The film nobody thought would find an audience

On 2 September 2005, a film that the industry had little faith in was shown on the Lido in Venice. Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" tells of two young men who herd sheep in Wyoming in the summer of 1963 and fall in love with each other. What begins on the mountain stays with them for the rest of their lives. Both marry women. Both keep returning, secretly, for a few days a year.

It is based on a slim short story by Annie Proulx from 1997. The material had been offered to Pedro Almodóvar, who turned it down out of concern for his artistic freedom. Lee took over, cast Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal and shot the film in Alberta.

That same day, a critic for the American trade paper Variety saw the film and wrote a review that seems strangely ambivalent today. He praised Ledger's performance, the restraint, the tact. And he noted that a wider audience for this western would be hard to win. That, he said, was a marketing task of historic proportions.

He was wrong. A few days later Lee received the Golden Lion in Venice. In the months that followed, the film became a talking point, in newspapers, in pubs, in parishes. It never let itself be entirely reduced to the label "gay cowboy movie", even though many wanted to leave it at precisely that.

What remains is a turning point. Studios began to take an interest in material they had previously avoided. The assumption that a gay lead role would end a career lost its self-evidence. And a debate that continues to this day began here: the question of who may play queer characters and what it means when two heterosexual stars embody cinema's most famous gay love story.