Today from 17:00-20.00 hrs, the UvA Film Club will continue their weekly screening in HVL/BuzzHouse’s Co-Working Space! This week's film is Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, 1984), with an introduction by Mel Ketelaars.

Desert Hearts is a lesbian classic, showing a surprisingly tender and romantic love story between two women for its time in history. The movie is directed by Donna Deitch, who raised money for its small production budget and her investors largely consisted of women and queer people. Both in its content and in its making the film is a small triumph for women and queer people, putting out an alternative to depressing or highly censored films. In the film, literature professor Vivian Bell (played by Helen Schafer) comes to Nevada to divorce her husband, and meets Cay (played by Patricia Charbonneau), 10 years her junior, and they are immediately drawn to each other, getting closer and closer into each other’s orbit. The film shows an interesting push and pull in its location, the open and wide desert offering freedom, while at the same time being a place with prying eyes and conservatism. But the film does not shy away from this love story, making it one of the few that doesn’t, even compared to lesbian films made today.