbidden encounter with Nurse Gin. It depicts the journey and evolution of a friendship into a romance between two women when their rapport would have been unlikely.
7.2Patrick returns to San Francisco for the first time in almost a year to celebrate a momentous event with his old friends. In the process, he must face the unresolved relationships he left behind and make difficult choices about what’s important to him.
5.8A pregnant New York social worker begins to develop romantic feelings for her gay best friend, and decides she'd rather raise her child with him, much to the dismay of her overbearing boyfriend.
6.9The wife of a pastor who preaches against homosexuality embarks on an affair with a female writer.
7.6In the late 1990s, the arrival of elderly invalid Patrick into Marion and Tom’s home triggers the exploration of seismic events from 40 years previous: the passionate relationship between Tom and Patrick at a time when homosexuality was illegal.
6.7A woman watches time pass beside the suitcases of her ex-lover (who is supposed to come pick them up but never arrives) and a restless dog who doesn't understand that his master has abandoned him.
7.2A library assistant plods through an ordinary life in LA until a chance meeting opens his eyes to the power of creativity and ultimately, love. When this new life and love begin to fall apart, he discovers he has a lot to give. This short film proves that ordinary is no place to be.
7.1A drama centered on two women who engage in a dangerous relationship during South Africa's apartheid era.
6.6In Kentucky, a transgender woman and her best male friend lament the lack of eligible partners and step across old boundaries of love and romance.
6.0In contemporary Los Angeles, two millennials navigating a social media–driven hookup culture begin a relationship that pushes both emotional and physical boundaries.
6.3Two brothers develop a sexual attraction to one another amid the unkind world around them.
6.6Based on the autobiographical novel, the tempestuous 6-year relationship between Liberace and his (much younger) lover, Scott Thorson, is recounted.
0.0Through a collection of video diary entries spanning more than a year, Pronouns in Bio delivers an offbeat and charming reflection on transness and identity. Part documentary, part video essay and part musical, the film follows director and star Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner, a recently out transgender, autistic woman, as she navigates the first year of her transition. Note: Lucy uses the name Frankie during the film but has since started using the name Lucy.
2.0A dramedy about four Drag Queens who find themselves at the very same therapy retreat. In an effort to overcome issues holding them back, they dissect their problems, told in vignettes of their lives. They discover common ground; Perhaps, it wasn't serendipity that brought them together. Maybe they're not alone?
7.1While waiting for her divorce papers, a repressed literature professor finds herself unexpectedly attracted by a carefree, spirited young woman named Cay.
8.0In rural Louisiana, 11-year-old Sabine's widower father misses Ash Wednesday Mass, so she pushes him to give up drinking for Lent. He breaks his vow, evoking the wrath of the ROUGAROU, a mythical bayou beast who punishes bad Catholics. Now Sabine has to step up to save him from the monster or risk losing her only living parent.
7.5An excellent example of how sometimes dialogue is not necessary, Totems is a visual display of our inner animal disposition. A lumberjack is working in a forest when a tree falls down and his leg gets stuck. As he is trapped in a beautiful but cruel environment, the despair awakens his primal instincts.
0.0Based on the Stephen King story of the same name.
5.9Felix is a friendless achiever in high school whose life changes after the arrival of the half-American Snyder brothers, entangling him in their dark ambitions.
4.5Sofiane lives in a high-rise block at the edges of Paris. A violent young man, he tries to be like his gang of friends. However, Sofiane is attracted to guys. Through his contradictions, he embodies the confusion of today's idle young people who have lost their bearings and live withdrawn into themselves.
0.0Conservative middle-aged fisherman Singaram cares for his orphaned niece and nephew who he loves deeply. As Singaram works hard to provide for his family, he also tries to arrange a groom for his niece. But she rejects the many suitors he brings, and he soon learns that his niece is in love with her fellow female teacher. Ostracized by his community, Singaram tries to come to terms with his niece being a lesbian and through the process he learns to empathize with the plight of the village barber Alankaram, who is transgender.
6.0It is summertime in a blue-collar, marginal district of a city in the South of Spain. Tano, a teenager currently serving a sentence in a juvenile reform center, is given a 48-hour leave to attend his brother’s wedding.
7.3A 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.
7.0The story of a middle-aged woman with small children whose life is shaken up when two free-spirited twenty-somethings move in across the street.
0.0196X. Anna, an enigmatic and attractive professional kidnapper, abducts The Professor during his wedding ceremony on request from one of the latter's former girlfriend. This woman, whose face Anna has never seen, wishes to die with The Professor before he marries. Leaving the church with The Professor on the back seat of her motor-bike, Anna starts on the journey to the fictional city of 'Alpha Paris'.
0.0Two young men spend an ordinary weekend together as Jehovah's Witnesses in the historic industry town of Trail, British Columbia. They eat junk food, play video games, watch movies, drink energy drinks, go out in the Ministry, then go their separate ways towards the silence of living. In that silence they contend with the hidden realities of their lives and feelings.
7.7Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories fill the gaps between camcorder footages as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the troubled man she didn't.
7.0A biopic of writer Truman Capote and his assignment for The New Yorker to write the non-fiction book "In Cold Blood".
6.8Tobi 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 meteorological.
6.0On the outskirts of Brooklyn, Frankie, an aimless teenager, suffocates under the oppressive glare cast by his family and a toxic group of delinquent friends. Struggling with his own identity, Frankie begins to scour hookup sites for older men.