Handsome Devil

Short

Twitch is an ode to overcoming dark energies that lie within; confronting fear and the journey to self-acceptance.

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I am near-sighted. When I see a potentially beautiful boy at a distance, I perceive him as perfectly beautiful. Gradually, as he approaches, he begins to accumulate defects which detract from his overall beauty; sometimes to the point where he ceases to be attractive at all.

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This watercolor animation of childlike creatures, poppies, and dismembered legs—collaged from Nothing Ever Happened—reflects on loss. Set to Rae Spoon’s Love is a Hunter, it explores how love can be transformative yet threatening, evoking a childhood shaped by hiding from violence, pain, and the fragility of affection.

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One is the Loneliest Number places a universal hero in the shoes of the heartbroken. Céline, Jon, Britney and Stevie couldn’t have said it better!

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Axis, an anxious enby, faces a supernatural surge of fears during a late-night walk home alone.

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Johanie, the single mother of a dysfunctional family, grows wary when Ian and his dog move into the neighborhood. The back alley between them becomes the stage for a rivalry where prejudice, fascination, and frustration subtly intertwine with the sound of barking.

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Two lesbian twin brothers play out a prescribed sleep-work-play existence. But, when evening comes...

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A portrait of the legendary Madame Simone, shot in the early nineties by an undergraduate student.

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Another spectacular output from Montreal’s DJ Frigid.

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Part of the My Heart series initiated by Nik Forrest, Annie Martin and Nelson Henricks, a reflection on gender, delving into childhood memory, gender fluctuation and a love of late 70s rock stars.

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A poetic exploration of Black womanhood, race, place, and identity, delving into the double-voiced discourses of a particular Black literary tradition concerning the complexities faced by enslaved people learning their captor’s language.

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.

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Vivek navigates the chronic pain caused by the pressures of advocating for diversity, finding healing and strength through weightlifting.

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.

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?

Short

This watercolor animation of childlike creatures, poppies, and dismembered legs—collaged from Nothing Ever Happened—reflects on loss. Set to Rae Spoon’s Love is a Hunter, it explores how love can be transformative yet threatening, evoking a childhood shaped by hiding from violence, pain, and the fragility of affection.

Short

Set around a single dining table, a son struggles to reclaim his sense of normalcy as his mother’s delusions tighten their grip. Through quiet tension and buried longing, this intimate psychological drama exposes the fragile warfare of a mother-son relationship trapped between love, denial, and control.

FeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

DANISH • ENGLISH 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.

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A portrait of the legendary Madame Simone, shot in the early nineties by an undergraduate student.

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On New Year's Eve, a broke and restless young man is drawn into a risky encounter with a hustler's client at a hotel. After being assaulted and scammed, with no help from the staff, he must face the consequences of his choices.

Feature

The protean central character of Queerpanorama has built a sex life for himself as an unreliable narrator. Curious about Hong Kong’s international tourists and struggling immigrants, this native Hongkonger briefly infiltrates their bubbles in the guise of other men he has bedded. In an open relationship with an American boyfriend—who, like his other writerly conjurings, may or may not exist—the anonymous ‘I’ (Jayden Cheung) uses his freedom to educate himself on the “complicated universe.” From vast urban spaces to remote beaches, and many a quiet restaurant and architectural marvel in between, ‘I’ bumps up against vastly different lifestyles and circumstances. Copulating and conversing with men who, like him, are searching for grounding or simply to lose themselves. For everyone seems to have reasons to be someone else—even if just for the length of their next encounter. Actor-turned-writer-director Jun Li renders his sexual odyssey in silky black and white, lending its contemporary subject matter a timeless, heightened air. With the noirish romanticism of In the Mood for Love and the beautifully framed melancholy of Lost in Translation, he depicts shifting ideas of normalcy and the burdens we bear or share.