30. Schwule Filmtage: "Lilies Not for Me"

Gay Film Days - for the 30th time, Cinema Quadrat presents the best gay films of the season, for gay, straight and everything in between!

LILIES NOT FOR ME

GBR/ZAF/FRA/USA 2024. dir: Will Seefried. D: Fionn O'Shea, Robert Aramayo, Erin Kellyman, Louis Hofmann. 97 min. englOmdtU. FSK: 16

England in the 1920s. Writer Owen ends up in a closed psychiatric ward because of his homosexuality. During a series of medically prescribed "romantic dates", he tells his story to a nurse: How he first thought he had found peace and happiness with his love for Philip - and realized too late how deep the latter's self-hatred really ran. Philip wanted to curb his forbidden feelings with an operation - and Owen was supposed to wield the knife.
Based on historical events, the film tells of the origins of conversion therapy in unforgettable images that make these "treatments" and their consequences visible and tangible - a heartbreaking, yet ultimately life-affirming story in a dark era for queer people: "LILIES NOT FOR ME shows the brutal simplicity of homophobia and at the same time the fragile strength of queer self-assertion. A movie that resonates for a long time."(queer.de)