ONE of the most striking  films in this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival was the documentary I Am Samuel from Kenyan film-maker Pete Murimi who, since he began his career in 2003, has been drawn to “shine a light on the unseen, marginalised and vulnerable in our society.”

His is a beautifully composed film, with wonderful panoramas of western Kenya, that courageously throws open the door to conversations around gay rights and traditional cultural values — prayer and faith are strong influences in Samuel’s family home — in a country where being gay is criminalised by law.

It’s shot on a country farm and in Nairobi where Samuel meets his partner, Alex. The latter talks of a “heathy denial,” —  knowing the truth but willing to believe the lie — and this perhaps prompts Samuel to come out to his father.   

I Am Samuel is a superb mediation within which Murimi invites us to bear testament to this  couple’s commitment to each other.   

The Dose (La Dosis), directed by Martin Kraut, is a bleak Argentinian thriller exploring the ethical dilemmas confronting the nurse Marcos (Carlos Portaluppi), who resorts to using euthanasia, and his motives for doing so.

His rival colleague Gabriel (Ignacio Rogers) also dabbles with assisted suicide but to his own nefarious ends and this forces Marcos to confront him and secretly investigate his activities in an attempt to stop him.   

The film’s distinctively dark aesthetic is due to a mainly monochromatic colour palate, with its green-grey tones a realistic representation of a hospital ward and the plot grippingly twists and turns down a labyrinth of excitement and mystery.  

Directed by Canadian Phil Connell, Jump, Darling, tells the story of the connection rookie drag queen Russell (Thomas Duplessie) has with his maternal grandmother Margaret (Cloris Leachman). He’s gone to look after her out in the country as he struggles to look after himself following a relationship break-up.   

Margaret, in declining health, is desperately trying to avoid a retirement community and she is portrayed with fragility and a quick-witted dry humour by Leachman — at the age of  94!  

The intimate connection between grandmother and grandson is thrown into relief by rural shots of Prince Edward County, Ontario, as well as in and around the dance sequences with Russell in full drag attire.   

Linda Kash shines with sincerity as Russell’s mother and Duplessie’s honest and authentic delivery can’t help but make Jump, Darling an endearingly funny and warm film to watch.     

The US film The Obituary of Tunde Johnson, directed by Ali LeRoi, plays out like a fierce ballad and its structural complexity and slick aesthetics makes it a film to revisit.

Its Groundhog Day device explores different facets of the eponymous Tunde’s story as an isolated event —  the murder of a young black man by white police officers on the day he chooses to come out to his parents — which plays relentlessly on repeat.  

In each segment we look for meaning, in the context of police brutality and injustice in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement — a struggle in which racially oppressive forces still at work continue to be upheld structurally.

The film’s strength is mostly in its timbre and tonality, which bring to mind elements of Lars Von Trier’s Elephant or David Fincher’s political TV series House of Cards.  

Directed by Oskar Roehler, Enfant Terrible spans the most prolific years of the late German theatre and film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder from 1967 at Munich’s Action-Theater to his sadly premature death in 1982 at the age of 37.  

With a stylised aesthetic, this dramatised biopic of a key figurehead in New German cinema explores some of the films in which  Fassbinder mostly attacked the hypocritical liberalism and complacency of the middle and upper classes.

Enfant Terrible ends with Querelle, Fassbinder’s  last and most uncompromising film about gay male sensibility.

But if the film is aiming to subvert the logic of the petit bourgeoisie as Fassbinder had so effortlessly, Klaus Richter’s script might have focused less on Fassbinder’s drug and alcohol abuse and the sensationalised aspects of his life and placed the emphasis more simply on his work.

Films screened at the festival included 26 features and 38 free shorts from 23 countries, and they’ll certainly be worth looking out for when they hit the streaming platforms.