Monday, October 25, 1999
9:30pm   Egyptian Theatre

Lola and Billy the Kid
Kutlug Altman, director; 1998; Germany; 93 minutes; 35mm; in German and Turkish with English subtitles

VIOLENT SITUATIONS
ASL INTERPRETING PRIOR TO SCREENING

Winner of many international, film festival prizes, Lola and Billy the Kid explores the subculture-within-a-subculture of gay Turkish immigrants living in contemporary Berlin. Murat, a seventeen-year-old Turkish teenager struggling with his homosexuality and his despotic older brother, flees his tradition-bound family for the shadowy but vibrant world of drag clubs, transvestites and hustlers - among them Lola and her boyfriend, Billy the Kid. Drawn together through their shared alienation, Murat and Lola soon learn that they have more in common with each other than they could have ever imagined.

Their story erupts into tragedy as the tensions of a reunified and increasingly multicultural Germany bear down on their lives. Murat and his friends find themselves trapped in a suffocating matrix - with Turkish machismo and homophobia pressing from one side, and German xenophobia and rising neo-Nazism shoving from the other. Shot on location in the old/new German capitol, the film captures the bizarre mixture of ghetto and glamour, tinsel and tragedy that is Berlin.