If you’ve followed my festival coverage at Sundance or TIFF in the past and been frustrated that you can’t watch the work yourself, I have great news for you. Almost everything I’m covering this year will be available through the Sundance 2025 online platform starting this Thursday, January 30!
The downside — for me, at least — is that because I’m not covering the festival in-person I won’t be reviewing some of the most high profile queer films this year including Andrew Ahn’s remake of The Wedding Banquet (the original is #11 on our list of gay male cinema) or Bill Condon’s much-anticipated remake of Kiss of the Spider Woman.
But festivals aren’t just about seeing work we’re already excited about — they’re also about new discoveries! So come on and discover with me. I’ll be updating this every day with what I’ve watched.
Hal & Harper (dir. Cooper Raiff) (TV series)
Didn’t Die (dir. Meera Manon)
Every time the Democrats lose an election, I think about the scene toward the end of Meera Manon’s wonderful debut Farah Goes Bang when her characters who have spent the entire movie canvasing for John Kerry finally admit he sucks. They want so badly to make a difference in our shitty world and yet even their compromise cause has failed. It’s a moment of innocence lost, growing beyond the paradigm of our established systems.
Manon is back at Sundance with her first feature since her sticky 2016 film Equity — she’s been working on TV shows including Westworld and Ms. Marvel — and she’s reteamed with Farah co-star Kiran Deol. Deol plays a podcaster navigating a zombie apocalypse alongside her brothers, her sister-in-law, her ex, and a baby. The film is heavy with feelings of Covid, this zombie uprising an easy stand-in for the virus and our forced isolation. But the film is at its best when it leaves behind these easy connections for a deeper heaviness about living in our world amid so much death and cruelty.
Low-budget and rough around the edges, Didn’t Die isn’t the sleekest film at the festival. But with tender performances and effective horror moments, it’s a worthy zombie movie for our time.
Kiran Deol in Didn’t Die
Sweet Talkin’ Guy (dir. Miss Dylan, Spencer Wardwell) (short)
Co-written by, co-directed by, and starring Miss Dylan, this short comically portrays the predictable script recited by three different guys in their attempt to hook up with a trans woman. While a lot of trans media — made by us and certainly made by cis men — has concerned itself with this dynamic, there’s something refreshing about a film that focuses in on the mundanity. Miss Dylan’s silent protagonist isn’t distraught, nor is she hopeful, she’s just going through the unfortunate motions to get laid. While cis people can think they’re embarking on some grand adventure by dating us, it’s great to see a film that mocks their tedium.
Hold Me Close (dir. Aurora Brachman, LaTajh Weaver) (short)
A portrait of Black lesbian domesticity, this documentary short focuses as much on the living space of its central couple as it does on the people. Wide shots and close ups are static as the soundtrack is filled with Corinne and Tiana discussing everything from when they met, to their familial relationships, to gender identity, to their plans to have a baby. The audio (recorded privately according to the press notes) is intimate while the beautiful visuals create a certain distance. Corinne and Tiana are in their own world together.
Coexistence, My Ass! (dir. Amber Fares)
The first half of this documentary about anti-Zionist Israeli comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi is a by-the-numbers inspiring story about how a woman went from working at the UN to spreading the message of peace through performance. Schuster-Eliassi was raised in an internationally celebrated community where Jewish Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side, her best friend is Palestinian, and her life and perspective seem readymade for liberal praise. But halfway through the documentary, the timeline arrives at 2021 when the Israeli government once again escalated their violence against the Palestinian people. Schuster-Eliassi begins to question her role as an ally, an inner conflict that only increases after October 7, 2023.
The rest of the documentary is fascinating as Schuster-Eliassi starts to abandon her liberal optimism for something more radical. It becomes a challenging study in the limits of allyship and the necessity for moral courage and clarity. Part of me wishes the first half of the film matched the complexity and craft of the second, but I also think, as is, the film is something of a magic trick. People who still want to pretend the apartheid and genocide carried out by the Israeli government is too complicated to discuss could be seduced by the first half of the film only to be forced to face the harsher reality in the second. People are more open to a lecture after hearing a few jokes.
The Virgin of the Quarry Lake (dir. Laura Casabé)
A portrait of a depressed teenage girl and her cruel society, this adaptation of two Mariana Enriquez short stories is heavy with ghosts. It’s 2001 in Argentina and recent high school graduate Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) is in love with her friend Diego whose attention has been taken by a 30 year old woman he met online. Natalia spends her days masturbating, hanging with her friends, and seeking a sense of self in a violent world.
Each day brings power outages, water shortages, classism, racism, and death. With touches of horror and magical realism, the question is not just whether Natalia and her friends will lose their virginities like your average teen coming-of-age movie, but whether they will lose their souls. They’re not encouraged to care about other people, scarce resources leading to a selfish desperation among their families. The issue is not Diego — it’s any want or need. How can we learn to share, to compromise, to lose, when we haven’t been shown how to do so? This is a challenging, at times nasty, film, but it’s not cynical. When all humanity seems lost, Casabé returns to the faces of her talented performers to reveal the conflict beneath their harsh choices.
Dolores Oliverio in The Virgin of Quarry Lake
Two Women (dir. Chloé Robichaud)
Queer filmmaker Chloé Robichaud’s feature debut Sarah Prefers to Run was ranked sixth on our list of the best queer sports movies of all time and her most recent film Days of Happiness was even better. Her latest, which she notably didn’t write, is a bit of a departure, a mostly heterosexual sex comedy instead of a queer drama. While it’s not as good as her other films, her formal prowess and ability to garner great performances is still in full force.
Following two neighbors in unhappy relationships who cope by having a bunch of random sex, Two Women is charming and humorous with some moments of real emotion. It’s fairly basic in its topics of monogamy and marriage, but there are worse things than watching beautiful people be horny. Karine Gonthier-Hyndman is exceptional — funny and heartfelt in a way that elevates the script. This will probably resonate more with a straight audience, but I did appreciate that Robichaud lets one of the characters throw a female window washer into her list of affairs. If a queer filmmaker takes on straight material, they can be trusted to make the sex scenes better and to add in something a little gay.
Are You Scared to Be Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail? (dir. Bec Pecaut) (short)
For all the talk about how trans cinema is obsessed with surgery, there really haven’t been that many on-screen portrayals grounded in reality. The getting of surgery is framed as the ultimate gender achievement, but the post-op healing process is brushed past with sentimental tears or, ya know, death. Enter Bec Pecaut’s short film starring Lío Mehiel as someone navigating their relationships with their partner and their mom in the days after top surgery. I really appreciated the complexity the film achieves in its short runtime, leaving space for the ways people can be needy, scared, and even mean during this period. The types of love their partner and mom are able to give are both imperfect and both needed. The film doesn’t over-explain its characters — it just lets the moment be.
Sweetheart (dir. Luke Wintour) (short)
Focusing on the hidden history of 18th century Molly Houses, Luke Wintour’s short feels like a proof of concept for a prestige TV drama. That’s mostly a compliment — it has a polish and attention to detail impressive for a low budget — even if it did leave me wanting more. As our current conservative backslide aims to cover up our history and pretend queerness is new, a story like this feels even more important. I hope Wintour and his team do get the chance to expand this film, because there’s a lot more to explore within this setting — especially in regards to race and gender-nonconformity.
Cactus Pears (dir. Rohan Kanawade)
Rohan Kanawade’s semi-autobiographical debut is a film aching with longing. Longing for familial acceptance, longing for romantic connection, longing for a sense of belonging, longing for the dead. The film follows Anand (Bhushan Bhingarkar) throughout the ten-day mourning ritual for his father. He’s traveled from Mumbai back to the village where he was raised where everyone wants to know why he’s still unmarried — except his mother who knows exactly why.
During these ten days, Anand connects with another unmarried man Balya (Suraj Shinde) and their friendship quickly develops into romance. This is not a film of grand gestures or heightened drama. It is sensual, embracing the quiet of its rural setting. Kanawade allows the characters to communicate in static frames, every gap in conversation, every touch, maintained.
There have been many films about queer people returning to their family homes, but few with this amount of tender specificity. There is awkwardness, there is grief — there’s also so much love.
Bhushaan Manoj and Suraaj Suman in Cactus Pears
By Design (dir. Amanda Kramer)
If you’ve seen Amanda Kramer’s previous film Please Baby Please, you know to expect a unique vision from this artist. But she may have outdone herself in this film about a woman who body swaps with a chair.
Juliette Lewis plays Camille, a woman who finds herself smitten with a designer chair when out with her two wealthy friends. By the time she’s gathered her finances together, the chair has been sold and, in a distraught moment, she wishes to be the chair. The rest of the film follows the chair in Camille’s body and Camille as the chair with her new owner Olivier (Mamoudou Athie). While even the short runtime of 90 minutes sometimes feels like it’s pushing the potential of this premise, when By Design is good, it’s really good. It’s funny and thought-provoking and entirely itself. I wish the film filled me with the all-consuming love the chair inspires in Camille and Olivier, but it did give me a more muted fondness and that’s important too.
You can watch most of these films on the Sundance online platform later this week.
