Content from Strand Releasing

Two HIV-positive young men — a semi-employed film critic and a hot hustler — tear off on a cross-country crime spree.

In a remote South American colony in the late 18th century, officer Zama of the Spanish crown waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. He suffers small humiliations and petty politicking as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia.

A down-on-his-luck adult film star sees a chance to make a comeback via a lesbian documentary film-maker, but she is exploiting him to get financial backing for her pet project.

A cute, openly gay latin boy's hormones go into overdrive when his hunky cousin Angel arrives for an extended stay. The two explore the young and sometimes dangerous gay scene in the city's Latin neighborhood, with surprising outcomes.

Vittorio is looking for a woman who matches his ideal. Through a classified ad he meets Sonia, a sweet, pleasant, intelligent girl. However, she weighs 125 pounds -- which according to Vittorio is way too much. A goldsmith by trade, Vittorio is obsessed with the desire to shape Sonia's body and mind as does a fire with gold. Almost imperceptibly Sonia becomes a passive participant and the relationship grows into a reciprocal masochistic game. When the two lovers isolate themselves in a country house in the Veneto hills, they dangerously lose touch with reality and the rest of the world.

Set in Tokyo in 1940, the peaceful life of the Nogami Family suddenly changes when the father, Shigeru, is arrested and accused of being a Communist. His wife Kayo works frantically from morning to night to maintain the household and bring up her two daughters with the support of Shigeru's sister Hisako and Shigeru's ex-student Yamazaki, but her husband does not return. WWII breaks out and casts dark shadows on the entire country, but Kayo still tries to keep her cheerful determination, and sustain the family with her love. This is an emotional drama of a mother and an eternal message for peace.

The story of Joseph, a man plagued by violence and a rage that is driving him to self-destruction. As Joseph's life spirals into turmoil a chance of redemption appears in the form of Hannah, a Christian charity shop worker. Their relationship develops to reveal that Hannah is hiding a secret of her own with devastating results on both of their lives.

The neglected child of parents living on a commune, Victor is helpless to resist the atmosphere of sex and drugs that permeates his world, but he's smart enough to know that if he is going to survive, he has to get out.

Francesco and Marta run a husband-and-wife design company in Rome. When Francesco's aunt dies in Istanbul he travels there to sort out the hamam Turkish steam bath that she left him. He finds a love and warmth in his relatives' Istanbul home that is missing from his life in Italy.

Follows the journey of Joe Peterson, a burned out children's book writer who's approaching a midlife crisis.

After more than forty years apart, Andreas and Claire embark on an affair as reckless and intense as when they were young lovers. Widowed musician Andreas decides to get back in touch with his one great love, Claire, who is still married to her first husband, John. Andreas and Claire find that the connection they shared when they were young is still there and they soon become involved in a rekindled love affair.

Reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, the action is transposed from the silver screen's old backlots to contemporary male prostitution and the pornographic industry.

Each of the three short films in this collection presents a young gay man at the threshold of adulthood. In "Pool Days," Justin is a 17-year old Bethesda lad, hired as the evening life guard at a fitness center. In the course of the summer, he realizes and embraces that he's gay. In "A Friend of Dorothy," Winston arrives from upstate for his freshman year at NYU. He has to figure out, with some help from Anne, a hometown friend, how to build a social life as a young gay man in the city. In "The Disco Years," Tom looks back on 1978, the year in high school that he came out of the closet after one joyful and several painful encounters

John Rosow drinks to forget. He is a former New York City cop turned Chicago-based private investigator. At the last minute, he is hired by someone he's never met to follow a middle-aged male subject on the soon-departing California Zephyr train to Los Angeles.

Jason Gould satirizes coming out in Hollywood in Inside Out, starring Alexis Arquette and papa Elliot Gould. Lane Janger's Just One Time was a festival favorite recently expanded into a feature film that turns the tables on a groom-to-be and his fantasies of sex with two women. Bradley Rust Gray's Hitch follows two attractive young guys on a dizzying road trip that leads them toward sexual self-discovery. David Fournier's Majorettes in Space is a witty French spoof of post-modern sex, romance, relationships, the Pope and baton-twirling majorettes. And, Gregory Cooke's $30 is the bittersweet story of a closeted teen presented with a young prostitute on his 16th birthday.

A daughter torn between two mothers, one who raised her with love and her biological mother, who instinctively claims her back.

A look at the 1950s muscle men's magazines and the representative industry which were popular supposedly as health and fitness magazines, but were in reality primarily being purchased by the still-underground homosexual community. Chief among the purveyors of this literature was Bob Mizer, who maintained a magazine and developed sexually inexplicit men's films for over 40 years. Aided by his mother, the two maintained a stable of not so innocent studs.

Aging screenwriter Felix Bonhoeffer has lived his life in two states of existence: in reality and his own interior world. While working on a murder mystery script, and unaware that his brain is on the verge of implosion, Felix is baffled when his characters start to appear in his life, and vice versa.

When Dorine Douglas' job as proofreader for Constant Consumer magazine is turned into an at-home position during a downsizing, she doesn't know how to cope. But after accidentally killing one of her co-workers, she discovers that murder can quench the loneliness of her home life, as a macabre office place forms in her basement, populated by dead co-workers.

When the fiancé of a fireman reluctantly agrees to participate in a ménage à trois with another woman, she does so on the condition that he reciprocate the favor with another man, which ultimately puts their impending marriage in jeopardy.