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P.S. Burn This Letter Please (Documentary)

By Golu
This documentary pulls together oral history to trace a very specific New York chapter of gay life in America. Back in 2014, someone found a box stuffed with hundreds of letters sitting in a storage unit in LA. These letters went all the way back to the 1950s and were written to a young guy named Reno Martin, who'd later become known in Hollywood as agent Ed Limato. When Martin left home to chase a radio career, his closest gay and queer friends kept writing to him just to stay in touch. Every letter's signed with a fake name and ends with a warning to burn it after reading, which tells you everything about an era when just being gay, or dressing in drag, could get you thrown in jail. The filmmakers actually tracked down the surviving writers, now in their eighties and nineties, and turned what could've been dry historical digging into something genuinely personal and intimate. The people behind this doc found the original letter writers themselves, several of whom are stil...
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I Shot My Love (Hebrew/English) (Documentary)

By Golu

Seven decades after his grandfather fled Nazi Germany and built a new life in Palestine, Israeli documentary filmmaker Tomer Heymann finds himself heading back to Germany to screen his earlier film Paper Dolls at the Berlin International Film Festival. That trip is where he runs into Andreas, a German dancer, and what starts as a 48-hour whirlwind turns into something much bigger between the two of them. Alongside that relationship, the documentary also weaves in the story of Tomer's mother and what is happening in her life during all of this.

Two things sit at the center of this documentary, Tomer's bond with his mother Noa, and his growing relationship with Andreas. Noa is struggling with the fact that one by one her children have packed up and left the country she and her family dedicated themselves to building, and Tomer is the only one still around after his parents split. That makes her grip on his life tighter than he probably wants. On the other side, when Andreas eventually makes the move to Tel Aviv, he is not just stepping into a new relationship, he is walking into the complicated day-to-day reality of living in Israel while carrying his own personal history as a German citizen.

Genuinely, I am still not sure what this documentary was trying to be. The whole thing reeks of self-indulgence. Tomer himself offers nothing particularly interesting to chew on and spends most of the film hiding behind his handheld camera rather than actually letting anyone in. What you get is a lopsided peek into his life with almost no depth behind it. There are bits and pieces showing Noa's situation, including the kids coming back when she ends up in hospital, but even that feels thin. The actual love story between Tomer and Andreas, how it grew, why it worked, what it meant, barely gets touched. You never find out how their families or the people around them feel about their relationship or their sexuality, which feels like a pretty glaring hole. Nothing really happens across the entire runtime. You keep watching because you assume at some point something worth watching will show up, and it never does. Andreas spends his screen time reciting poetry and tossing out philosophical ramblings while basically being Tomer's biggest fan, and that is genuinely all there is to it. An absolute waste of time, start to finish. (1/10)

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