The 50th edition
of the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival
(Frameline)—the largest, longest-running, and most widely
recognized queer film exhibition in the world—arrives not
simply as another anniversary, but as a living archive still
writing itself in real time. Over five decades, the festival has
grown from a grassroots act of queer visibility into one of the
most important cultural institutions for LGBTQ+ cinema
worldwide, a place where filmmakers, activists, artists, and
audiences gather to imagine lives beyond erasure.
Frameline has always understood that queer cinema is not a
genre, it is a necessity. As attacks on queer and trans rights
intensify across the United States and beyond, Frameline50
carries added gravity this year: the festival is both
celebration and resistance, a reminder that queer cinema has
always been a frontline art form.
The milestone edition features more
than 140 films from 35 countries, alongside tributes,
restorations, and major premieres that underline the
festival's enduring role as a bridge between generations of
queer storytelling. Colman Domingo
will receive the Variety Creative Conscience Award, while
legacy titles like "Paris
Is Burning" (1990), "Desert Hearts",
(1985), "Bound"
(1996), and "Cruising"
(1980) return to the screen alongside new works pushing queer
narratives into stranger, riskier, and more intimate
territories. The programming reflects a festival refusing to
become a museum piece. Frameline remains defiantly alive,
preserving queer history while documenting the anxieties,
desires, and revolutions unfolding now.
The Big Nights span the full range of what queer cinema can
be: raucous and local, elegiac and historical, delirious and
visionary.D'Arcy
Drollinger's "Lady
Champagne", written by and starring the San
Francisco drag legend herself, opens the festival on June 17
at the Castro Theatre with the irreverent, community-made
spirit that has always defined Frameline at its best. The
centerpiece is Brydie
O'Connor's "Barbara
Forever" (2026), a Teddy Award-winning portrait of
pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara
Hammer. Closing the festival on June 27
is Jane
Schoenbrun's "Teenage
Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" (2026), fresh from
its Cannes world premiere, with Schoenbrun receiving the
Frameline Queer Lens Award for Filmmaking before the
screening.
San Francisco itself becomes part of the story. Opening at the
newly renovated historic Castro Theatre and
reestablishing a festival hub in the Castro district,
Frameline50
reconnects with the neighborhood that helped define queer
public life for generations. In an era where LGBTQ+ spaces
continue to disappear under economic pressure and political
hostility, the festival's return to these communal landmarks
feels almost ceremonial, like lighting a beacon that still
refuses to go dark.
What follows are reviews of a few films from this year's
program. Taken together, they suggest both the breadth
of the current queer cinematic moment and the fierce necessity
of a festival like Frameline to bring them into the light.
The film's title, "Tiger,"
is both the name of its protagonist and the persona he
creates. Taiga (Takashi
Kawaguchi) is a 35-year-old gay masseuse working
in Tokyo's underground queer economy. Tiger is
the stage name he adopts when he finally lands his
shot at breaking into gay porn — close enough to
his real name to feel like a dare; it’s also a
version of himself that is bolder, more visible,
harder to ignore. That tension between who Taiga is
and who Tiger might become runs through the entire
film.
Written and directed by Anshul
Chauhan, a Tokyo-based Indian filmmaker who spent
three years collecting real stories from Japan's
LGBTQ+ community before writing the
script, "Tiger,"
is a fierce and emotionally volatile character
study. It portrays queer identity not as a fixed state
but as something shaped through confrontation with
family, masculinity, and the pressure to survive in a
world not built for you.
When Taiga's father falls terminally ill, he returns
to his hometown from Tokyo, stepping back into a
family dynamic freighted with unspoken tension. His
sister wants their father's house, and the inheritance
question creates friction between them, though the
film is careful not to turn her into a villain. What
the homecoming unlocks more powerfully is Taiga's bond
with his young niece, whose guileless affection for
her uncle becomes one of the film's warmest and most
aching threads. In her company, Taiga is simply
himself, without calculation or guard. The contrast
with almost every other relationship in the film is
quietly devastating.
Taiga also briefly reconnects with a childhood lover
who has since married a woman and built a conventional
life. The desire between them hasn't vanished; it has
simply been absorbed into a different kind of
existence. The encounter passes without resolution, as
these things tend to do, and the film moves
on. Chauhan
never overstates it, but the moment lodges in the
memory.
The film also takes seriously about the dangers gay
sex workers in Japan face. Taiga's world in Tokyo is
rendered without glamour or condemnation, populated by
men making daily calculations about visibility and
risk. Kawaguchi
carries it all with controlled intensity, never asking
for sympathy and getting it anyway. By the end,
Taiga's future remains genuinely open, and the film is
wise enough not to close it in either direction. You
leave the film wondering what becomes of him, the way
you wonder about people you actually know. That
Tiger earns that feeling is a real achievement.
Maspalomas
(Spain 2025 | in Spanish |
115 minutes)
"Maspalomas"
opens where its title promises: sun, skin, and
freedom. Vicente (José
Ramón Soroiz) cruises beaches, goes to raves,
drifts through sex parties in the gay-friendly resort
of Maspalomas, and belongs to all of it without
apology. He came out at 50, left his wife and daughter
behind, and spent the 25 years since building a life
entirely on his own terms. The math of that is
devastating before the film even begins: a quarter
century of reclaimed life, bought at a steep personal
cost.
Then a sickness changes everything. He wakes up back
in San Sebastián, his daughter has placed him in a
nursing home, and almost without realizing it, Vicente
returns to where he started. The closet reassembles
itself around him, piece by piece, not through any
single act of cowardice but through assumption,
exhaustion, and the path of least resistance. A man
who came out at 50 and lived freely for 25 years finds
that the institutional world of old age demands he
surrender it all again.
Arregi and Goenaga are patient and precise in mapping
how this happens, and they find unexpected warmth in
Vicente's relationship with his conservative roommate
Xanti (Kandido
Uranga), whose blunt certainties gradually soften
into something resembling solidarity. The film resists
making anyone a villain. It is more interested in the
architecture of retreat than in assigning blame.
The film belongs entirely to José
Ramón Soroiz, who won best
actor prizes at San Sebastián, the Forqué, and the
Feroz Awards for a performance that is disarming in
its lack of defensiveness. You feel, in the looseness
of his face and the ease of his smile in those early
Maspalomas scenes, the relief of a man determined not
to waste whatever time remains. That Vicente's delight
is informed rather than naive makes what follows all
the more painful to watch.
"Maspalomas"
comes to Frameline50 at a moment of fresh urgency. As
the generation of LGBTQ+ people who lived through the
pre-Stonewall era begins to enter sunset age, and as many
of the rights they fought for face renewed political
assault, Vicente's story stops being merely
personal. The film offers no easy catharsis. It simply
watches, with unflinching compassion, as the walls of
a man's world close in, and asks what it means to lose
your freedom twice in a single lifetime. One of the
best films at Frameline50.
Dreamboi
(Philippines 2025 | in Tagalog | 84 min.)
Seductive and bruised around the
edges, "Dreamboi"
dives into fantasy, desire, and self-invention with a
hazy neon pulse. Diwa (EJ
Jallorina) is a trans woman who turns to audio
porn to feel something again, until a habit of
eavesdropping on a stranger having sex in a basement
toilet spirals into obsession. When she discovers the
man is also her favorite anonymous audio porn actor,
Dreamboi (Tony
Labrusca), fantasy collides with reality in ways
that are erotic, destabilizing, and not entirely
resolved.
Director Rodina
Singh, herself a trans Filipino filmmaker, is
working from deeply personal terrain. Her stated
intention is to explore how trans desire is often
messy, fractured, and shaped by shame, and the film is
most alive in its commitment to that interiority. It
understands how queer longing often lives halfway
between performance and confession, building a world
where vulnerability hides beneath swagger and
flirtation. The film's visual language, all glam body
horror and psychological unease, has a genuine
personality. The film holds a defiant creative
position that carries real weight given that the film
was rated X twice by the Philippine media board before
finally receiving an R-18 classification on its third
attempt.
The film doesn't always live up to its ambitions. The
lead performance has its moments but struggles to
fully anchor the film's more demanding emotional
turns, and the narrative often loses
traction. Filipino queer cinema at Frameline has
historically skewed toward the world of male go-go
dancers. A trans woman's interior life as the sole
subject is a different proposition entirely.
One of the festival's standout documentaries, "Public Access"
Access* excavates the history of New York's public
access television with urgency and genuine
affection. Before the internet gave everyone a
platform, a quirky regulatory mandate required cable
companies to open their airwaves to the public, and
what flooded in was extraordinary: outsiders, misfits,
sexual boundary-pushers, activists, and artists who
had no other outlet and nothing to lose. For three
decades, Manhattan Cable became an uncurated,
uncensored free-speech experiment unlike anything
American television had seen.
The LGBTQ+ dimension of this history is central, and
the film is at its most compelling when it gets
there. The Gay Cable Network used public access as a
lifeline at a moment when AIDS was ravaging the
community and mainstream media was largely looking
away. In the New York of that era, with its unstable
economy, underground culture, and an epidemic tearing
through queer lives, these broadcasts did something
radical: they made gay and trans people visible on
their own terms. More than a nostalgia piece, the film
becomes a reminder that visibility was never freely
given. It had to be fought for through local stations,
pirate sensibilities, and fiercely independent
storytelling.
Director David
Shadrack Smith brings encyclopedic enthusiasm to
the material, drawing on rare archival footage and
interviews. That enthusiasm is also the film's
limitation. The materials are fascinating but
sprawling, and a tighter editorial hand would have
served the story better. The film occasionally feels
like the channels it celebrates: you keep watching,
not always sure where it's going, but unable to quite
look away.
Few dramatic situations are as charged as gay men of a
certain generation sitting down to reckon with each
other, and with everything they
survived. "Downtown"
earns that charge fully: a confined reunion, years of
accumulated grief and silence finally given a room, a
table, and nowhere left to hide.
In Amsterdam in 1986, the Downtown club is alive with
music and bodies and freedom. Ronnie
(Daniel Cornelissen) runs the DJ booth. Lennart
(Sebastián
Mrkvicka) comes to dance and takes whatever the
night offers. Then Bas (Thor
Braun), a 20-year-old artist, walks in and
something shifts between the three of them. What forms
is a bond built on love, excess, and the specific
euphoria of being young and queer in a city that is,
for one intoxicating moment, entirely theirs. Then the
regulars begin to disappear, one by one, and the world
they built starts to come apart.
Thirty-five years later in 2021, Ronnie
(Yorick van
Wageningen), Bas (Roeland
Fernhout), and Lennart (Hans
Kesting) find themselves at a dinner table
together for the first time in decades. Lennart has
little patience for the COVID pandemic consuming the
world outside. To a man who lived through the AIDS
crisis, COVID registers as a "toy virus," an
inconvenience dressed up as catastrophe by people who
have no idea what a real plague looks like. That
bitterness lands with particular force knowing that
Kesting himself was diagnosed with HIV in 1996, a
biographical fact that film's casting transforms
into something close to testimony.
Director Michiel
van Erp cuts between the two timelines with
remarkable fluency, never forcing the parallels
between AIDS and COVID, letting them surface on their
own. Both eras demanded disappearance. Both left
survivors accounting for the distance between who they
were and who they became. The performances across both
timelines are extraordinary: the younger actors
electric with physical confidence, the older trio
bringing something harder and more weathered, men who
learned to live with loss and are not quite sure what
to do now that the past has returned.
Selected as the opening night film of the Netherlands
Film Festival later this
year, "Downtown"
receives its world premiere at Frameline50 at the
Castro Theatre, and the weight of that setting is
impossible to separate from the film itself. Watching
it here feels like laying another panel on the quilt:
a tribute to those who loved freely and dangerously,
and to those who survived and are still, somehow,
finding their way back to each other.
Montreal,
My Beautiful (Montréal, ma belle |
Canada 2025 | in French/Mandarin | 118 min.)
A middle-aged Chinese immigrant in Montreal risks
everything she has dutifully built—family,
stability, and cultural belonging—when a
long-suppressed desire for women finally refuses to
stay buried. It is the story that
director He
Xiaodan's sophomore
feature "Montreal,
My Beautiful" presents with patience,
bilingual texture, and a nuanced performance
from Joan
Chen.
53-year-old Feng Xia (Joan
Chen) has spent her life shaped by duty: to her
family, her culture, and a loveless marriage. A
Chinese immigrant in Montreal, she exists in a space
between worlds, belonging fully to neither, carrying
obligations that leave little room for desire. Then
she meets a free spirited 30-year-old Camille
(Charlotte
Aubin) from a dating app, something that has been
buried for decades begins to surface.
What follows is less a love story than a
reckoning. He
Xiaodan, a Montreal-based Chinese-Canadian
filmmaker and the first Chinese immigrant director to
receive governmental grants in Quebec and Canada for a
feature fiction film, structures the film around the
collision of forces that have governed Feng Xia's
entire existence: cultural expectation, maternal
obligation, personal longing, and decades of deferred
dreams. Each bears down on her with equal weight, and
the film is meticulous in refusing to reduce any of
them to a simple obstacle. The conflicts are internal
as much as external, and the film gives them space to
breathe across the film's running time.
Joan
Chen delivers a performance that is her hallmark:
feelings expressed through the finest modulations of
gesture and expression, an entire interior life made
visible without a word spoken. She has always been an
actor who trusts stillness, and He
Xiaodan's direction trusts her in return. The
moments where Feng Xia registers what she is risking
and what she has already lost are rendered with a
precision that no amount of dialogue could improve on.
The film is also remarkable for using its
bilingualism. Within Feng Xia's household, Chinese and
French coexist as a generational fault line: the
parents speak Mandarin, the children answer in French,
each holding on to its own language as a form of
identity and rootedness. That two tongues can share a
home and still speak past each other says something
profound about immigration, about the distances that
open up between people who love each other, and about
the particular loneliness of a woman caught between
the world she came from and the one her children are
already living in.
This is a deeply felt film that holds its
contradictions without resolving them. Liberation, it
suggests, always comes at a cost, and the film is
honest enough to show us the bill.
