Beauty is Revenge

Queerment QuébecShort

Abandoned in the debris of a mine, a dancer is revived by the celestial energy pulsating within him.

Queerment QuébecCompetitionShort

EXT. DAY - A sunny Sunday morning on a café terrace: Isabelle, an actor whose career is in a rut, meets Johanne, her agent, who might have a new part for her. Tension mounts both at the table and in the surroundings. Will expectations be met?

Queerment QuébecCompetitionShort

Two incarcerated women in a secure Northern Québec forest are subjected to the hard labour of reforestation. They enjoy a little area of freedom they’ve managed to create thanks to an empathetic prison guard.

Queerment QuébecShort

A woman confesses her sins to her priest.

Queerment QuébecCompetitionShort

Five thousand twenty five walks. Fifty-two miles of floors mopped. Seventy hours watching movie stars kiss. Alice, a headstrong elder dyke, navigates environmentally induced illness while she contends with her unique notion of legacy.

Queerment QuébecShort

Set to classical Québecois music and filmed in a colourful, cinematic style, Doux temps explores the sharp contrast between, on one hand, the somewhat routine daily lives of four characters and, on the other, the lyrical sweep of words and music that evoke the amorous passions of the ‘sweet days’ of youth.

CompetitionFeature

In a fraught exchange between Leipzig and Strasbourg, Fanny and Lena warm to each other while the situation around them heats up. As it gets harder to parse fact from fiction, too much trust and not enough, they look to protest movements to teach them what out-of-control adults cannot. Writer-director Claire Burger’s nuanced drama is bracingly of-the-moment, capturing topical issues with a foreboding sense of longing and imminent disaster, and inspiring fiery performances from her leads, including Nina Hoss as a mother undone. After an initially cold reception from Lena (Josefa Heinsius) when she arrives in Germany, 17-year-old Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) will do anything to ingratiate herself with her prickly pen pal. Chocolate-covered shrooms, sexual experimentation, bonding over Antifa and black bloc protest movements—each attempt at connection becomes more daring than the one before, their “Franco-German friendship” mirroring the heated clashes of our time. When the school exchange is flipped, and Lena is now the fish out of water in France, giving into the attraction sizzling under her animosity will mean coming to terms with a world tearing apart at the seams and the fantasies built up to survive it.

Queerment QuébecShort

Jules is bi. Bi as in bisexual. Bi, even though he’s only slept with women. Bi and ready to try his first experience with Samuel, a friend of friend.

Made au CanadaCompetitionFeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Inspired by true events, in 1970 an unorthodox mother sends her offbeat son from New Brunswick on a wintry cross-country mission past Quebec to retrieve his brother from Toronto after a public sex violation. Antics ensue in the Two-Solitudes atmosphere, bursting with revealing humour about brotherly love and French-English relations. In bravura performances, Alan Cumming plays motormouth Perley—dressed in an ushanka and ascot, taxidermied dog tucked under his arm—and Charlie Creed-Miles is Weldon—a gruff stoic in crooked glasses. These oddball siblings travel through frozen nights and across the language divide as they bicker, break down, and ultimately bond in their journey through central and eastern Canada. Weldon forced to confront the reality of Perley’s homosexuality (and his abject fear of being required to speak French) as he processes a horrific event from their past. After a lifetime of shutting down, a new set of dire circumstances has them opening their ears to hear one another’s stories. Award-winning filmmaker Michael Clowater, a master of wringing humour from pain, never loses sight of Perley and Weldon’s essential humanity among the pratfalls and bigotries, embedding beautiful truths in the film’s engrossing frictions.

CompetitionFeature

Jorge is tousled and handsome, seemingly carefree, shouldering changes with cheerful resignation. But after his sudden death, his young mother and best friend, Carmen, is left grief-stricken, forced to reckon with the veracity of her son’s life, including his two lovers—one female, one male—left wondering why he’s ghosted them. At first, Carmen (Ludwika Paleta) refuses all comforts in the wake of her son’s death, cared for, despite her protests, by her kindly queer brother (Darío Rocas). Then, she goes digging. According to Jorge’s estranged father (Luis Velazquez), Jorge (Nicolás Haza) was depressed shortly before he drowned in the sea. Is this true—if so, why? And is this enough to prove his death was intentional? The search for answers will acquaint Carmen with Jorge’s jilted girlfriend (Adriana Palafox) and lovesick boyfriend (Alan Oliva), and reconcile her with a passion for music that hounds her even when she tries to leave it behind. In this expertly crafted tearjerker, writer-director Sofía Gómez-Córdova uses seamless flashbacks and home videos of happier times to reveal who the characters were. And Ludwika Paleta’s blistering performance-of-a-lifetime shows us who Carmen may be in the Thereafter.

Made au CanadaCompetitionFeature

In the vein of the Tony award-winning musical Stereophonic, this must-see drama is a Behind the Music-style glimpse of a 2000s Toronto indie band with Fleetwood Mac-like flare ups. With a trans frontman and queer members, The New Normals break boundaries while breaking one another’s hearts. Building off the source material, the novel Heidegger Stairwell by Kayt Burgess, Karen Knox maintains balletic control of multiple perspectives and aesthetics, following how each of the five core members handles firsts: first music video, first phone sex job, first love triangle. Music saves this close-knit crew from quarrels when it’s not causing them, but it’s the in-fighting, the “threads of connection and tension” that keep their audience hungering for more. Will the trans frontman (Lane Webber) stay with his queer girlfriend and songwriting partner (June Laporte) or find a different tune with Lugh (Daniel Gravelle)? Will the band survive or live on only in tribute? These concerns converge in a film charged with envy, creative friendship, and reckless love, and chock-full of pedigreed talent, including co-writing credits from award-winning Canadian writer, Zoe Whittall and festival alumni, Pat Mills as well as original songs from Stars’ Torquil Campbell.

Made au CanadaCompetitionShort

Between loads of laundry at the corner laundromat, Cooper shares the tumultuous story of her gender reassignment journey.

Made au CanadaCompetitionShort

Robin is a young woman who lives alone above a gas station in North Bay. Every night she watches truckers fill their tanks up and munch on pepperettes. Robin has a secret. Robin is a porn addict. Robin can’t feel anything anymore.

Queerment QuébecCompetitionShort

Five thousand twenty five walks. Fifty-two miles of floors mopped. Seventy hours watching movie stars kiss. Alice, a headstrong elder dyke, navigates environmentally induced illness while she contends with her unique notion of legacy.

CompetitionFeature

SPANISH • ENGLISH ST | Argentinian filmmaker Matías is an intense perfectionist struggling to shape his autobiographical film as the past wriggles from his grip. Is Alexander—a dashing fabulist from Sweden he met in Italy as a boy—the lost love of his life? Or just a lovely, bittersweet dream? At the United World College of the Adriatic, with its diverse, exuberant student body, young Matías (Santiago Madrussan) finds a freedom he never knew in Argentina. There, he is befriended by Alexander (Oscar Morgan), whose rousing stories and bedroom eyes make the world more magical, and whose family’s vast holiday home becomes a memory palace for all that was left unsaid. In his 40s, Matías (co-writer/director Juan Pablo Di Pace) looks back at this time and, with a festival deadline looming, tries to fathom the sizzling closeness and coded interactions. A key piece of evidence lying dormant for when he least expects it. With its meta intrigues and captivating sweep, Duino is an elegiac masterwork crackling with swoon-worthy chemistry. A film that asks: how far are we willing to go for a proper conclusion, and what, in the end, remains voices in the wind?

Made au CanadaCompetitionFeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

This homage to Bollywood spectacle and intergenerational bonds is a time-hopping, candy-coloured crowd pleaser that induces huge smiles and big laughs while also tackling the resonant themes of enforced gender roles, passive racism, and the seismic shifts of growing up. Azra (a stunning Amrit Kaur) lives in cohabitating sexual bliss with her girlfriend in Toronto in the VHS-popping 90s when she receives news of her father’s death. One voltaic match cut later and she’s on a plane for the funeral in Pakistan with her brother (Ali A. Kazmi), where her mother (Ms. Marvel’s Nimra Bucha) nitpicks and her culture shuts her out of the mourning process. Then another and we’re in 1969 Karachi, swept up in the whirlwind romance of Azra’s rule-breaking mother (also played by Amrit Kaur, underscoring mother-daughter parallels) and dashing father (Hamza Haq) before their tough transition to 1989 Nova Scotia. Each temporal hop peeling back another layer of how Azra’s family dynamic came to be. The Queen of My Dreams is itself a moviegoer’s dream, chock-full of eye-popping visuals, high production value, and fantastic fashion. Revealing how salvation can come in unlikely ways from unlikely sources.