There is so much to choose from at this year’s QFest, so we’re going to try to narrow things down just a little by taking a look at some trailers. And there are a LOT of them, so lets get right to it.

1. A Few Days of Respite – “A pair of gay men escape from Iran and seek safety in a small French village, but freedom, love and happiness clearly has a price in this quiet drama.“

This trailer has no subtitles, so we’re not sure just what’s happening, but we dig the melancholic soundtrack music. The Iranian couple and the French lady are giving major Acting Face as they take meaningful drags of cigarettes and gaze into mirrors and out of windows, which we’re thinking means that this movie will make you weep hot tears of human spirit triumph.  

2. Absent – “A calculating high school student attempts to seduce his somewhat older swimming instructor in this tense sexual drama.”

Buttcheeks! There are youthful Spanish buttcheeks in this trailer! Plot-wise it looks like the seductive student in question keeps creating situations where his teacher has to look after him, to the point where the poor older guy doesn’t feel like he has any choice but to let the teen spend the night. It’s unclear from the trailer whether the professor succumbs to his student’s wiles, but considering that the actor playing the teenager is probably well into his 20’s, we won’t feel too bad watching the crap out of it if they do get it on. 

3. Amphetamine – “A poor straight swimming instructor falls passionately in love with a rich businessman. But will his drug addition and the haunted memories of his past doom their relationship?”

No English subtitles in this trailer either! Yet again, they make up for it with some epic soundtrack music. Come to think, there’s a lot that’s epic in this trailer: The sunlit frolicking in the sand on the beach, the sensual embrace in a hot tub, the driving around in a bright yellow hot rod, the sun setting over the the city pensively seen from a rooftop, the coiffured platinum-bleached hair, the laughter, the tears, the martial arts sequences, the bungee jumping (yes, there is literally bungee jumping happening here), the waking up screaming and thrashing from nightmares, the underwater reenactment of that gay hand-touching part of the Sistine Chapel, the… silver-skinned angel? Wow. From what we can tell, the title truly fits the movie here. EPIC.

4. Bite Marks – “Blood thirty vampires set their sights on a sexually repressed truck driver and a young gay couple in this alternately funny, sexy and gory horror flick.”

Vampires! wry one-liners! Beefcakes! This exciting trailer makes the movie out to be something like Zombietown meets Buffy with a gay twist and at least one public bathroom stall sexing session.

5. Blackmail Boys – “Bernard and Richard Shumanski, the filmmakers behind the 2009 gay hit Wrecked, return with a similarly sexy, yet heartfelt follow-up.”

A public homophobe who is secretly gay? Say it ain’t so! In this suspenseful clip, we see two young gay boys, one of them a hustler, discussing videotaping and blackmailing one of their high-profile closeted clients. There’s bound to be betrayal, and also, more buttcheeks. Are plentiful buttcheeks in gay flicks like the bare boobs of straight movies? Discuss.

6. Break My Fall – “Filled with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, Break My Fall brilliantly follows a sexy gender-bending dyke couple who work hard and play harder in East London’s vibrant queer underground.”

London hipsters in love. “There’s a whole world of other people, who go to bed at night, and get up in the morning,” one character marvels. So there you have it.

7. Buffering – “From the makers of Shank and Release comes this British sex comedy about a young couple who decide to broadcast their sex life via webcam to pay the bills.”

Times are tough, to be sure. So it’d be understandable for young attractive people to broadcast their sex lives online for a little extra cash. It’d also be understandable to start this trailer off first thing with another sweet pair of buttcheeks. For our part, we should have started this trailer screening with a drinking game for each visible buttock. Anyway back to the movie. Billed as “THE ULTIMATE RAM COM,” it seems that Buffering should definitely fulfill the “ram” part of the deal. As for the “com,” we’ll have to see. Looks fun though! http://phillygaycalendar.com/pages/newcolumn.php

8. Circumstance – “This suspenseful, political love story starkly juxtaposes public lives and lives lived away from the omnipresent surveillance by the state.”

The titular circumstance in question here is how young love between two women can blossom in a repressive society. If you don’t get just a little choked up watching this trailer, literally you do not have a heart, and subsequently should be poked at by government doctors to find out how you get blood to travel through your body. 

9. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same – “Opening Night descends on the girls with a film that received critical acclaim at its Sundance premiere… a hilarious first-date movie for connoisseurs of kitsch, sci-fi geeks, Ed Wood aficionados and all starry-eyed searchers looking for love.”

This super-short trailer doesn’t give us too much else to chew on other than the depths of the starry universe and an alien spacecraft fashioned from foil take-out containers. CLSASS is playing its cards close to its, er, chest, but it’s working some kind of magic on us. We want to see more. You had us at the title, honestly.

10. Eating Out: Drama Camp – “Chris Salvatore and Daniel Skelton return, along with Rebekah Kochan and cult icon Mink Stole in the fourth installment of Q. Allan Brocka’s Eating Out series!”

If you’re a fan of Eating Out and its subsequent sequels, why would you not fall in love with this installment? There’s writhing man-bodies and snappy quips galore, plus some gross-out humor involving bodily fluids and a dramatic director who proclaims that “Shakespeare did not have cumshots.” We get the feeling that the thespians in this flick might beg (and moan) to differ.

*whew* And that’s just the first ten trailers of DOZENS! We’ll try to get to as many more as we can before the fest kicks off. And if you’re playing at home, let us know what you think. What excites you in this year’s fest?