Filmmaker Spotlight Series: Ang Lee – Brokeback Mountain at Real Art Ways

“We conclude the Filmmaker Spotlight: Ang Lee series with one of his most influential films to date. Brokeback Mountain‘s compassionate and unblinking look at its same-sex love story cleared a path for queer focused cinema. Lee subverts expectations by casting Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, pulling nuanced performances from this movie star duo. Focusing on the raw emotional truth of the characters, Brokeback  Mountain tells a story that is moving and resonant. It is, in other words, an Ang Lee film.” – Ian Ally-Seals, Film Programming Coordinator & Curator of this film series

“[A] powerful and moving film, a smart study of relationships that could but can’t and never will be.” – Empire Magazine

“The whole movie is a rich, spacious, passionate way of showing, not telling, feelings that dare not speak their name — and doing so with superb intelligence and magnificent candour.” – Guardian

“Lee has taken a story of gay love and placed it where it should be — in the mainstream. He’s delivered a beautifully crafted film to boot.” – Time Out

“A film about love and the cost of lying that’s exquisite in its beauty, painful in its truths.” – Houston Chronicle

88% on Rotten Tomatoes

In 1963, rodeo cowboy Jack Twist and ranch hand Ennis Del Mar are hired by rancher Joe Aguirre as sheep herders in Wyoming. One night on Brokeback Mountain, Jack makes a drunken pass at Ennis that is eventually reciprocated. Though Ennis marries his longtime sweetheart, Alma, and Jack marries a fellow rodeo rider, the two men keep up their tortured and sporadic affair over 20 years.