Lilies

A visually intoxicating queer rhapsody of desire and repression, revenge and redemption unfolds as a deliriously stylized play-within-a-film in this sumptuous cinematic pageant adapted from the stage work by Michel Marc Bouchard. In a Quebec prison in 1952, an aging priest (Marcel Sabourin) sits down to hear the confession of a convict (Aubert Pallascio)—only to have the tables turned on him as the prisoner, aided by his fellow inmates, stages a time- and space-collapsing play that takes them both back to 1912, when they were young men engaged in a tragic love triangle with another boy (Danny Gilmore). Described by director John Greyson as a “strange, Genet-inflected-via-Fellini fable,” this entrancingly beautiful, gender-bending fantasia stands as one of the rapturous peaks of the New Queer Cinema.