An all-star cast brings Martin Sherman’s award-winning stage play ‘Bent’ to the screen – Discover great gay stories.

Clive Owen, Mick Jagger, Ian McKellen, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Paul Bettany star in Bent, a gut-wrenching adaptation of the award-winning stage play by Martin Sherman.

Originally released in 1997, the film is set in 1930s Berlin. We follow Max (Owen), a promiscuous gay man who sleeps with a German SA officer, only to see him killed by his fellow Nazis the next morning.

Refusing an offer of new papers for fear of leaving his boyfriend behind, he’s found by the Gestapo and soon bound for Dachau. Once there, Max makes friends with a fellow gay man, who shows him that dignity lies in acknowledging one’s true nature. As the pair become lovers through dialog and the power of their imagination, they reckon with identity and struggle to maintain their dignity in the face of unspeakable persecution.

The original play, which premiered in London in 1979 before opening on Broadway the following year, was revived many times, most significantly by Sean Mathias, who directed this film adaptation as well.

Though much time had passed between the play’s debut and this film’s release, much was still not known about the experiences of LGBTQ+ victims of the Nazi regime. By the time of the film’s release in 1997, it was the first feature to tackle the subject head on. Today, Bent remains a riveting and important record of our understanding of this terrible history, a valuable preservation of a significant work of theater and a deeply moving cinematic work in its own right.

Watch the trailer for Bent below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.