“I’m not gay.”Īlvaro Delgado-Aparicio, director of Retablo. Perhaps, then, Aparicio has his own war stories about coming out in a part of the world where, as a 2017 CNN report put it, homosexuality is legal but deadly. Wrong again: it has played for six weeks to full houses. Hardly an auspicious climate for a film such as Retablo.
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Surely, then, there was some backlash when the movie opened? After all, Alberto de Belaunde, one of only two out gay members of the country’s majority conservative Congress, recently described a proposed bill for marriage equality and gender identity as “doomed”. On the contrary, he tells me, the money came easily: a chunk of it from Peru, the rest from Europe. When I phone the film’s 43-year-old writer-director, Alvaro Delgado Aparicio, I am expecting to hear tales of thwarted funding and industry homophobia. The season begins this month with Retablo, an understated but powerful study of the relationship between a teenager and his closeted father in the Peruvian Andes. Perfect timing, then, for the Barbican, in the east of the capital, to launch Forbidden Colours, a series of films made in countries hostile to the rights of LGBT people. Once Pride in London ends this weekend, the banks, supermarkets and sandwich chains will drop their rainbow-coloured logos and revert to business as usual.