MQFF Midsumma Movies: Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes

MQFF brings you a sizzling weekend of the newest and most fabulous queer cinema

Always out to his peers and family, trailblazing American photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955) captured the zeitgeist of mid-20th century artistic society in his surreal celebrity portraits and extravagant fashion shoots. But to Lynes there was another creative desire: to advance the celebration of the male nude, and those surviving pictures of his male studies, radically explicit for their time, depict more than a surface homoeroticism but rather a deep, sensuous love for and championing of the male form.

As an art director, Sam Shahid’s portfolio includes remarkable work for Calvin Klein in the early ‘80s, Banana Republic in the ‘90s and Abercrombie & Fitch; who better then to bring Lynes’ stunning photography from the 1930s through to the ‘50s to the big screen, and to uncover his long-term friendships with Gertrude Stein and Alfred Kinsey, in a transfixing documentary celebrating his lasting, if undersung, influence as one of the first openly gay, great American artists.

• Director: Sam Shahid
• Country: USA (2023)
• Rating: Unclassified 18+
• Runtime: 96 minutes