Flow

A filmmaker who's Chinese, 22, and gay talks about his work and love life with an unseen friend behind the camera. We also watch four of his short films. "Hysterio Passio" conjures images of men's passions. In "Matricide," a lawyer asks a young gay Chinese why he killed his mother on Christmas morning. In "Key in the Heart," a heroine (an Asian man in drag) pursues vampires. In "Fall, 1990," college students meet their roommates, and Jimmy, an edgy scholarship boy without a family, is slowly brought to an understanding of love by the callow Byron. "Flow" begins with a satiric look at the vectors of viruses and ends with a chat with our fictive filmmaker's hip mother. Written by