A CULINARY UPRISING: THE STORY OF BLOODROOT

Short

Frustrated sci-fi writer Julian is facing a slump in his relationship. So will his fiancé Leo's trip into orbit with the world's first ever low-cost alternative spaceline provide them with just the space they need to get back on track?

Feature

Passionate, provocative, and powerful—it’s easy to see why Bearcave was awarded the Europa Cinema Label at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Set in a fictional remote village in the Balkan Mountains of Greece, a love story between two lifelong friends unfolds—but will their relationship survive the call of womanhood? Argyro is a farm girl—hard-working, unpretentious, and wholesome while Anneta is … in a bit of trouble. Whisked away by her law enforcement beau (and carrying his child) Anneta’s move to the city threatens to sever her friendship with Argyro for good, but their understated glances from across the crowd at a party one night tells a different story. The whisper of sweet nothings and foggy windows in Argyro’s pickup truck soon fade to memory, leaving behind a cloud of confusion and heartbreak, that is—until Anneta’s side of the story unfolds. Set against a backdrop of sweeping landscapes, a mystical cave, and nettle bushes, Bearcave is a film that’s steeped in tradition, then abruptly subverted, and not only by a sapphic love story, but a hybrid soundscape of folkloric and contemporary music, as well as ethereal sequences of cinematographic magic.

Feature

Based on Fleur Pierets’ memoir of the same name, Julian tells the heart-wrenching love story between the author Fleur and Julian Demoor and Project 22—their international LGBTQ+ marriage campaign of 2017 that was brought to an abrupt halt by tragic circumstances. In 2017, it was legal for same-sex couples to get married in twenty-two countries worldwide, hence the birth of the performance art piece: Project 22. Fleur Pierets, a Belgian journalist and LGBTQ+ activist, came up with the idea to travel around the world and marry Julian—her partner in life as well as business (as co-founders of Et Alors? Magazine)—and not only once, but in every country where it was possible. The goal? To raise awareness on how few places same-sex couples could legally marry. Director Cato Kusters provides a fictionalized account spanning the campaign, from the years 2017–2019, with home-movie-esque film segments that provide an immersive peek into this courageous couple’s experience, both behind the scenes, on the road, and after the fact—moments of joy and silliness, as well as the intimacy, doubt, uncertainty of fighting for one’s rights while also fighting for one’s life.

Feature

A tight-knit group of revolutionary gay filmmakers in late-1950s former Yugoslavia are shackled by the state to Emir, a communist bureaucrat conditioned to see sabotage everywhere. When the group endeavours to use the Tito regime’s ideological weapons against them, an upended system or the horrors of Barren Island await. Desire—for all of us—can be a heady cocktail. In a society that turns desire inside out, with trust shaken and lover pitted against lover, it becomes a minefield. Dancing cheek to cheek and screwing with abandon turned into revolutionary acts, art a tool for undermining authority. All tactics taken up by professional and romantic partners Lovro (Dado Cosic) and Nenad (Djordje Galic) and their fellow filmmakers (Slaven Doslo, Elmir Krivalic). The four friends determined to savour glimpses of the beautiful lives possible if defense mechanisms could safely fall—a boogie-woogie record; a secluded, seaside house in Istria—as they risk their lives for the cause of freedom. In Croatia’s official submission for the 2025 Academy Awards, the sex is explicit, the stakes and brutality intense, the cinematography stunning. A gutting and rarefied concoction immortalized by writer-director Ivona Juka’s daring cinematic achievement.

Feature

CROATIAN • FRENCH ST | Marko, slight but mighty, seems always in control, always a champion—but what happens when he slips his banks? As “unstable air” portends torrential rains for a small Croatian village, the return of Marko’s former neighbour is the rush that might pull him under. Marko (Lav Novosel in a natural, understated performance) has a full life: a brother with Down syndrome (Leon Grgić) who he treats with a soft attentiveness; learning discipline from his father (Filip Šovagović) in the lead up to an arm-wrestling competition; chanting about female anatomy with his buds before pestering his girlfriend Petra (Franka Mikolaci) for sex. But there’s another side to his even-keeled bravado. For, as he tells his brother in the guise of a story, “the boy and the bunny” were once “inseparable,” with a secret hiding place of their own. And now that “bunny” is back. Home from cosmopolitan Berlin for his father’s funeral, Slaven (Andrija Žunac) catches Marko off guard. Despite training constantly as if to outrun his feelings, Marko returns again and again to the river, again and again to Slaven. An imported joint is shared, affections are renewed, and temperatures—and waters—rise.

DocumentaryVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Of the 8.7 million living animal species on Earth, thousands defy our expectations. Inspired by trans evolutionary biologist Dr. Joan Roughgarden’s groundbreaking work, narrator Elliot Page and preeminent queer, BIPOC, and immigrant scientists transcend well-trod narratives, revealing how survival hinges on being the most open to change. The scientific establishment has long been stymied by suppression and resistant to evidence debunking the primacy of three rigid categories: “insatiable” males, “coy” females, and “maladaptive and unnatural” others. But, from university labs to the forests of Costa Rica, that picture is changing, opening our eyes to a nature teeming with variations: polyandrous tamarins and polygamous Capuchin monkeys, “very gay” water fowl and sex-role reversed species like seahorses. We are guided through this diversity by sweeping footage, Caitlin Craggs’ delightfully quirky animations, and mind-blowing facts (for example, did you know 50% of fish on a coral reef are members of a sex-changing species?). In a political present where truth is under attack, Second Nature follows the trailblazers who are shifting the consensus from “sometimes this happens” to a codified science, leaving the “quaint myth” of the binary in the historical dust.

Short

A dancer struggles to break free from the hold of his choreographer, now drawn to another. This silent film explores power, inspiration, and replacement within the LGBTQ+ dance community through body language and music.

Short

When her childhood best friend falls in love, nostalgic teenager Dodo struggles to let go of the past and goes to increasingly dangerous lengths to secure her affections, threatening to spoil their idyllic lakeside holiday.

FeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

DANISH • FRENCH ST | With In Ashes, writer-director Ludvig Christian Næsted Poulsen grippingly toys with genre. He inflects one Danish collegian’s immersion in frantic hook-up culture amidst a relationship mysteriously ended with elements of psychological horror and the tension of a spy thriller. In 2017 Copenhagen, baby-faced Christian (Rex Leonard, a nervy knockout) is glued to his camera, determined to capture every giddy moment he spends with his long-distance boyfriend Aske (Lior Cohen). Flash forward to 2022 Aarhus, “the most wonderful city in the world,” and a scruffier Christian seems less than content. He interrogates his schoolmate’s perspective and confronts strangers over assumed slights. He’s plagued by an unspoken ailment. And Aske seems nowhere to be found. With each empty tryst, each hungrily inhaled cigarette, Christian descends into a type of madness. Or is it clarity? Aske’s reappearance, arriving with the jolt of a jump scare, may hold the key to that question, as desperation congeals into starry-eyed determination. For those drawn in by the enigmatic pull of All of Us Strangers, In Ashes will have you guessing ‘is this a romance or a tragedy’ until the very last second—perhaps, even, long after.

FeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Karun, a kindly border guard, finds himself in “paradise” among Bandipora’s soaring peaks, though religious and cultural resentments simmer and scald. Jolted by Faheem’s gorgeous face revealed from behind a helmet visor, Karun is drawn into a romance with indelible repercussions in this first queer film in the Kashmiri language. Wooed by an apple and a warm ripple of attraction each time Faheem (a subtle yet potent Mir Tawseef) passes his checkpoint, Karun (Akash Unnimenon) ventures into Gurez to seek out further encounters. Gurez, a remote Kashmiri village near the border between India and Pakistan, speaks with the voice of soft lullabies and bleating sheep, of a flowing river indifferent to divisions, though that tranquility is soon replaced by distant gunfire. Determined to drop the veil of shame that partitions their lives, Faheem and Karun’s restless hearts pine for one another from a distance, the two praying to separate deities but sharing an equal desire. Wanting, so passionately, to be one. When terrorist infiltrators and a homegrown street gang make a volatile situation worse, can love bind as society breaks?