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.
