40 hidden gems of LGBTQIA+ cinema

The annual BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, dubbed ‘Queer Christmas’ by its most enthusiastic fans, has been at the forefront of presenting vital LGBTQIA+ cinema to audiences for four decades. Since it began in 1986, its programming has surfaced crucial cinematic snapshots of queer lives and experiences outside the mainstream. Dramas and documentaries about the Aids crisis were shown at a time of unforgivable government inaction. The festival presented key works of the New Queer Cinema movement before the term was coined. And in an industry dominated by men, the curation has increasingly championed films by lesbian and trans directors.

In 1986, the first iteration of the festival, consisting of only nine events at the NFT, was Gay’s Own Pictures. Two years later it was renamed the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, before becoming BFI Flare in 2014. For 40 years, the festival has hosted red carpet events, with galas and special presentations of key works, welcoming diverse celebrity talents such as Sandra Bernhard, Bowen Yang and 1950s Hollywood star Tab Hunter. One of its greatest achievements, though, has been spotlighting lesser-known LGBTQIA+ works, many by emerging talents.

– Alex Davidson

Director: Arthur J. Bressan Jr

The very first festival, in 1986, kicked off with a strong roster of films, some of which would go on to become modern LGBTQIA+ classics, including Desert Hearts (1985) and Parting Glances (1986). Nestled among them was Buddies, the first feature-length drama about Aids, directed by and starring gay men. A quietly angry portrait of the relationship between a dying man (Geoff Edholm) and his volunteer companion (or ‘buddy’), played by David Schachter, its unflinching critique of the fatal inaction of the Reagan administration during the health crisis is deeply effective. The film’s director, Arthur J. Bressan Jr, died from an Aids-related illness two years after its release.

– Alex Davidson

Director: Yu Kan-ping

Based on the acclaimed Taiwanese novel Crystal Boys, romantic drama The Outsiders is widely considered to be Taiwan’s first commercial feature exploring gay relationships. Also known as Outcasts in English to avoid confusion with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film of the same name, the film follows student Ah Ching, who is expelled from school and kicked out of his family home after he is caught with another man. Seeking refuge in a Taipei public park known for gay cruising, he connects with a new community and chosen family. Released shortly before 38 years of martial law in Taiwan ended in 1987, The Outsiders is a glimpse into early representations of LGBTQIA+ experiences made against the backdrop of a society transitioning to democracy. 

– Suyin Haynes

Director: Roger Tonge

As well as films, the festival spotlights TV dramas from around the world, often made under challenging circumstances. In 1988, Thatcher’s Conservative government passed Section 28, which forbade local authorities from promoting “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. A sweet BBC drama, Two of Us, about a romance between two schoolboys, was an early victim. Fearing the government’s wrath, the broadcaster moved it to a late evening slot, cutting a kissing scene and presenting a rewrite of the original happy ending; in the version screened on TV, one of the boys re-embraces heterosexuality. The same year, the festival showed the original version, uncut.

– Alex Davidson

Director: Monika Treut

A subversive road movie, Virgin Machine follows Dorothee Müller’s quest to understand love, only to dismantle her original heterosexual assumptions. What starts as naive research into romance – “woman’s malady” – evolves into a queer awakening once Dorothee reaches San Francisco’s liberated sexual underground. Her encounters with the cheeky Hungarian Dominique, the radical Susie Sexpert and her world-beating collection of dildos, and Ramona, a magnetic drag king performing in a lesbian bar, open up a world where pleasure, identity and performance blur. The film treats sexuality as experimentation rather than destiny, and Dorothee’s journey becomes less about finding answers than discovering desire beyond patriarchal norms, embracing queer community and possibility.

– Helen de Witt

Director: John Greyson

A witty yet pointed queer satire, Urinal imagines a surreal council of dead artists – Sergei Eisenstein, Frida Kahlo, Yukio Mishima and Langston Hughes – tasked with investigating the policing of gay public sex in Ontario. Blending camp narrative with documentary testimony, the film exposes the cruelty of washroom sting operations and the lives shattered by charges of ‘gross indecency.’ Its playful conceit, including Dorian Gray infiltrating the police as an undercover gay agent, combines with fierce political critique. Through interviews, reconstructions and exuberant visual experimentation, the film transforms shame and surveillance into queer resistance, reclaiming public space, pleasure and history.

– Helen de Witt 

Director: John S. Boskovich

A ferocious cabaret fantasia, Without You I’m Nothing transforms the lounge act into a stage for queer performance and identity play. Sandra Bernhard cycles through wigs, songs and borrowed personae, channelling icons like Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross, until the self dissolves into pure performance. The nightclub becomes a camp purgatory, where imitation and desperation expose the fragile theatrics of show business. Surrounded by backup singers that include drag performers, Bernhard thus turns emulation into a queer strategy where anyone can be anyone. Her abrasive humour and emotional nakedness culminate in a startling strip draped in the American flag, a defiant gesture of queer vulnerability and spectacle.

– Helen de Witt

Director: Mark Harriott

POUT Issue One premiered at the 1991 London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, created by a collective of queer artists and activists with limited resources. Aimed at resisting mainstream gay media, POUT stood for ‘provocative and out’. Using VHS, they blended satire, protest footage and TV parodies with bold expressions of queer desire. Influenced by scratch video and Gay Sweatshop theatre, their content featured leather dykes, faeries, drag and role-play. Produced amid the Aids crisis and Section 28, POUT provided a counter-archive to the media’s silences and hostility, boldly celebrating queer identity with humour and defiance. The issues are a rare instance of gay video magazine culture in the UK, and were distributed in Woolworths. Now they can be viewed online on the London Community Video Archive. 

– Jaye Hudson

Director: Monika Treut

A whirlwind of explosive films by and about LGBTQIA+ people hit cinema screens in the late 80s and early 90s, a movement that B. Ruby Rich in a 1992 Sight and Sound article named ‘New Queer Cinema’. While Paris Is Burning (1990), Go Fish (1994) and The Watermelon Woman (1996) have entered the canon, Monika Treut’s uproarious, sex-positive 1991 comedy, in which a German father pays a surprise visit to his lesbian daughter in New York, has been neglected. Against all odds, his impromptu visit liberates them both – she finds love with a trans man, while daddy woos a porn star and performance artist (Annie Sprinkle). It’s a lively, fizzy comedy, where everyone gets laid.

– Alex Davidson

Director: Rosa von Praunheim

Rosa von Praunheim’s film combines interviews and dramatised sequences to tell the story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a trans woman’s survival of a fascist state. The film dramatises key moments of her life, including killing her Nazi father, becoming a DJ, and developing a passion for antique furniture. In 1993 it was the first trans feature to close the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, marking a significant milestone for trans representation in cinema and the festival itself. The film is being screened again this year to serve as a tribute to both Praunheim and von Mahlsdorf, highlighting their contributions to trans visibility and honouring the lasting impact of trans lives both on screen and in the streets.

– Jaye Hudson

Director: Barbara Hammer 

A landmark of experimental queer cinema, Nitrate Kisses sees Barbara Hammer reclaim the histories erased from both mainstream and avant-garde film. Blending archival fragments, including footage from the 1933 short film Lot in Sodom, with newly shot intimate portraits of queer couples, Hammer constructs a sensual and defiant counter-archive. The film refuses singular narratives, instead presenting historically suppressed queer identity as multiple and communal. Its playful excavation of Willa Cather’s coded lesbian life, alongside tender images of elderly lovers, challenges both ageism and heteronormativity. The erotic and the political are the constituents of this formally daring film that makes lost queer pasts startlingly visible.

– Helen de Witt

Before The Watermelon Woman made her a pioneer, a 25-year-old Cheryl Dunye was quietly revolutionising queer Black cinema from the ground up. Her third short screened as part of the festival’s Sister to Sister Black shorts expo in 1992. It follows Shae Clarke, a young Black lesbian cataloguing her romantic misadventures with characteristic wit. Playing Shae herself, Dunye blends confessional documentary and scripted fiction into what she’d later coin ‘Dunyementary’, a style so distinctively hers that no one has since replicated it. Funny, frank and formally daring. 

– Wema Mumma

Directors: Janet Baus and Su Friedrich

A radical chronicle of early 1990s queer activism, The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too captures the first electrifying year of the Lesbian Avengers, made by two of them – video activist Janet Baus and experimental filmmaker Su Friedrich. The film blends street-level footage of protests with candid portraits of women discovering the exhilaration of public rebellion and lesbian visibility. From their first demonstration to the fiery spectacle of the Dyke March in Washington, the Avengers transform activism into theatrical defiance. Humorous interviews and moments of collective joy highlight how protest becomes community-building, turning anger and pride into a compelling call for queer action.

– Helen de Witt

Director: Debi Sundahl

At the height of the Aids crisis, queer women were largely invisible in sexual health education. Director Debi Sundahl and producer Nan Kinney, the duo behind On Our Backs, the first all-women-created erotic magazine, set out to change that. This mid-length film centres Allie and Dione, a lesbian couple who receive a frank and playful demonstration from the Safe Sex Sluts. Raw, warm and genuinely funny, it treated women loving women as deserving of pleasure and safety in equal measure, a radical proposition then and an equally important one now. 

– Wema Mumma

Director: Marlon Riggs

Marlon Riggs filmed his final documentary from his hospital bed as he succumbed to Aids, aged just 37. An interrogation of Black identity in all its contradictions, the film refuses to let queer Black people be footnotes in their own story, weaving them insistently through the full, fractured tapestry of the diaspora. Blackness here is not monolithic, and queerness is not an asterisk. Interviews with bell hooks, Angela Davis and Cornel West sit alongside performances by Essex Hemphill, while Riggs’ own dying presence threads through every frame. Completed posthumously and awarded the Filmmakers’ Trophy at Sundance, it remains as urgent now as the day in 1995 when it screened in London. 

– Wema Mumma

Director: Zhang Yuan

Opposites attract in this beautifully shot drama starring Si Han and Hu Jun, mostly taking place over a single night as power swings between the two leads. Gay writer A-Lan is detained and interrogated by policeman Xiao Shi after a night raid in a park near Beijing’s Forbidden City – the film’s title references local slang for the public toilets that doubled as cruising spots on either side of the city. Known as one of the first films from mainland China to dramatise gay male love explicitly and boldly, East Palace, West Palace was controversial during both production and release. The footage was smuggled out of the country in spring 1996 and post-production work was done in France, while its selection for the 1997 Cannes Film Festival sparked ire from Beijing’s authorities. 

– Suyin Haynes

Director: Mohamed Camara

When Guinean filmmaker Mohamed Camara’s 1997 drama (screened at LLGFF 1998) about the romance of two men, one of whom is married to a woman, was first shown in cinemas in his home country, where same-sex activity is illegal, the director had to leave screenings early to avoid the risk of violence. Regarded as the first West African film to depict homosexuality, its reputation has grown over the decades, although it remains difficult to see. Celebrated Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty said to Camara, after watching the film, “You can be sure that your career is over, but in a hundred years, people will still talk about you.”

– Alex Davidson

Director: Hans Scheirl

The festival has a well-earned reputation for championing out-there experiments. Exhibit A: Ashley Hans Scheirl’s cyberpunk splatterfest Dandy Dust. Five years in the making, and filmed on a microbudget, it throws everything it has at the screen, rejecting gender constructs and embracing anarchy as a mutating cyborg hurtles through time and space. It’s a shocking and hilarious slice of genderfuck – any film with a character called Spidercuntboy will not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s a lot of fun for anyone willing to embrace the madness. The world premiere in 1998 showed the festival at its wildest.

– Alex Davidson

Director: Sidra Smith

Imagine Carol (2015) but a Black romcom set in the 90s with a cameo from MC Lyte and a twist ending, and you’d come close to this Sidra Smith film, which was also turned into a web series. In the film version, a young photographer preparing to move to South America is unexpectedly wooed by an older magazine editor. It feels like a film that should sit in the canon of great Black romcoms alongside the likes of Love Jones (1997), but for obvious reasons – queer, directed by a Black woman – it’s never got the love (and luv) that it deserves.

– Grace Barber-Plentie

Director: Patrik-Ian Polk

Patrik-Ian Polk’s debut film feels like a precursor to his beloved TV series Noah’s Arc (2005 to 2006). Centred around a group of queer African-American friends, the film is a perfect hangout movie while also touching on important issues around this intersectional community, such as safe sex, desirability and gender presentation. The film remains criminally underseen due to one of the things that makes it so fabulous: a soundtrack full of Sister Sledge songs – performed by a drag group in the film – which were never properly licensed. 

– Grace Barber-Plentie

Directors: Silas Howard and Harry Dodge

An ultra lo-fi, no budget transmasculine buddy movie about scrambling to survive on the margins of society, By Hook or by Crook deserves a more prominent place in the New Queer Cinema canon. Co-directors Silas Howard and Harry Dodge play Shy and Valentine, two charming young trans men and petty criminals who form a sincere brotherhood even as they lie and steal from each other, evading the law and psychiatric institutions, picking up femmes and cooking up schemes. Meandering yet bold, anarchic yet unexpectedly tender, it’s shot through with genuinely punk spirit and childlike energy. A truly radical piece of queer cinema.

– Laura Venning

Director: Jacques Nolot

Described by John Waters as “the best feel-bad gay movie ever made”, Jacques Nolot’s semi-autobiographical downer stands as one of queer cinema’s most unflinching portraits of ageing. The third part in a loose trilogy on gay life that began with L’Arrière-pays (Hinterland, 1998) and continued with La Chatte à deux têtes (Glowing Eyes, aka Porn Theater, 2002), Before I Forget sees Nolot himself play a former hustler who drifts through Paris, confronting illness, fading beauty and the ghosts of past lovers. A stark and bracingly unsentimental reflection on mortality, it’s a tough watch, certainly, but a deeply rewarding one too.

– Michael Blyth

Director: Cynthia Wade

Eclipsed by a schmaltzy Hollywood adaptation in 2015 starring Julianne Moore and Elliot Page, the Oscar-winning original documentary short is a touching portrait of a fight for justice that also demonstrates the fragility of respectability politics. The film charts the campaign for Laurel Hester, an upstanding New Jersey cop with terminal lung cancer, to ensure her domestic partner Stacie receives pension benefits after her death, just as a heterosexual partner would. Hester’s Republican-voting former colleague admits his shock at the reality of the homophobia she experiences, a clear indication that even being a veteran police officer, the pinnacle of American decency in the eyes of conservatives, is no guarantee of immunity from discrimination.

– Laura Venning

Director: Bahman Motamedian

Some amateurish production notwithstanding, docudrama Khastegi (Sex My Life) offers vital insight into the lives of seven trans people in Tehran as they navigate romantic and familial relationships as well as the struggle to receive healthcare. Punctuated by group therapy sessions and direct-to-camera addresses, the film is as empathetic as it is unflinching, portraying the immense emotional strain endured by Iranian trans people. Particularly sobering is Sissi’s observation that even if she could she wouldn’t want gender affirming surgery because “What rights do my mother and sister have here? If I lived in a Western country, maybe, but here I’m not going to become a woman and lose my rights and freedom.”

– Laura Venning

Director: Andrew Haigh

A low-budget, semi-improvised drama about male sex workers, including the charismatic Pete (Peter Pittaros), had its world premiere at the festival; the screening was followed by a rambunctious Q&A with cast and crew, including the first-time director: a former National Film Theatre usher named Andrew Haigh. Frank, tough and sexually explicit, Greek Pete depicts sex work in a sensitive, unsensational way. Haigh has gone on to become one of the UK’s leading directors, creating major works such as Weekend (2011), All of Us Strangers (2023) and the HBO series Looking (2014 to 2015).

– Alex Davidson

Director: Xavier Dolan

The centrepiece screening of the 2010 festival was a feature film made by a 19-year-old. Kickstarting a decade of provocative, moving queer cinema, including Tom at the Farm (2013) and his best film, Mommy (2014), Québécois filmmaker Xavier Dolan signalled his arrival with the incendiary I Killed My Mother (2009), in which he plays a surly teen in constant battle with his mother (Anne Dorval). He’s chaotic and she’s a mess, but despite their wildly dysfunctional behaviour, Dolan finds the humanity in both monsters. Flawed matriarchs and wayward sons would be recurring tropes in his later works.

– Alex Davidson

Director: Campbell X

After a number of memorable short films, Campbell X made his feature debut with a spiky queer romcom, filmed in London, which helped launch the career of T’Nia Miller. She stars as a butch lesbian who falls hard for a beautiful woman, sparking tensions in her relationship with her gay best pal. Black, gay characters were scarce in British cinema when Stud Life made its premiere at the festival. As with some of the most memorable festival films, it transcends its minuscule budget through heart, conviction and a lot of humour. It has since gone on to be a cult queer favourite, while Miller’s career has soared.

– Alex Davidson

Directors: Gavin Butt and Ben Walters

Gavin Butt and Ben Walters’ fascinating documentary captures invaluable interviews and remarkable performances by a host of mostly LGBTQIA+ artists, whose works flourished following the video revolution and the increasing availability of affordable digital technology. The talking heads include an impressive roster of outsider figures: Dara Birnbaum, Nao Bustamante, Vaginal Davis, David Hoyle and a young Cole Escola, now a Tony Award winner for their performance in the Broadway smash Oh, Mary! Best of all are new performances by actor Dickie Beau, who re-interprets archive monologues through the media of drag and lip sync.

– Alex Davidson

Director: Ingo Haeb

Presented in the festival’s Bodies strand in 2016, this German gem stars a then virtually unknown Vicky Krieps. The intimate character study tells the story of a hotel chambermaid whose voyeuristic fascination with guests leads her to meet an enigmatic sex-worker who opens her world. Directed by Ingo Haeb, whose keen sense of mise-en-scène makes the most of the film’s enclosed spaces, it is above all a showcase of Krieps’ luminous humanity. After her breakthrough in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017), she has become an arthouse cinema powerhouse, BFI Flare 2025’s Hot Milk presenting further proof of her magnetism.

– Diana Cipriano

Director: Sydney Freeland

Sydney Freeland’s feature-length debut came to the newly renamed BFI Flare following a premiere at Sundance. It follows the ups and downs of life for three young Native Americans on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Teenager Nizhoni seeks out her biological family, years after her adoption; father-to-be SickBoy grapples with the military life awaiting him; and Felixia looks to fulfill her modelling dreams while navigating trans womanhood. Freeland, who is a trans woman and a citizen of Navajo Nation, creates a layered, nuanced portrait of each character. Nizhoni, SickBoy and Felixia’s flawed decisions are treated with empathy and understanding as the threads that connect their three journeys are slowly untangled. 

– Suyin Haynes

Director: François Ozon

François Ozon’s melodrama explores the tension between Claire (the luminous Anaïs Demoustier) and David (Romain Duris), the widowed husband of her best friend. David appears to be refashioning himself in the image of his late wife – perhaps out of grief, perhaps due to deeper desires. Claire is equal parts intrigued and repulsed. Is she struggling with transphobia – or with repressed feelings for the woman who is now out of the picture? It’s refreshingly slippery, evading dress-up drama pitfalls by humanising its players in all their flaws and complexities – and features a memorable shopping montage set to Katy Perry’s ‘Hot N Cold’.

– Blake Simons

Director: Jim Chuchu

When Nairobi arts collective The Nest Collective began gathering testimonies from Kenya’s queer community, they knew the risk. The resulting anthology spans five vignettes set in a boarding school, nightclub, rural farm, hotel room and a pre-colonial Kikuyu transgender ritual. The film premiered at Toronto before arriving at Flare as a centrepiece screening in 2015. Executive producer George Gachara would be arrested in Kenya for the film’s purported violations of industry regulations. Still, Stories of Our Lives insists that queerness is not un-African, pushing beyond survival into something rarer: a utopian imagining of freedom for those who exist at the margins.

– Wema Mumma

Director: Alexandra-Therese Keining

In the vein of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s dark fairytales, this intoxicating Swedish trans fable sees three outcast teenage girls drink the nectar of a strange flower and transform into boys overnight. All three are empowered by this brief sojourn into male form, learning the secrets of masculinity and standing up to the misogynistic school bullies who’ve made their lives hell. But for Kim (Tuva Jagell and Emrik Öhlander) it’s a much more profound moment of self-discovery that they cannot turn away from. Achieving a complex, heady combination of fantasy and teen angst, writer-director Alexandra-Therese Keining captures the freedom and terror of figuring out who you really are.

– Laura Venning

Director: Stephen Cone

Unfolding over one hot summer afternoon, Stephen Cone’s uncommonly layered coming‑of‑age tale sees reluctant birthday boy Henry, the teenage son of an evangelical preacher, quietly grappling with his identity, both religious and sexual. Rather than keeping its focus solely on the eponymous teen, the film weaves together multiple narrative strands, observing the other partygoers with warmth, humour and compassion even as their contradictions come into view. It’s a richly nuanced work from a deeply humane filmmaker deserving of wider recognition, whose generosity of spirit would be further showcased in his wonderful follow‑up Princess Cyd (2017).

– Michael Blyth

Director: André Téchiné

This 2017 Hearts presentation marks a partnership between two filmmakers who access the experience of growing up like few others: André Téchiné and Céline Sciamma. A naturalistic tale of two boys whose last year of secondary school sees them straddle a line between violence and passion, it echoes both Téchiné’s knack for showcasing the destabilising power of desire, present in his seminal Wild Reeds (1994), and Sciamma’s sensitive, emotionally intelligent gaze, as seen in Water Lilies (2007) or Tomboy (2011). Being 17 is a piercing exploration of how messy discovering yourself and what you want can be.

– Diana Cipriano

Directors: Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra

A work of exhilarating unpredictability, Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas’s queer gothic fairytale is a Grand Guignol blend of social realism, sexual awakening and full‑blooded monster madness — with songs. Set in São Paulo, Good Manners follows the intimate, increasingly complicated bond between Clara, a working‑class nurse, and Ana, the wealthy, pregnant woman who hires her. What begins as a story of care and desire mutates (quite literally) into something darker, stranger and unexpectedly tender. Exploring themes of class division, race and domestic labour, this shapeshifting fable slips thrillingly between genres, resulting in a beguiling horror story with a big beating heart beneath its sharp political bite.

– Michael Blyth

Director: Wanuri Kahiu

Banned in Kenya before it even opened, Wanuri Kahiu’s vibrant romance about two young women falling in love amid rival political families became an international talking point the moment it premiered at Cannes, as the first Kenyan film ever selected. Adapting Monica Arac de Nyeko’s Caine Prize-winning short story ‘Jambula Tree’, Kahiu gave her protagonists something the source material didn’t: a hopeful ending. A founding text of the Afrobubblegum movement, which centres African joy and imagination over trauma, Rafiki’s kaleidoscopic palette and radical optimism have since cemented it as a modern queer classic. 

– Wema Mumma

Directors: Harri Shanahan and Sîan Williams

In 2016, the festival presented 20 minutes of a work-in-progress called Rebel Dykes. A punchy, sex-positive tribute to the underground lesbian scene in London in the 1980s, it was a huge hit with the audience; its bawdy Q&A pulsated with anarchic energy. The complete film finally arrived at Flare in 2021, a year when the festival was online only – even the pandemic couldn’t thwart the dykes. It’s one of the most important LGBTQIA+ documentaries of recent years, and a perfect symbol of the festival at its best – political, provocative and unapologetic.

– Alex Davidson

Director: Victoria Linares Villegas

Victoria Linares Villegas returns to Flare in 2026 with her third feature film, Don’t Come Out, but her first, a deeply personal documentary from 2022, is where her Flare journey began. When she discovers that her uncle was a filmmaker who fled to Cuba from the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship, Linares Villegas goes on a journey through archives and recreations of scenes from his films to trace the unknown story of his life and the similarities it shared with hers. This is a rich and creative story of queerness from the Caribbean, a region where queer cinema is still an emerging genre.

– Grace Barber-Plentie

Director: Marija Kavtaradzė

Elena is a dancer, her life led by physical instinct. Dovydas is a sign language interpreter – his life is about linguistic connection and translation. One day, Elena teaches dance to a group of deaf individuals. The two meet and are drawn to each other. Their ideas of intimacy are different. Elena is quick to unbuckle her partner’s pants. Dovydas is asexual. He takes her hands in his and relocates them to his shoulders. Sensitive and sympathetic, Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradzė paints a refreshing portrait of the realities of loving someone belonging to a part of the LGBTQIA+ acronym that remains underexplored on screen.

– Blake Simons

Director: Noah Schamus

This witty and wise summer mumblecore, screened at Flare 2024, snapshots the shifting dynamic between Leo (Bobbi Salvör Menuez), an early-career actor navigating transition, and his cisgender college friend Eleanor (Marianne Rendón). They haven’t seen each other since Leo transitioned. Embarking upon an unconventional cabin retreat, Eleanor helps Leo learn lines – as their own boundaries begin to come into question. Human and heartfelt, this fiction debut of hybrid filmmaker Noah Schamus is much like a hammock – it lifts you up, it supports you, and it’s fun to lounge around in.

– Blake Simons