Gay Film Festival: Pride and prejudice

The films at the 21st London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival come in every conceivable form: there are polemical documentaries, romantic comedies, melodramas, thrillers, shorts, horror movies, comedies, and even one or two non-gay films.

The festival - the third- largest film event in the UK after the London and Edinburgh Film Festivals - opened last week with a gala screening of Jamie Babbit's Itty Bitty Titty Committee, a US indie comedy about a young lesbian with a dead-end job in a plastic surgeon's office who throws in her lot with a feminist prankster-guerrilla group, the CIA (Clits In Action.)

If that's not oddball enough for you, try Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, which the producer bills as a cross between Carl Dreyer's Vampyr and Michael Jackson's "Thriller". The film is based on the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Dracula, but as befits a movie directed by a Canadian whose mother once ran an Icelandic beauty parlour, it is exotic in the extreme. Exquisitely shot in black-and- white, imbued with a doomed romanticism, it looks - at first glance - as if it was made during the heyday of silent cinema. Maddin does use tinting, occasionally colouring Dracula's eyes red. He also fills the film with snowflakes and throws in oblique references to tainted blood and Aids. Somehow, it doesn't come as a surprise to learn that the movie was shot in a "toxic" disused mattress factory on the industrial side of Winnipeg.

Altogether more earthbound are some of the British titles dug out of the archives. There are some intriguing British TV-dramas that are as groundbreaking in their way as Basil Dearden's 1961 film Victim, which starred Dirk Bogarde as a gay lawyer and is acknowledged as the first British film to deal explicitly with homosexuality. For example, the festival is showing the John Mortimer-scripted Bermondsey, a 1972 TV-drama starring Dinsdale Lansden and Edward Fox, billing it as "Brokeback Mountain in a pub in South London". Other rediscoveries include Warren Hussein's little-seen The Connoisseur, a 1966 TV-drama, starring Richard O'Sullivan and Ian Ogilvy, about the sexual shenanigans at a public school (reportedly based on Eton); and Peter Gill's Girl (1974), starring Alison Steadman as a young army recruit who catches the eye of her female corporal (Myra Frances.)

The festival is also premiering Sparkle, the new film from Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger (the team behind Lawless Heart). This is notable for featuring one of Bob Hoskins' best performances in years. Looking as koala-like and crestfallen as he did in his Mona Lisa prime, Hoskins plays Vince, a London bachelor with a huge crush on Jill (Lesley Manville), a would-be singer who comes to London from Liverpool to keep her eye on her scally son Sam (Shaun Evans.) There's real pathos and comedy in Hoskins' bungling courtship, and his self-effacing performance is contrasted with the brashness of Stockard Channing, cast as a bitchy London PR whose already complicated love life becomes yet more so when she begins an affair with the much younger Sam.

As part of the festival's "Femme" sidebar - a series of films about lesbians reclaiming their feminine identity rather than conforming to butch stereotypes - audiences will again have the chance to watch such titles as François Ozon's 8 Women and Pedro Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The former is notable for one of the best catfights in the movies since Dietrich had a bust-up in Destry Rides Again. In what starts as a tasteful Agatha Christie-style murder story, we eventually see two legends of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant, going at each other on the floor with relish. Almodovar's film, meanwhile, gives a plum role to Carmen Maura, his one-time muse with whom he was recently reconciled via Volver.

Among the more colourful guests in town this week has been ex-RAF man and film publicist Peter De Rome, who started his movie career doing PR for Alexander Korda and David O Selznick. The Kent-born De Rome bought a camera to film events in the Deep South during the Civil Rights era, in which he was heavily involved. Then he turned his attention to gay pornography. De Rome, who was at the festival to introduce a screening of a compilation of his erotic films (Hot Pants, Second Coming, Daydreams from a Crosstown Bus), once shot footage of Garbo walking in New York. He included this footage in one of his porn films. Strictly speaking, this marked the Swedish star's last screen appearance.

As ever, the festival showcased films from last year that may have slipped by the public's eye. There was the chance to see Pratiba Parmar's slight, vaguely maudlin but very likeable lesbian romance Nina's Heavenly Delights, a Glasgow-set love story, and Douglas McGrath's Infamous, the second film in a year about Truman Capote.

The symbol for this year's event is a pansy. On the front of the festival catalogue is a photograph taken of a purple flower at the location on the South Bank where David Morley was killed in an apparent homophobic attack. This is part of the Pansy Project, an initiative by the artist Paul Harfleet to plant pansies where homophobic abuse has been experienced. In its 21st year, the festival may be part of the mainstream, but as the image of the pansy reminds us, old prejudices die hard.

21st London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 020-7928 3232; www.llgff.org.uk, to 4 April