Winner of the Teddy Jury Award at the 2000 Berlin International Film Festival, Chrissy is the story of an ex-runaway and street kid who was diagnosed HIV+ at age 18, and did not reveal her sexual orientation or her illness to her family until eight years later. As we follow Chrissy, her mother, and three younger sisters for the next year, we are given access to a world one must see to really understand. Filmmaker Jacqui North takes us on a personal journey of a family learning about acceptance and love. Breaking records as the most watched documentary on Australian television, where it first aired on World AIDS Day in 1999, Chrissy is an honest and daring film.

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Winner of the Prix de Jeunesse (Youth Award) at Cannes, this sensitive, seriocomic coming-of-age film explores the fragile emotions of adolescent sexual experimentation. Best friends Dani and Nico spend ten days together at a beach house on the coast of Spain while Dani’s parents vacation in Egypt. With extraordinary tact, the film observes the friends’ exploratory sexual fumblings in the bed they share during the visit. Tensions arise as their sexual identities begin to diverge – for Nico, the nightly sessions are mere convenience, while for Dani they are fraught with emotion and romantic hope. This unflinching, yet delicate take on the rides of adolescence affectionately transports us back to those awkward days of longing, curiosity, innocence and fear.

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The collaboration between “sixth generation” director Liu Bingjian and openly gay screenwriter Cui Zi’en has resulted in a picture of homosexuality rare for Chinese cinema in its sympathy and realism. A shy young man arrives in Beijing to work in a clothes shop owned by the repressed wife of a boorish man. Meanwhile, the flamboyant host (Cui Zi’en) of a lonely hearts talk show on a pirate radio station is asked out by the editor of a fanzine that publishes graffiti from public toilets. At first nothing happens–feelings are hidden under a cloak of normalcy. When passions finally erupt, they are violent, unexpected, liberating and subversive.

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