Known for his off-kilter storytelling with strong women protagonists, his casting decisions (read: a real admiration for our fave Kristen Stewart) often cement that status.
Olivier Assayas’ films often feel queer-friendly in a tangential sense. Queer critics have criticised its focus on the often dismal trans narrative, while the film’s inspiration, ballet dancer Nora Monsecour, has stood by its side. As she fights the battle on one side, bruised and blistered after every dance class, she has to handle the confusing gender dysphoria and everyday transphobia that comes with it. Following the editor of the school yearbook, Anne, as she lusts over the stupefyingly good looking softball star Sasha, it raises issues of consent and sexual health that few others have handled with such finesse.Ī crowd favourite at the Cannes Film Festival that was met with harsher criticism once it reached the real world, Girl - the directorial debut from Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont - tells the story of a young trans girl whose dreams of becoming a ballet dancer run in parallel with the gender reassignment surgery she’s about to undertake. As its protagonists, Samantha Mugatsia and Sheila Munyiva delivered subtle and star-making performances.īefore Booksmart sauntered into our lives and became the big queer energy film about high school LA, Kerem Sanga’s First Girl I Loved took us to the sad, confusing core of what it’s like to fall for someone during your formative years. It suppressed the hammy tropes of queer trauma, and swapped them out for a tale that perfectly captures the nuances of our first true love. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, this Nairobi-set story of two women forging a relationship in a society that doesn’t welcome it sidestepped its baggage (it was banned and then unbanned in Kenyan cinemas) and won hearts for one reason. This documentary about young queer people of colour in NYC reckoning with homelessness, sexuality and HIV around the Christopher Street Pier was a critical success, and won the Teddy Award at the Berlinale back in 2016.įew contemporary queer films attract as much controversy as Rafiki did.
Three decades after the enigmatic, colourful characters of Paris is Burning were walking the balls of uptown Harlem, Kiki came to be: the spiritual sister project to Jennie Livingston’s formative 90s classic.