People die in the selections in this year’s Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival, and not just from AIDS. Lives change, and they don’t merely conform. And gays transform not only themselves but others, and society as well. A movement that seemed mired in complacent romantic comedies has come out into the open again with films that, though of varying quality, are of determined intent and committed to making a difference.

What’s more, they depict the struggle against patriarchal, racist, and homophobic repression by any means necessary, though usually by those that are constructive and affirming. Such as the movement chronicled in Radical Harmonies (2002; May 2 at 8 p.m.), Dee Mosbacher’s rapid-fire documentary about the three-decade rise of women’s music from its hardscrabble origins in the early ’70s to its commercially successful and perhaps even more radical present. Whether or not you enjoy the music, you have to admire the courage and tenacity of such pioneers as Meg Christian and Holly Near, who found that the "counterculture" and the "cock rock" of the early ’70s had no place for their feminist and lesbian sensibilities. So they built their own industry and counterculture, including record labels, festivals, and a passionate fan base, from the ground up.

Although their folkie influences in the early years tend to turn the film into an edgier version of A Mighty Wind, the movement’s later embracing of multi-cultural performers and latter-day punk-rock grrrls makes for an eclectic and fiery mix. Or so it would if the filmmakers showed more than 10 seconds of any of the performer’s tunes — instead it defers to a parade of talking heads. At times Radical Harmonies seems an infomercial for a Time/Life compilation CD.

A more jaded version of the same industry provides Laura Nix’s The Politics of Fur (2002; May 9 at 8 p.m., with the director present) with its seductive setting. Based loosely on Rainer Werner Fa§binder’s 1973 cinematic sonata of co-dependency The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fur focuses on Una (a striking Katy Selverstone), a record producer who lounges about the stark white interior of her LA pad stroking her pet tiger cub and being stroked by her domestic slave, Dick. Her latest discovery is B (Brynn Horrocks, no Hanna Schygulla), a scrawny punker who responds to Una’s world-weary declarations (on rock music: "All those repetitions of nostalgia and recycled psychology I find suffocating") with an incisive "Cool!" Una doesn’t have a chance. Savvier and more melancholy than Lisa Cholodenko’s gentler Laurel Canyon, The Politics of Fur is one of the festival’s tart pleasures.

Not that there’s a shortage of melodramatic films about lesbian couples in destructive relationships. Apparently it doesn’t help to live in a city like Zagreb, or at least in the apartment block where elegant Iva and her tough-cookie lover, Marija, have set up their love nest in Dalibor Matanik’s Fine Dead Girls (2002; May 3 at 5:45 p.m.). It makes the building in Polanski’s The Tenant look idyllic what with its neighbors from Hell — a drunken abortionist and his autistic boy, a psychopathic crone and her rapist son, a war veteran with a thing for martial music and wife beating, and the like. Matanik’s goal is shock and titillation, and on that level the film succeeds handsomely. (Editor's note: this film has been replaced by Group; see our review in "Film Strips.")

Equally volatile but more coherent is Monica Stambrini’s Benzina/Gasoline (2002; May 4 at 7:30 p.m. and May 16 at 6 p.m.), a film that draws on such disparate sources as Psycho, Straw Dogs, and Thelma & Louise but also asserts its own austerely wacky identity. A meeting between gas-station owners/lovers Stella (Maya Sansa, a bantam Helena Bonham Carter) and Lenni (Regina Orioli, who resembles Uma Thurman’s sheepish kid sister) and Lenni’s hoity-toity mother ends with mom getting accidentally killed. The two lovers take the Volvo on the road with the body stashed in the trunk, but their plans to dump it and head for Tunisia get detoured by Lenni’s imaginary conversations with the dead woman and chance encounters with a trio of demented young punks on a spree. Over the top, but oddly touching.

The lethal-lesbians-on-the-road movie achieves its most polished variation in Argentine director Diego Lerman’s Tan de repente/Suddenly (2002; May 7 at 8 p.m.). Shot in black and white, it’s an oblique allegory of sexual and potentially political liberation as dumpy Buenos Aires shop girl Marcia finds herself more or less voluntarily kidnapped by a feral pair of punkish lesbians who call themselves Mao and Lenin. They steal a cab, hitch a ride with a woman who works at an aquarium, and visit Lenin’s spirited septuagenarian aunt in a neighboring city. Along the way they encounter the ocean, recurring images of orcas, dead people in the road, and, finally, love. Lerman’s first feature demonstrates a unique and confident new talent.

The men prove more solitary and ambivalent in their efforts to throw off restraints, as is the case in Duncan Roy’s AKA (2002; May 3 at 7:30 p.m.). Based on a true story and set in the late ’70s in London, it follows the career of Dean Page (Matthew Leitch), a/k/a Alexander Gryffoyn, a teenager who rebels against his working-class origins by impersonating an aristocrat. Shot in DVD in a split-screen triptych, it looks fancy, but the gimmick doesn’t quite conceal the film’s simpleminded assessment of the hero’s pathology — i.e., abusive father plus ineffectual mother equals futile search for identity and craving for supportive male love. In short, another pasty-faced young man scams the wealthy ˆ la The Talented Mr. Ripley and Catch Me If You Can (Leitch bears a resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio), but this time it’s like watching from a bank of security monitors.

Could gay liberation solve the Middle East crisis? Probably not, but it’s unnerving to watch two tough-looking Israeli officers on patrol at a desolate border post suddenly dump their weapons and go at it in the snow. Eytan Fox’s Yossi & Jagger (2002; May 18 at 2:30 p.m.) half-heartedly poses its heroes’ love as a possible alternative to their brutish commanding officer’s gung ho bellicosity, but the real strength of this film is its portrayal of the lower ranks, the soldiers (ranging from a Tibetan Buddhist to a frustrated chef to a party girl named Goldie) who form the microcosmic community anchored by the two officers’ all-pervasive but secret love.

A smaller and less disciplined community falls apart when its center perishes from AIDS in Australian director Tony Ayres’s wry and elegiac Walking on Water (2002; May 11 at 7:15 p.m. and May 17 at 4:15 p.m.). Charlie, Anna, Simon, and Gavin create an ill-sorted but functioning household until Gavin enters the fatal illness’s last stage. Their attempt to ease his passage with dignity via a morphine overdose ends with Charlie suffocating him with a plastic bag. What follows is "The Little Chill," so to speak, as the funeral service brings Gavin’s family and they mourn and reminisce and the three friends try to erase that horrible last image of their dead friend. Charlie sips the leftover morphine, Anna sleeps with Gavin’s brother, and Simon acts simple. It sounds melodramatic, but Ayres’s restrained palette and quiet narrative rhythms balanced by the cast’s measured, funny performances evoke the ache of loss and the empty freedom of being left behind.

Two documentaries touch on similar themes of oppression, isolation, and liberation, with the added twist of finding their gay subjects placed within an alienating community that is itself oppressed by the larger society. The title of Peter Barbosa & Garrett Lenoir’s straightforward I Exist: Voices from the Lesbian and Gay Middle Eastern Community (2002; May 17 at 12:30 p.m.) speaks for itself, as young men and women of Arab and Persian descent describe the problem of trying to remain close to families who ostracize them. The stories of guilt, rebellion, rejection, and depression become numbingly repetitive, making the few exceptions who have prevailed and found either reconciliation or a new family of their own all the more inspiring.

Inspiring and frustrating, too, is the story told in Nancy D. Kates & Bennett Singer’s stately and concise Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003; screens Saturday, May 12 at 2 p.m.). A charismatic leader and a brilliant organizer, Rustin had one fatal flaw for a black public figure in the heyday of the civil-rights movement: he was a proud and practicing homosexual. Not a lot was made of it, despite FBI surveillance, until his arrest on a "morals charge" in 1953 restricted his effectiveness for the image-conscious movement.

Thereafter Rustin determined to "sublimate" his sexuality to the greater cause. Nonetheless, homophobia both inside and outside the movement forced him to work behind the scenes, though a somewhat wary Martin Luther King valued him enough to make him the brains and spirit behind the triumphant 1963 March on Washington. Rustin’s effectiveness would not survive King’s assassination and the Vietnam War, however. One wonders how powerful a force for change he might have been had he been allowed to express his gay identity and liberate himself as well as others.