David Andrew Ward | All Over Brazil / 2003

things are about to change

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamie Havlin (screenplay), David Andrew Ward (director) All Over Brazil / 2003 [10 minutes]

 

There’s not much more than the obvious set out on a platter in this short film from 2003, All Over Brazil. But then perhaps the obvious needs to be stated once again. Not every male in the universe is into football.

    Stephen’s father (Frank Gallagher) certainly is. In the summer of 1974 he’s nearly desperate to watch Scotland face Yugoslavia in the football World Cup, and he presumes his son should be at his side. Unfortunately, his TV doesn’t cooperate and he can’t get the game properly tuned in, and he no choice but to pay a visit his neighbor Rab (Pete Mackenzie). Neither does his son Stephen (Iain De Caestecker) play along, skipping the game with his father in order to sneak into his sister Donna’s bedroom, try on her high gold boots, paint his lips red, and appropriate a scarf that once belonged to is now dead mother to imagine himself in a Glam Rock paradise.

 

    Unfortunately, the game with Yugoslavia was a 1-1 tie, and because Yugoslavia beat the African nation of Zaire, with Brazil beating them, Scotland became the first country to be edged out of the World Cup without losing a game.

    Stephen’s father comes home early to find his son, metaphorically speaking, de flagrante delicto, if a rock concert takes you to the edge of an orgasm, which it obviously does for the young, probably gay Stephen. Outraged, his father pulls off the scarf, washes the rouge from his mouth, pulls him down the stairs, pushes him out the door, and locks it, leaving his poor son to be mocked and beat up by local thugs (the credits describe them as “hard boys”) for being a “nance.”

     Later, both Stephen and Donna sit on the couch in utter silence and depression, their father clearly not allowing them to attend a local concert “with all them nancy boys.” But when Stephen suggests their mother would have permitted them to attend, their dad explodes, sending them on their way with disgust.

     With Donna (Gemma Morrison), who helps her brother with the mascara, and her girlfriends looking on, Stephen is accepted and feels right at home. We never see them at the concert, nor are we told who is performing—Sparks, David Bowie, Sweet?; most likely the Scottish group Iron, who had a terribly influential flop, “Virgin Rebels Rule,” that very month—but surely they enjoyed the concert, even if it meant returning to the cold and unfriendly house wherein their father remained.

     But we have seen the conservative father himself trip up the stairs, hold his wife’s scarf in his hands, put it to his nose, and cry, obviously for his loneliness and loss.

      By the time his children return, he has mellowed some, and even thrown some eggs into the frying pan. Donna takes over, scrambling them, while the father pours out a half glass of beer from his bottle and pushes it over toward his son, who quickly drinks it up. Things are about to change.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).