Via Gayoutdoors.org: New Brokeback Mountain Type Movie Being Filmed

Private Life, has begun shooting. The story is a little bit Brokeback Mountain, a little bit Boys Don't Cry. It's a short film, a fictionalized re-telling of an actual hate crime the writer/director read about nearly a decade ago that really terrified him. A gay couple, backpacking through the Appalachians, was shot at eight times sniper style while making love in a secluded mountain meadow. Check out his website, tell all your friends and SHARE it will all your Facebook friends. >>View Website

The film was written and directed by Greg Williamson, a grad student at the cinema school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

In addition to the gay-interest theme, there is also a huge outdoors theme. Two-thirds of the story takes place out in the mountains on a backpacking trip. They have been scouting outdoor locations for months! [He’s really enjoyed being able to go on so many hikes to scout the locations.]

The film tells the story of a gay couple, struggling in their relationship, who end up forging a deeper connection while on a backpacking trip out in the great outdoors. Private Life is a story about a broken sort of person, who is scared and trying to hide from the world and how he ultimately learns that only by opening up and making himself vulnerable can he can truly begin to heal.

Greg added, “Even after coming out I spent a lot of time judging others—too gay, too effeminate, too shallow, too political or just too into escaping their troubles with drugs and alcohol and drama. Being gay is a large and complicated conversation and my place within it has never been much more than tenuous. It wasn’t until I started figuring out what this story means to me that I felt like I had anything to contribute to the conversation. To really open myself up to another person makes me feel vulnerable to them shutting me down, walking away and not returning it. It makes me feel that what I’m sharing might be judged as offensive or immoral or wrong or selfish and met with hostility, anger, rage or violence. It makes me feel vulnerable to feelings of embarrassment and humiliation and that’s really scary to me. Fear of vulnerability I think is a universal part of the human experience—a necessary instinct for survival. But there’s so much more to life than just surviving it. Making this film is a way to confront my own fears about what it means to me to come out and be vulnerable.” We will try to put together a screening in Boston once it’s complete.