Alejandro and Beto are in love. Their relationship, however, is being seriously tested. Alejandro is HIV+ and becoming more desperate as he finds the drug treatments in Mexico City are not working as he had hoped, and his t-cells continue to plummet. After much anguish, he decides, without input from Beto, that he needs to go to the U.S. for better information, medication and treatment. That decision unleashes havoc for Alejandro as he and Beto fight, slip up and finally reconcile. At the U.S. embassy, Alejandro is denied a visa, which ultimately leads him to try crossing the border illegally.

Based on photographer William Yang’s one man stage show, “Sadness” chronicles two diverging narratives through the use of slide photography, oral history and stylised recreation. One story follows Yang’s pilgrimage into the heart of the North Queensland sugar cane fields as he investigates the murder of his uncle Fang Yuen. The other is a series of moving portraits of the many friends and lovers Yang has lost to AIDS. Director Tony Ayres skillfully weaves these two separate stories together creating a powerful testament to family, friends, love and loss.

The oldest known “out” African-American lesbian remembers ten colorful decades in this hour-long documentary, which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1999. Born July 23, 1899, in Springfield, IL, Ruth Ellis spent most of her life in Detroit. A pioneering independent black businesswoman, she operated her own print shop until the age of 65. In the home she shared with Cecilene “Babe” Franklin, her partner of more than 30 years, she played host to innumerable gatherings of the city’s African-American gays and lesbians in an age when segregation excluded them from white homosexual society. A participant in the civil rights movement and a witness of the riots that tore Detroit apart in the 1960s, Ellis later became an icon for, and active participant in, the city’s multicultural lesbian and feminist community.