SAN FRANCISCO—Pink and White Productions announces the addition of Dietrich de Velsa's 1980 French gay adult feature Equation to an Unknown to its indie adult film streaming platform PinkLabel.TV.
The long-lost classic centers on a handsome young biker (Gianfranco Longhi) who rides his motorcycle through myriad sexual encounters, from a soccer game’s locker room to a dreamy and unsettling orgy where the film reaches its melancholic peak.
In French with English subtitles, the film has been newly scanned in 2K from the original camera negative. Director de Velsa (aka Francis Savel/Frantz Salieri), a former painter, was also the owner and artistic director of one of the first transvestite cabarets of Paris, La Grande Eugène. Years later, he collaborated with Joseph Losey on Mr. Klein and Don Giovanni. Equation to an Unknown (Équation à un inconnu) is Savel's only film, and regarded as an unqualified masterpiece.
Nearly impossible to see for decades since its original release, the film was rediscovered by director Yann Gonzalez during his research for the film Knife + Heart (2018), which he got from Hervé Joseph Lebrun, who had made Mondo Homo: A Study of French Gay Porn in the ’70s (2014) and who was historical advisor for Knife + Heart. Gonzalez was so taken with the film, he tracked down the negative in a French film lab, commissioned a new 16mm answer print, and used this to create a subtitled DCP to share the film with a broader audience.
Equation to an Unknown streams on demand with a PinkLabel PLUS membership, or is available a la carte here.
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