SCREEN | Swimming Past 'Numakage Public Pool' x DOXA 2026

"Once the pool is gone, it'll be too late."

Hydroblast

Numakage Public Pool, director Shingo Ōta's peaceful eighty-minute observational documentary chronicling the eponymous landlocked suburban Tokyo public swimming pool complex's final months of operations, details the much-loved location through its ten-thousand daily patrons, from the elderly, families, and children, as they fight to keep it open against looming urban development.

GENRE | Staying 'A Safe Distance' Away x SXSW 2026

"Would you like to take a ride on my time machine?"

Drafthouse Films / Vortex Media

A Safe Distance, SFU Film alumnus Gloria Mercer's debut feature-length film, stars local actor Bethany Brown as a woman stranded in the woods by her petulant boyfriend (Chris McNally) after she rebuffs his marriage proposal while on an anniversary camping trip in rural British Columbia, who then becomes both emotionally and criminally entangled with an attractive but dangerous bank-robbing couple (Tandia Mercedes and Cody Kearsley).

VIFF 2025 | 'Pillion' – Alexander Skarsgård Controls A Rom-Dom-Com

"I have an aptitude for devotion."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—The comically mismatched romantic pairing of Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård stars in English filmmaker Harry Lighton's explicit yet crowd-pleasing directorial debut, Pillion, based on British author Adam Mars-Jones' 2020 novel Box Hill. Framed as a stylish, BDSM-themed gay biker romance, both actors are fearless yet earnestly sweet in their tender but often graphic courtship.

SCREEN | Kristen Stewart Swims Past 'The Chronology of Water'

"We will publish or perish together!"

The Forge

Talented actress turned first-time feature filmmaker Kristen Stewart directs Imogen Poots in her riveting portrayal of Oregon-based, bestselling author Lidia Yuknavitch in a hazy film adaptation of the latter's 2011 cult memoir, The Chronology of Water. Framed around a tumultuous family life centred on parental abuse leading to both substance and sex addiction before a promising competitive swimming career, the film is a narratively ambitious portrait of personal salvation.

SCREEN | Coming Out 'To the Moon' x VQFF 2025

"It prevents the moon from crashing to the Earth."

Vancouver Queer Film Festival

To the Moon, Halifax writer/director Kevin Hartford's offbeat second feature film, revolves around a closeted single father (Jacob Sampson), his savvy teen daughter (Phoebe Rex), and their eccentric writer neighbour (Amy Groening), whose interactions reveal a strange premise about the greater world amidst the former's struggle to come out.

REEL | Dylan O'Brien and James Sweeney Grieve 'Twinless'

"Deservedness is not a requisite for forgiveness."

Lionsgate / Roadside Attractions

Twinless stars Dylan O'Brien and writer/director James Sweeney as a pair of grieving men who meet in a support group for twins who have lost their siblings before awkwardly bonding over their shared grief. It's a novel, original premise that allows for a unique brand of dark humour and alternative psychological dramedy.

SCENE | A Historic Royal Visit – Arts Club Cares for 'Casey and Diana'

"This is like the homosexual version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation!"

Casey House / October 25, 1991

South Granville—Arts Club Theatre Company stages North Vancouver playwright Nick Green's acclaimed, fictionized AIDS crisis dramedy, Casey and Diana, inspired by the late Princess Diana's historic 1991 Toronto visit to Casey House, Canada's first freestanding hospice caring for people (primarily gay men at the time) dying from the HIV/AIDS virus. A real tearjerker of a stage play that premiered at the 2023 Stratford Festival, it's a powerful tale that lives up to the actual impact the event had, destigmatizing the epidemic and humanizing those afflicted.

SCREEN | Daisy Edgar-Jones Gambles 'On Swift Horses'

"Everything's looking real prosperous around here."

Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media

Rising stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi play in-laws, Muriel and Julius, on similar paths apart in veteran television director Daniel Minahan's monochromatic, mid-'50s period queer romantic drama about post-Korean War relocation in the still unconquered American West. On Swift Horses' dual parallel romances represent the constrained and repressed cultural identity of the time, based on Kansas author Shannon Pufahl's novel of the same name, as adapted by screenwriter Bryce Kass.

SCREEN | Wrestling with the Past – 'Queen of the Ring' Slams

"Bad times don't last but bad guys do!"

Sumerian Pictures / Sherry Media Group

Queen of the Ring, the 1930-50s biographical sports drama from writer/director Ash Avildsen (son of Rocky director John G. Avildsen) based on the non-fiction book, The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend by Jeff Leen, stars Vancouver native Emily Bett Rickards as legendary trailblazing wrestler Mildred Burke in a physically impressive lead performance surrounded by an otherwise midcard-level historical biopic.

SCREEN | A Queer Romantic Comedy of Errors – 'The Wedding Banquet'

"Queer theory takes the joy out of being gay!"

Bleecker Street / VVS Films

Thirty years later, Korean-American indie filmmaker Andrew Ahn remakes Ang Lee's seminal 1993 Taiwanese queer romantic comedy, The Wedding Banquet, into a fresh take on modern romance featuring a delightful cast of Asian actors. Shot in Vancouver but set in Seattle (because, of course), the film centers on two LGBTQ couples who, comically, try to solve each other's familial, financial, and romantic problems in the silliest ways possible.

REEL | Daniel Craig Feels 'Queer' for Longing x WFF 2024

"I want to talk to you without speaking."

Whistler Film Festival

Former James Bond superstar Daniel Craig makes his prestige gay indie film turn for Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino's transfixing screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' mid-century novella, Queer, a 1950s Mexico City-set period romance written in 1952 and published in 1985. It's a heartbreakingly raw portrait of unrequited expat "junkie" love between two men.

VIFF 2024 | 'Emilia Pérez' Finds A Musical Crime Odyssey

"I want a new skin."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2024—No one can accuse Emilia Pérez, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard's Spanish-language transgender musical crime thriller based on his opera libretto of the same name and loosely adapted from Boris Razon's 2018 novel Écoute, of not taking bold risks. His film collects different genres, from its Mexican gangster setup to some telenovela melodrama, crisscrossing with a surreal queer family tragedy and full-on choreographed musical odyssey, for mostly triumphant results thanks to its talented female lead cast that commits to the strange tone.

SCREEN | Living Hilariously 'Rent Free' x VQFF 2024

"The plan is simple. We stay out of people's hair and do favours for them if they ask."

Vancouver Queer Film Festival

Rent Free, Austin-based filmmaker Fernando Andrés' lo-fi observational comedy, has the perfect indie movie premise of two twenty-something down-on-their-luck friends (one gay, one straight) couch surfing at various friends' homes for as long as they'll have them to save up money and avoid growing up or transitioning to the next phases of post-college adulthood.

SCREEN | Camping Out – 'Good One' Unpacks Family Drama

"Do you want me to try?"

Metrograph Pictures / LevelFilm

Good One, first-time writer/director India Donaldson's gripping debut feature film, unpacks a quietly harrowing father/daughter indie drama set on a tense backpacking camping trip in the Catskills alongside the parent's troublesome best friend. It balances a complex lead performance by transfixing newcomer Lily Collias, who is sensational, with an effortless sense of discomfort of transitional power to engage viewers.

GENRE | Nesting Horror – Hunter Schafer Goes 'Cuckoo' x Fantasia 2024

"I expect her to come for you again."

Fantasia International Film Festival

Euphoria actress Hunter Schafer stars in German filmmaker Tilman Singer's stylish sophomore body horror thriller, Cuckoo. She stars as a knife-wielding teenage brat of a final girl, Gretchen, stranded somewhere in rural Germany. Its experimental nature at first toys with unknown supernatural killer tendencies before heading down a more conventional slasher genre path to its thrills.

GENRE | Suburban Obsession – 'I Saw the TV Glow' x SIFF 2024

"This isn't the Midnight Realm! It's just the suburbs."

Seattle International Film Festival

Non-binary indie filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun writes and directs the coming-of-age, art-horror fantasy I Saw the TV Glow about how two troubled suburban youths spiral down a sinister path over their shared obsession with a supernatural cult television series from the mid-1990s that doubles as a transcendent examination of gender dysphoria.

REEL | 40–Love – Zendaya Breaks 'Challengers'

"Decimate that little bitch!"

Amazon MGM Studios / Warner Bros. Pictures

Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino's exhilaratingly sexy tennis romantic thriller Challengers is about how the magnetic Zendaya (also a producer) is so powerful and talented a force of nature—even only at partial strength due to a career-ending knee injury—that having sweaty, passionate post-match sex with only one of Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist (perfectly pitted against one another) and not both at the same time is simply just not enough for her. We can easily sympathize.

GENRE | Kristen Stewart Chills – Acts of 'Love Lies Bleeding'

"I've never been anywhere but here."

A24 / VVS Films

Saint Maud writer/director Rose Glass helms the late-'80s New Mexico-set lesbian noir romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding. Starring Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian as a reclusive gym manager and her hitchhiking bodybuilding drifter lover, we focus on the cyclical nature of violence told through a destructive queer romance between two very lost, broken women at the intersection of desperation and desire.

REEL | 'Drive-Away Dolls' Takes A Lesbian Crime Caper Detour

"Tomorrow can wait a day."

Focus Features / Working Title Films

One-half of the Coen brothers, Ethan Coen, co-writes and co-directs a queer joyride crime caper alongside his lesbian film editor wife/collaborator Tricia Cooke, in the breakneck but shaggy road trip comedy, Drive-Away Dolls (originally titled Drive-Away Dykes). Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star as mismatched best friends driving from Philadelphia to Tallahassee in 1999 who get entangled in a convoluted political extortion conspiracy.

SCENE | Speaking 'Child-ish' – Adults Talking Like Kids x Pacific Theatre

"Playgrounds would be made entirely of mushrooms!"

Photo credit | Chelsey Stuyt

South Granville—Celebrated Australian-born and raised (now Toronto and Los Angeles-based) queer/trans playwright Sunny Drake undertook his ambitious Child-ish project to painstakingly document the real-life thoughts and feelings of forty-one different Toronto area children (ages 5 to 12). First adapted into a fun four-episode web series, it's now been translated into a feel-good live theatrical meta-adaptation of his findings into a thoroughly amusing stage play presented by Pacific Theatre in its world premiere, starring grown-ups as composite characters drawn from his exhaustive pool of interviewed kids and very much made for adult audiences.