Queering Albion
Line up: God’s Own Country + two short films

Too often the inclusion of queer narratives in the British and Irish film landscape are isolated to urban tales of found family, illicit activity and a general modern vs traditional culture dichotomy. While this represents vast populations of the queer society, it excludes the ‘ones left behind’; those that don’t want to trade their relationship with the land for their relationship with those they love. This programme investigates the nuance, pain and joy that exists for queer people in rural places in the British Isles. 
 

Landline 

Matt Houghton | 2018 | UK | 12’ | English

In 2010, a chaplain from Cheshire set up a helpline for gay farmers. Landline journeys into the world of the people who called. A Londoner of mixed British and Indian descent, Matt Houghton is a BAFTA-winning filmmaker who makes films about outsiders and the unheard. His work experiments with form, often treading the line between fact and fiction. 

 
Lambing Season

Jeannie Donohoe | 2013 | Ireland, US | 15’ | English 

On a sheep farm full of secrets, nature has its way of delivering the truth. Jeannie Donohoe’s passion for humanist storytelling has paved her path from a South Bronx classroom to an Irish sheep farm to basketball courts with NBA champions.

 
God’s Own Country 

Francis Lee | 2017 | UK | 104’ | English

Farmer's lad Johnny is struggling to choose between family duty and finding his own path, until the arrival of a migrant worker propels him on a transformative emotional journey. Director Francis Lee was brought up on his parents’ farm on the Pennine Hills in Yorkshire. After training at Rose Bruford College he worked as an actor in theatre, television and film. Years later he started to write and direct his own short films, mediating on different aspects of life in the area he grew up in. God’s Own Country was Francis’ first feature film, premiering at Sundance and Edinburgh International Film Festival, this quiet, moving rumination on loneliness and newfound intimacy was heralded as “the first great film of the Brexit era”. This film's authenticity, which is both tender and brutal, displays a juxtaposition of landscape and emotion, and centrally explores the question of what it means to be a man, to be queer, and to be a person of the land.