Heartstone (c) Breaking Glass Pictures

A Conversation with Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson, the Director of Heartstone

Enjoy this interview with writer/director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson, the man behind the gorgeous and powerful new coming-of-age drama Heartstone from Breaking Glass Pictures. This conversation was taken from the official press kit for Heartstone. We found it interesting and wanted to pass it along for your reading pleasure.

 

The film takes place in a remote fishing village in Iceland and follows teenage boys Thor and Christian (Baldur Einarsson and Blaer Hinriksson) as they experience a turbulent summer. As one tries to win the heart of a girl, the other discovers that he has been harboring new feelings toward his best friend. When summer ends – and the harsh nature of Iceland takes back its rights – it becomes apparent that it’s time to leave the playground and face adulthood.

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How to Talk to Girls at Parties

John Cameron Mitchell is ready to teach you How to Talk to Girls at Parties

John Cameron Mitchell, director of the acclaimed films Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus wants to teach you How to Talk to Girls at Parties. His new film takes us to an exotic and unusual world: suburban London in the late 1970s. Under the spell of the Sex Pistols, every teenager in the country wants to be a punk, including our hopeless hero Enn (Alex Sharp). Crashing local punk queen Boadicea’s party, Enn discovers every boy’s dream – gorgeous foreign exchange students. When he meets the enigmatic Zan (Elle Fanning), it’s love at first sight.

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Fourplay

Now Available On Demand: Fourplay

Director Kyle Henry‘s Fourplay, which tells four intimate tales of sexual triumph and travail set in four American cities, is now available to stream instantly at TLAgay.com! The four stories told are…

 

Skokie: Marcy, a closeted, mid-fifties lesbian church choir member, pines for Gail, the wife of her Methodist pastor, Roger. When Gail and Roger head out of town for the weekend, Marcy offers to watch their nightmare of a dog, Myra. Marcy works hard to win the pooch over, and ultimately accomplishes much more than that.

 

Austin: Lily, early thirties, is fertile and off the pill. She and her boyfriend Kai plan a casual night of sex after a long dry spell, but Lily’s unwed sister and sick baby nephew make hooking up at Lily’s place impossible. As they prowl the sultry summer night streets, they debate whether marriage and babies are really in their future … and arrive at a startling compromise.

 

Tampa: Late-twenties Luis loops into a local mall to grab lunch in the food court and a quickie in the public restroom. Paranoid about his own small package and clearly nervous about the situation, he scouts for possible partners, letting his imagination take over when reality proves thoroughly unsatisfying.

 

San Francisco: A confident, mid-thirties cross-dressing prostitute, Aliya, travels for a job to Marin County. Arriving at a seaside estate, Aliya meets Anne, the client’s wife, who engages Aliya in nervous conversation. Once Aliya puts her at ease, Anne leads to the door behind which her quadriplegic husband awaits and gives Aliya specific instructions on how to care for him. Left alone with this challenging client, Aliya must summon all her emotional strength and creativity to accomplish her mission.

 

Two of the tales in Fourplay premiered on the festival circuit as stand-alone shorts. Tampa, easily the raunchiest and funniest of the bunch, premiered at the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 2011 and played Sundance in 2012. The heartfelt San Francisco premiered at LA’s Outfest in 2010 and won a special jury commendation from Cardiff’s Iris Prize Festival, the world’s top monetary prize for LGBT short films, and Best Narrative Short at NYC’s NewFest in 2010.

 

Fourplay premiered in its current form as a feature-length anthology in June 2012 at San Francisco’s Frameline Film Fest and has played Los Angeles’ Outfest, Oslo’s Int’l Film Festival, Atlanta’s Out on Film, New Orleans’ Film Fest, Austin’s aGLIFF/Polari, and the Guanajuato Int’l Film Festival.

 

According to director Kyle Henry, “My goal with Fourplay was to provide understanding for characters participating in sexual acts that might otherwise be considered deviant and to depict sex acts as potentially cathartic moments in our lives as human beings.” He went on to say that his idea was to “represent a spectrum of sexual experience, hence four stories of varied style and tone. Like a good book of short stories, the sum total should add up to an impression of my view of the world without the easy trickery of interlocking story overlap or recurring characters. I’m inspired by the surreal films of directors Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, and Lindsay Anderson, particularly their anarchic subversion of power through expressive excess. I hope that the scope, nonjudgmental attitude and expressive representation of sex will implicitly challenge notions of ‘normal’ behavior through which sex and bodies are seen in ‘mainstream’ cinema.”

 

Now you can enjoy this wild and unique collection INSTANTLY at TLAgay.com! Check out the image gallery and trailer below!