A Year Without Love.

A Year Without Love * Directed by Anahi Berneri * Starring Juan Minujin * Strand Releasing

This striking film tells a sharp and sexy story of one gay man's steady climb to dignity and fulfillment against great odds. Winner of the Teddy Award for Best LGBT Feature at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, the film represents a breath of fresh air in its transfiguration of narrative convention, illustrating a gay life laced with irony and graced with resourcefulness and love.

Pablo is a young, attractive, HiV-positive writer living in Buenos Aires. Aspiring to live by his writing, he's forced for a time to work as a French teacher and to economize by living with a crazy aunt, accepting financial support from his emotionally distant father. These complications have almost entirely eclipsed his sex life (hence the title) but not his capacity or desire for love.

When a last-ditch burst of inspiration leads him to place a personal ad seeking a master (or slave), he finds himself on the brink of a new possibility. More or less adopted by an intimate S/M-leather group, Pablo suddenly finds the promises of love, and even family, coming true in a community that offers respect, tenderness--and hot sex! The trace effects on his domestic life and his writing are ironic but inspiring: Fate has handed him a deliverance from meaninglessness. Like Ana Kokkinos (Head On) and Laura Muscardin (Bays), prodigious Anahi Berneri proves herself a female director with a sure eye for a gay man's dilemmas and inner dignity, and she's crafted a cagey, compelling AI DS portrait in the bargain. Pretty good for a first feature.--Shannon Kelley