Ward Kamel | If I Die in America / 2024

the body thieves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ward Kamel (screenwriter and director) If I Die in America / 2024 [15 minutes]

 

Syrian-born Ward Kamel’s 2024 short film If I Die in America once again recounts something that happens far too often in gay life.

    Both Manny (Gil Perez-Abraham) and his husband Sameer (George Shakkour) have evidently been in an automobile accident that has injured Manny and killed Sameer.

     Hardly as Manny recovered and attempted to visit the funeral home where is husband’s dead body lies that he is presented with papers by a cousin serving a lawyer for the family asking him to sign permission for them to ship the body back to Kuwait for a proper and immediately Muslim burial.

    Outraged that Sameer’s mother has not even bothered to talk to him about their request and for the fact that they do not even want to allow him time to assimilate the family request, he refuses.

     A short while later Dalal (Han Chamoun) tries again, this time visiting Manny at his home where a birthday cake for Sameer still sits on the table. Dalal is accompanied by another relative Khalil (Moud Sabra).

     Dalal apologizes, having presumed that the mother had spoken to him and for her having confronted Manny without warning. But she still reminds him that it is the Muslim custom to immediately bury the dead, and begs him to consent for the body to be returned to the family. She also argues that his flight will also be paid so that he might attend the ceremony.

     But again, Manny is not at all ready to make such a sudden decision, having not even had the time to assimilate his lover’s death. Khalil enters into the negotiations by claiming that Manny has no real say in the matter since he was not really married, their marriage having been only a green-card arrangement: “Are you a woman? Did you have a wedding? A real wedding, not just one with your friends. You didn’t because this was not a marriage. This was an arrangement. That’s all this was.”

   Manny lunges at him and tells them to get out. The homophobic statement, denying even the love they shared outrages Manny and he throws both of them out of the house, hurrying back by chauffeured car to the funeral home.

     Throughout he has attempted to call Sameer’s mother, but he receives only a recording; and he is told by Dalal that it is problematic to the mother to even have to acknowledge his existence. Furious by her refusal to answer his phone call, he throws his cellphone out the window. But soon after, he demands the driver stop and he attempts to find the phone in the field, finally speaking to the mother who attempts to explain that he is being selfish, that Sameer also had deep commitments with the family.

       In the last few moments of the film, it is clear that Manny has come to terms with the issue as we see him packing, dressed in black, obviously prepared for the voyage to Kuwait. He has come to realize that the burial will not alter the fact of their real love and time together.

      So often throughout gay history, lovers have been denied the right to even mourn their companions or, as the film A Single Man (2009) reminds us, robs the lover the possibility to even attend to funeral ceremony. In many cases before gay marriage was allowed, the houses of gay men, their possessions, and any remaining traces of their relationship were claimed by the families, particularly if their dead partners had made no will or other legal documents.

     Despite the truly homophobic situation, Manny finally comes to terms with the family claims because he is at least invited to the ceremony and he has the documents to prove his marriage and the significance of their lives together. More importantly, he has the memory of their love, as stronger force than any anger the family has had for their son’s sexuality.

     Yet this short film only reiterates just how tentative all gay relationships remain in a world of homophobic hatred.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).

 

 

 

Sek Kei (Wong Chi-Keung) | 死結 (Dead Knot) / 1969

new growth

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Woo and Sek Kei (screenplay), Sek Kei (Wong Chi-Keung) (director) 死結 (Dead Knot) / 1969

 

In 1969, Hong Kong student John Woo and Wong Chi-keung, Wong being one of Hong Kong’s most well known and experienced film critics writing under the pseudonym of Sek Kei, wrote the screenplay to and directed an experimental film, Dead Knot. Although Woo came to be known for his generally all male martial arts and “bullet ballet” action films, in this early work we see him questioning and exploring sexual and gender differences in a manner that is clearly related to the US and other western European versions of the first coming out films (which I describe as version A) as represented by the early works of Kenneth Anger, Cutis Harrington, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Jacques Demy, and A. J. Rose, Jr., the latter of whose Penis (1965), almost a summary of the early “coming out” film tropes, is chronologically closest to Woo’s and Sek Kei’s film.*

    The 18-minute film, divided into eight short chapters—“the beginning,” “the place,” “the forbidden fruit,” “run away,” “the living,” “rainy season,” “lost,” and “dead knot”—recounts the experience of a young boy (John Woo) who is at first in thrall of a gay S&M lover (Chan Kai-Yat) before he escapes and attempts to enter in what he believes is a “normal” relationship with a woman (Cho Chung-Lang). That relationship, however, soon disintegrates into a daily fragmentation of their lives—expressed quite brilliant in their repetitive daily acts and the insistent cinematic break-up of the images with white fragments and cuts in continuity in “the living”— before things truly break down in “rainy season,” where the male actively attempts to escape the relationship, before their final breakdown in “lost,” symbolized by their placement of blindfolds over their eyes as they desperately attempt to find a way in darkness back to one another.

     In despair, the boy returns to the forbidden allure of his former male lover who now puts him into a “dead knot,” as he types out what is apparently the history of the story we are encountering—or, perhaps, another possibility for their future, since the “dead knot” can mean either the new growth from a tree that is only loosely connected to the original branch or a tied at the end of a rope to prevent it from passing through a hole or another knot used most commonly to join ropes in climbing. The dead knot, is short does not represent death or strangulation but ideas centered around climbing new roots.

     This short film, obviously influenced by the western filmmakers I mention above, begins with a male-on-male relationship, representing the suffering and torturing the confused gay-leaning individual must undergo through the S&M torture. Although there is clearly a long tradition of S&M behavior in Asian literature and filmmaking, it here my be simply symbolic as the narrow bed on which the individuals must suffer through their nights of doubt in the US versions of the coming out films.

    Later incidents in Dead Knot clearly parallel the US films about the same subject, including the demands of the woman as she is either carried up or runs up a long set of steps which the male attempts with an almost Herculean effort to follow her, a scene in this film that seems right out of Harrington’s short work Picnic. And other moments, such as the male’s awe of and attempt to comprehend the female body through a sculptural work, reminds one immediately of the male admiration the sculpted male body of Adam in Rose’s Penis.

    In short, this 1969 work almost seems to be the last example, as well as a nice summary of the gay coming out movies before young people discovered that you could actually come out to more than simply oneself and a delimited cinematic audience—but to family, friends, and society in general.

    As critic Tony Rayns described this short work in Time Out:

 

“Rescued by the Hong Kong Film Archive, this is the earliest surviving trace of John Woo's beginnings as an indie film-maker. A psycho-drama in the vein of Anger's Fireworks, it's divided into eight short chapters. A young man (Woo) tries to escape from a gay sado-masochist relationship into a 'normal' relationship - with a girl! - but ends up back where he started, unable to buck his deepest desires. Whatever light this may shed on Woo's later work, it's fascinating for teasing out the subtext from the perverse swordplay bloodbaths which Chang Cheh was making at the time (Golden Swallow, etc).”

 

    For a more detailed description of the music and sound production of this film, interested readers should read Li Cheuk-to’s essay “The Past and Present of Dead Knot, published in 2025 and available online on the internet.

      

*Although Woo heterosexually married in 1969 and has three children, it is nonetheless interesting that his major cinematic influences are films that are concerned with male bonding and homosocial if not always homosexual works. His favorite films, so he has reported, are David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï—films with implicit homosexual and strong male bonding, along with other named favorites such as Michael Cocoyannis’ Zorba the Greek and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Most of these works are discussed in the pages of My Queer Cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).