Bulletproof: A Lesbian's Guide to Surviving the Plot

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When her self-help podcast asks her what she wishes to manifest, our hero realizes her desires are outgrowing her current relationship.

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Albert and Sixten are getting married. Today. The only problem is that if they were completely honest with each other, they shouldn’t even be a couple anymore.

Feature

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.

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The filmmaker aka Tranie Tronic tells the tale of the incident that inspired their latest album Transgression and brings awareness to the potential dangers of dating men online.

Feature

SPANISH • FRENCH 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?

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A traditional Maritime image: three generations of P.E.I. women wash dishes after holiday dinners. Their after-dinner conversations become revealing when one of their own begins his transition.

Feature

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.

Documentary

In Sandi DuBowski’s crucial, decades-spanning documentary (executive produced by Darren Aronofsky), Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie takes on the Orthodox regime amid escalating reactions to his experimental spirit. It will take harrowing face-to-face confrontations, heated ideological conversations, and all the Radical Faerie magic he can muster to weather the onslaught. Part of a line of rabbis stretching back to the 11th century, at age 28 Amichai left his isolated, pressurized upbringing in Israel for the freedoms of late-90s New York. In America, he joined the Radical Faeries and tapped into the feminine divine with his Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross drag persona, finding redemption through transgression, and founding the God-optional congregation Lab/Shul. Still, he encounters a wall of tradition and the pull of his familial dynasty. Enrolling to become a rabbi at the Conservative-leaning Jewish Theological Seminary, he endeavours to change the system from the inside, but soon finds himself at odds with his peers and “co-conspirators,” defending laws he once broke. Will he have the stamina and willpower to remain true to his ideals, or will his lofty goals end up quelling his radical energy and all that he means to others?

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A male teenager planning to come out to his father imagines different outcomes while portraying them in different cinematographic genres in his mind.

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A gay millennial reels after breaking-up with a popular influencer.