Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Fall festival season continues with Toronto’s Inside Out LGBT festival playing now both digitally and at drive-ins through the weekend. So this week I’m looking at three movies playing at Inside Out. There’s love amongst refugees in present-day Germany, an odd-ball relationship in Ireland in the 90s, and a Canadian musician whose fantasies finally come true in his seventies.

Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn Copeland Story

Dir: Posey Dixon

Beverly is a musician who grows up in a comfortable middle class home in post-war Philadelphia. Her father is a classical pianist and her mother sings spirituals at church. They send her to McGill in the early 1960s, where she is one of the first black students in her discipline, and where she comes out as a lesbian, virtually unheard of at the time, when homosexuality was still illegal in Canada. Later, she moves to Toronto where the Yorkville scene is nurturing folk musicians like Joni Mitchell. She cuts an eponymous record album with famous players on backup, in a unique style, combining jazz with blues and classical music. Unfortunately it disappears without a trace. She finds work as a musician and on TV – she is a regular on Mr Dressup! – but eventually moves into an isolated house in Muskoka with her lover.

In the 1980s she discovers computer-generated electronic music and self-produces a cassette of beautiful passionate songs. It sells maybe a few dozen copies. But in the 2000s, two big things happen: First Beverly realizes he’s trans, and begins transitioning female-to-male; and in the 2010s his album Keyboard Fantasies from the mid-80s is rediscovered in a tiny record shop in Japan. The owner requests more copies – all of which sell out in a day or two. The record is remastered and re-released and goes viral, and Beverly in his mid-seventies, is sudden’y a star with a devoited following. He embarks on a European tour backed up by a band of millennial hipsters and adoring young fans.

Keyboard Fantasies is a fascinating documentary about Beverley Glenn Copeland’s life, music and career. It’s filled with unusual psychedelic imagery, and upside-down and negative-coloured camera work reflecting the sudden reversals of Beverly’s own gender and career. His music is captivating, his voice sublime, and his life story like none other. This tale of rebirth in old age is a beautiful history not to be missed.

No Hard Feelings (Futur Drei)

Dir: Faraz Shariat

Parvis (Benny Radjaipour) is a young, gay German with dyed blond hair who lives in his family home in Hannover. He’s into sex, dancing and Sailor Moon. His Iranian parents sought asylum there 40 years earlier, to give their kids a better life, but he feels unmotivated, cut-off and trapped in limbo between two worlds. Raised within German pop-culture he knows nothing about Iranian dance or music. At home he speaks Farsi with a German accent, but the men he meets in gay bars constantly ask “where are you from?” (He’s from there!) But his life changes when, after being caught shoplifting, he is sentenced to community service as a translator at a refugee centre.

There he meets an adult sister and brother, a pair that seem almost joined at the hip, who eventually become his friends. They live together almost like lovers. Banafshe (Banafshe Hourmazdi) is outgoing and savvy, fluent in German, but facing deportation back to Iran. Her brother Amon (Eidin Jalali) is a nice guy but a bit stand-offish. He tells the flamboyant Parvis not to be seen with him at the refugee centre; his friends told him gayness is contagious. But the situation changes when the brother and sister spend the night at Parvis’s home. Parvis and Amon become lovers but are forced to keep it on the down low, constantly searching for secret places they can meet undetected. Will their love last? Can Amon and Bana gain refugee status in Germany or will she be deported? And can Parvis find his identity both within his family and in the larger German gay community?

No Hard Feelings is a touching and realistic drama about cultural and sexual alienation set within the vast and lethargic bureaucracy of the country’s immigration machine. It’s a distinctly German story, but one told mainly in Farsi and from that point of view. Good acting with some beautiful cinematography as well as occasional experimental, stylized footage. This is a great story about a subculture rarely represented on film. And it won the Inside Out prize for Best First Feature.

Dating Amber

Wri/Dir: David Freyne

It’s Ireland in 1995. Homosexuality was decriminalized just two years earlier, divorce is still against the law, and sex education is taught by nuns. Eddie (Fionn O’Shea: Handsome Devil) is a student at a rural high school outside of Dublin near an army base. He’s wants to become a cadet to please his dad but he’s not the right type; he’s frail, naïve and skittish. And he has a crush on his (male) math teacher. Amber (Lola Petticrew) is a plain-talking girl with blue streaks in her hair, who walks like she’s wearing army boots. She lives in a trailer with her mom since her father died. She’s saving up enough money to move to London after graduation to open an anarchist bookstore. She likes punk rock, but hates penises – they make her “vom” she says. Like Eddie, she’s bullied on a daily basis. Why? Because they’re both gay (though Eddie won’t admit it). So Amber comes up with a plan. Let’s pretend to be a couple until we graduate, so they’ll leave us alone. Will it work? Will it last? And what will it lead to?

Dating Amber is a terrific coming-of-age comedy about an unusual relationship in rural Ireland. It draws on a wry nostalgia for the 90s – fashion, hairstyles, pop music and attitudes — to construct some very real, funny characters. It’s romantic, hilarious, and deeply touching. This is a great movie.

Dating Amber, No Hard Feelings, and Keyboard Fantasies: the Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story are all playing at the Inside Out Festival which continues through the weekend. Go to insideout.ca for details.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.