On Wednesday night’s schedule at the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the movie Ciao was screened which AfterElton is calling the best gay film of the year. It sounds like it could be sweet or overly weird but here’s what the movie is about thanks to the festival Web site:
Lovers may come and go—but emails live forever. After the death of his former lover Mark, Jeff (Adam Neal Smith) reads through old emails to clean up Mark’s affairs. There are more than a thousand emails in which Mark has been corresponding with men from all over the world, but one particular exchange—with an Italian man named Andrea (co-writer Alessandro Calza)—emerges as more intimate, more charged, and somehow deeper than the others. After discovering that Andrea is about to fly to Dallas to visit Mark, Jeff initially tells the Italian not to come, then reconsiders. At first, the two men are linked only by their relationship with the deceased, but over the next three days they find their interaction gradually shifting from shared grief to mutual attraction. Devoid of splashy dramatics, CIAO’s naturalistic dialogue provides a new look at the art of saying hello and the pain of saying goodbye.
But Ciao is no news to Dallas already. Filmmaker Yen Tan is from Dallas and his film was screened during AFI’s International Film Festival earlier this year. Jerome Weeks wrote about it here on KERA’s blog way back in Spring. However, it is nice to see the Dallas film get props outside the city and heck, we’ll call it the best gay film of the year just for that reason.
