To mark International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) 2012, Austrian filmmaker Gregor Schmidinger has onlined his part-crowdfunded gay short film which tackles the issue.

Homophobia follows a young gay soldier battling his inner demons, as well as bullying from his comrades. On the final day of his military service he gets posted to the wooded Austrian-Hungarian border for some night-time guard duty with the fellow soldier he’s been lusting after.

Says Schmidinger: “Laws can prevent people from doing crimes, but they don’t change people’s thinking. Art can touch people on an emotional level and therefore really make an impact.

“People often connect homophobia with hate, but it’s really about fear. It’s the fear of the unknown and sometimes of the unknown within ourselves. With Homophobia I want to portray this conflict and provide people with new perspectives on an empathetic level.”

If Andrew Haigh’s recent gay hit is called ‘Weekend’, then director Ira Sachs latest movie could be called ‘Decade’. But it’s not; it’s called Keep The Lights On’ and it charts the start and end of a turbulent but passionate gay relationship over a ten-year period and is largely based on Sachs’ personal experience.

Sexy Danish actor Thure Lindhardt (check out his impressive turn as a gay fascist in last year’s Brotherhood) plays the Sachs-esque character, a gay documentary filmmaker, in this co-dependent coupling and young actor Zachary Booth fills the role of his drug and sex addicted literary agent boyfriend. They hook-up one night in 1997 for a no-strings encounter and then spend the next ten years locked in a tug-of-war between their love for each other and their self-destructive compulsions.

Keep The Lights On is currently playing the Tribeca Film Festival and co-writer/director Sachs gave them an interview where he talks about the inspiration for his movie, the film-within-a-film about vintage gay pornographer Avery Willard, the difficulty finding American actors willing to drop trou and how Lindhardt got the part with a little late-night, hotel room exhibitionism.

Sach’s previous works include 1996 movie, The Delta, about a closeted gay teen drawn into a dangerous sexual world, and the short film Last Address, which is an 8-minute visual elegy to New York based artists taken from us by the AIDS epidemic. You can watch it below:

Polk’s new movie, The Skinny, continues these themes, but in a less comic setting. It sees five former college friends reuniting in NYC for the city’s Gay Pride parade. They party, break-up, fight, take drugs, have sex, lust after one another, discover secrets and recite the poetry of Langston Hughes, who’s house they visit in Harlem. It features a sexy cast, including some notable gay porn stars, and tackles some uncomfortable taboos. The soundtrack is also written by Polk – he’s a member of LA band Fol Chen.

The Skinny is currently touring movie theaters around the US – check dates here – and is lined up for a Logo TV premiere in the summer. You can watch a promo below.

That movie followed the doomed, secret love between army commander Yossi and second-in-comand Lior, known to his fellow troops as “Jagger” because of his rock star good looks.

In this new film, simply titled ‘Yossi’, the central character (played again by Ohad Knoller) is now a doctor working in Tel Aviv but still firmly in the closet. He affords himself virtually no social life, bar the occasional internet hookup, and chooses to sleep at the hospital. A fateful encounter sends Yossi on a roadtrip through southern Israel and a chance meeting with a group of young soldiers reawakens something inside the depressed, workaholic doctor.

You can watch a clip from Yossi below. In it, we see the potential humiliation that can come from not updating your profile pics.

Yossi is currently playing at NYC’s Tribeca Film Festival.

It’s about a young Russian immigrant who is pushed into gay prostitution after losing his family. Watch the trailer after the jump…

Once-upon-a-time, for a brief spell, Steven Soderbergh made good films. Once-upon-a-time, for a very brief spell, Hollywood hunk Channing Tatum (who’s first- and surname work equally well flipped around, much like his screen performances are interchangeable with a jacket potato) worked nights as a stripper. Somehow, in the great scheme of things, it seems their cosmic fates were linked and we now get a Soderbergh movie about Tatum’s stripping days. It also stars ‘is-he?-he-is-isn’t-he?-yes-he-is-or-is-he?’ White Collar star, Matt Bomer.

Christopher Hines’ movie follows a new generation of activists, both gay and straight, as they take up the fight and work together in campaigning for LGBT equality in marriage, at work and in sport. And they have public opinion gradually turning in their favour. As Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign says: “we are at an historic tipping point”.

Hines previously made the documentaries The Butch Factor and The Adonis Factor, which both investigated issues and notions of body image and masculinity within gay male culture.

Viewers of MTV’s Logo Network can watch the premiere of Legalize Gay on Saturday 5 May 2012 at 8.00pm. Read more about the Ben Cohen Stand-Up Foundation here.

Pau Masó and David Damen’s psychological thriller is about a young illegal immigrant drawn into the world of gay prostitution after his mother’s suicide. Russian boy Aleksandr, played by Masó, must reconcile with his past and the abandonment by his family in order to come to terms with his new self.

26-year-old actor/writer/director Paul Masó, originally from Spain, cut his teeth on horror short Who’s There? and followed it up with feature-length scarer Haunted Poland, which received a gong at the American International Film Festival. He also does an impressive sideline in music videos homages on his YouTube channel.

With five movies currently in production, including a feature version of Who’s There?, Masó is a face to watch. You can see him acting in Joel Scheidegger’s 2010 gay short What About Boys? below.

“A repressed, married man leads a nocturnal double life as a slave to his dark sexual impulses. A life-changing encounter turns him into a reluctant vigilante, but an ambivalence towards those he helps and a blurred moral compass threaten to corrupt his actions.”

If this sounds like a movie you’d like to see, then ‘like’ this site – the more ‘likes’ we get, the greater chance there is of getting the movie made. We’ll be serialising the full screen story over the coming weeks/months.