QUEERPANORAMA

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A stroke upends 76-year-old Vicente’s recently charmed life in the Canary Islands, forcing him to trade his queer eden for a restrictive care home in San Sebastián—and to consider how essential his sexuality is to his identity. Among the nude forms dotting the Maspalomas dunes is Vicente (Jose Ramón Soroiz), a young man giving him pleasure. After 50 closeted years, this sensual existence is to be his reward. But three months later, he finds himself in a long-term care facility with neither income nor his beloved dog, minded by his estranged daughter (Nagore Aranburu). Paired with a motormouthed roommate (Kandido Uranga) with far right sympathies. Anonymously messaging his carer Iñaki (Kepa Errasti) but rejecting him in person. Camera sweeps and choral flourishes encapsulating a world that moves while he sits still. Then, a new manager brings changes just as he’s assimilated to the pale ghost of his days, dangling the hope of a “real home.” Taking us from 2018 Pride to the 2020 pandemic, directors Aitor Arregi and José Mari Goenaga honour those affected by health crises and the inexorable fact of time’s passage, which alters us in unpredictable ways.

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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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In the '70s and '80s, there were over 230 feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses throughout the United States and Canada. Bloodroot, located in Bridgeport, Connecticut, is now the oldest and longest-lasting of those spaces, in continuous operation for over 46 years. A Culinary Uprising: The Story of Bloodroot is a documentary that explores this feminist, queer, vegan restaurant and bookstore, and illuminates the legacy of its pioneering proprietors, Selma Miriam and Noel Furie. The film shares the history of Bloodroot, its place in the landscape of American feminist thought, and the impact it has had on the local community. It follows the restaurant’s founders, Selma and Noel, as well as the staff and customers, who reveal why Bloodroot is much more than just a restaurant. Audiences get an intimate look inside these women’s 46-year working partnership, along with how they navigate sexism, homophobia, and the reality of getting older. Despite challenges, Bloodroot has endured as a beloved space for generations of feminists, vegans, and queer people who keep coming back.

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Black. Brown. Trans. Cis. Queer. Immigrant. Full Bodied. Embodied. Femme. A conversation with women from Toronto's ballroom scene exploring the intersections of identity and how they channel the presence and power of womanism on the runway.

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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.

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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?

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Pillion is the unlikeliest (and most enthralling) of genre shake-ups, a romantic dark comedy about the biker dom who bends a meek sub to his will—and the sub who attempts to mold him in return. Colin (Harry Melling) is an endearingly crooked-teethed traffic enforcement officer who sings with his dad (Douglas Hodge) in a pub’s barbershop quartet. Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) is a biker god who reads Knausgård’s My Struggle while ignoring Colin, who satisfies his every whim. Thus, the stage is set for a twist on ‘opposites attract’: an is-it-love story of an impassive dom and his bemused submissive. As Colin begins to feel useful, a confidence that bleeds over into his thankless job, his dying mum Peggy (Lesley Sharp) grows less impressed. How much of himself is he willing to change to fit Ray’s strict rules? Is he losing his identity or becoming his true self? It’ll take some kinky wrestling, a countryside romp with Ray’s biker buddies (including a confident sub played by the Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears), and a war waged over sleeping arrangements to find out, in this sex-positive jaw-dropper brimming with sneaky humour and heft.

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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?

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In the near future, Dove, a gender fluid person, discovers the powers and perils of their Inkwo (Indigenous medicine) while defending the living against a horde of ravenous monsters, testing their courage, resilience, and connection to the Earth.

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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.