GagaOOLala, Asia’s first LGBT streaming platform, expands its catalogue of original content with the short film Sodom’s Cat by Huang Ting-Chun. Shot in 2016, the film has been touring the film festival circuit for more than one year, earning praise from both audience and critics: it was an immediate box office success in its home country at the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival, and was shortlisted for the Iris Prize Award.
The film, which runs over the 30-minute mark, follows the lives of five men from Taipei that meet for a group sex party after contacting each other through a dating app, while exploring the psychological and emotional consequences of contemporary hookup culture. The explicit orgy sequence, full of symbolism, also serves as commentary to the sex “roles” in gay culture, as each of the five characters represents an animal (e.g. bear, dog, cat, wolf and peacock) that defines their behavior in bed.
The film is said to have pierced through many taboos in Asian queer cinema, such as the depiction of explicit sex and open homosexual relationships on screen, and it has served director Huang Ting-Chun as a vehicle to delve into the concept of love.
“This is a film talking about love through sex. Though it is X-rated, it is the emotions behind our current sex culture that I want to explore,” said Huang, who was heavily influenced by the French gay film Paris 05:59 (Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineau, 2016), and wanted to bring its examination of casual sex and relationships to the Taiwanese context.
Sodom’s Cat marks the third GagaOOLala original film after the Taiwanese-Filipino gay drama Tale of the Lost Boys (Joselito Altarejos, 2017), recent winner at Sinag Maynila Film Festival of the Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Editing awards; and the web docuseries about the Taiwanese LGBT community, Queer Taiwan (Gan Li Ling, 2018), that will be followed by a second season, Queer Asia, focused on four other territories around the continent: Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
