Derek Malcolm recommends: Deep Desires & Broken Dreams at Riverside Studios

In its fifth year, the Hammersmith cinema’s popular annual gay week, includes on its programme Mike Skiff’s Folsom Forever, drama-documentary Codebreaker and Xavier Dolan's Tom at the Farm
21 February 2014

The Hammersmith cinema’s popular annual gay week, Deep Desires & Broken Dreams, opened last night.

It may be a relatively small-scale event but included in this, its fifth year, is a world premiere — of Mike Skiff’s Folsom Forever (showing on Sunday). The sharp documentary focuses on a run-down area of San Francisco that was effectively regenerated by a street festival, started in 1984 to raise money for Aids charities, to become home to a wild leather-clad subculture.

Also on the programme, Codebreaker (Sunday) is the sad story of Alan Turing, whose brilliant work on the German Enigma code saved hundreds of lives and probably shortened the war. Sacked after a trumped-up homosexuality charge, he was only recently officially rehabilitated and given a royal pardon. The film centres on the therapy sessions he was forced to undergo before he committed suicide after the most miserable period of his life.

Tom at the Farm (also Sunday) is by Xavier Dolan, a Québécois film-maker, and has a young man visiting the farming family of his recently deceased partner, who had no idea either was gay. The film won the international critics’ prize at last year’s Venice Festival.

The festival is supported by a small exhibition of London photographers at the theatre’s gallery.

Deep Desires & Broken Dreams is at Riverside Studios, W6 (020 8237 1111, riversidestudios.co.uk) until Feb 26

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