By reader suggestion, I added Inside Out to my Summer Fun List this year.
And while my busy social calendar dictated my attendance at just one screening, I was glad to make it out to the queer film festival, now in its 21st year.
On Friday I took in a program of short films entitled Brief Encounters at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
The six shorts followed clandestine get-togethers, drunken hook-ups and chance meetings, illustrating that sometimes the briefest encounters can have the greatest impact.
Though the screened films all fit the theme, they ranged in story and tone. In The Light, a Canadian film, opened the series with a cute story of personal revelation when two men wake up after a passionate one-night stand.
Along The Road, a Swedish film, depicts a roadside hookup between two truckers with differing priorities.
Student Body, the program's second Canadian entry, featured a high school student who's hot for teacher and turns to online hookups to explore his sexuality.
Things took a decidedly dramatic tun with The Casuarina Cove, a film from Singapore in which a man recounts how he had been arrested after cruising in the Tanjohn Rhu area many years earlier.
Watch Over Me, a film from Israel, features a supernatural twist, while American film Breach of Etiquette brings the action to a commune in the mountains of northwest New Mexico.
Brief Encounters turned out to be a great way for me to check out a number of entertaining GLBT films in one fell swoop. (The fact that they were shorts was coincidentally ideal, due to my short attention span).
While I naturally enjoyed the playful In The Light, I was easily engaged by the brooding tone of Watch Over Me and mysterious feel of Breach of Etiquette.