Angels and cowboys

Last night, crystal_storm and I went to a ses­sion of MQFF and watched the boys’ short films. As a whole it was good: the first few films were the usual fare, nar­rat­ives of first love and teen crushes, of older man meets younger man, of older inex­per­i­enced man seek­ing love through a hot­line – although each had its twist… I espe­cially liked the film about a young Eng­lish guy who’s out enjoy­ing him­self in the grass near his Mum’s house when a space­craft crash lands and on invest­ig­at­ing, he finds a NASA astro­naut. “Mum, I’ve brought home an astro­naut who crashed. He needs to use the phone.” “Oh, okay, love, does he want dinner?” When the astro­naut is happy to share his bed, too, it’s a dream come true – or at least, his prayer to Ziggy Star­dust answered.

But the last two films, both from New Zea­l­and, were in a class of their own, sen­sual and magical and beyond the realms of the ordin­ary tale.

The first was “Little Gold Cowboy”, Michael Reihana’s first film, six minutes of magical bliss as the cowboy with the sexy eyes gets a letter slipped under his door, care­fully puts on his gold paint and his eye­liner and his six-shoot­ers in their glittered hol­sters, strokes his raised, scar­i­fied sher­iff’s badge, cut into his skin and stitched with black thread to look a little like barbed wire, puts on his white angel’s wings, packs his pulsing heart into a water-filled bag along with a guard­ian gold­fish and sets off on a walk through the New Zea­l­and coun­try town, filled with dis­ap­prov­ing old men, Bonnie and Clyde in full 30s get-up with a clas­sic car, two sexy school girls making out on the side of the road, walks into a saloon where he encoun­ters his mirror image and suc­cumbs to the risks of car­ry­ing your heart in such an unpro­tec­ted way. Even better for me, our cowboy had shoulder-length dark brown hair and gor­geous green eyes. Pity I can’t find a photo online…

The second was “Boy”, writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by Welby Ing, a med­it­at­ive film of dreamy horror, a poetic film of broken dolls with black angel’s wings, a hit-and-run, boys’ cruelty, sordid sex in beats, the quiet stifling silence of a small town and the cross-fading phrases in bickley script, carved in white out of the heat of the New Zea­l­and summer, speak­ing of angels and silence and truth. A truly cre­at­ive and innov­at­ive film and pos­sibly the saviour of poetry as a writ­ten form.

And then we went and talked about friend­ship and the uni­verse and the con­nect­ness of all things until 3 in the morn­ing. It’s all good.