KAOS: BFI Flare 2018: Wood

K A O S

B F I F L A R E

L o n d o n L G B T F i l m F e s t i v a l 2 0 1 8

"A young man is confronted by his own feelings when the gay man he attacked appears at his boxing gym.."

Alaska Is A Drag started life as a short film, before being developed into a full length feature. Fingers crossed Wood gets the same treatment.

Eve Dufaud's beautifully shot short film stars James-Edward Métayer (as the titular Wood), Anthony Therrien, and Iannicko N'Doua.

It's a story with familiar ingredients: unrequited lust, homophobic violence, the closet... which brings me to this salient point.

One of the howlers I hear most is that we've seen it all before. Shortly before the festival started, a writer friend said to me in an email: "I think as one gets older one's simply seen the various gay narratives too many times to get terribly excited over the same sort of story 'but in Dubai' etc..." It's an observation I've heard said before, but it doesn't hold water. "There are no new stories," American author Jude Deveraux once said. "It all depends on how you handle them. It's how get there that's the fun." Quite.

Dufaud's story does have the familiar ingredients, but I was captivated from the outset. Her film surprised me. The cast is beautiful, committed and held me, rapt. You'll no doubt have seen this story before, or something like it. And we'll see it again, perhaps not as well told as here, or better. But Wood is still a little gem, and one to treasure.