From Brokeback Mountain (2005) to Call Me By Your Name (2017), queer cinema tends to run into tragic wretchedness. There have been only a handful of life-affirming, revitalizing, hopeful titles like Pride (2014) and God’s Own Country (2017).
These ten exceptional films, however, inject rage, agency and absolute self-possession into queer narratives:
All About My Mother (1999)
Pedro Almodovar’s film bursts at the seams with its unbridled, splashy declaration of sisterhood, arcing across generations and the spectrum. In the director’s typical maximalist, bright colors, the film confronts trans sexuality, performance and perception of gender roles. Unapologetically queer in viewing life and relationships, this black comedy is a celebration of womanhood.
Tropical Malady (2004)
Structured as a diptych, Tropical Malady established Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a major Thai voice. A soft, upfront romance between two men peculiarly wending into a man-beast encounter becomes the conduit to blur boundaries between the human and natural. As the film winds up to a ravishing finale, it rises into a call for freedom—a surrender to desire that may seem terrifyingly impossible in bleak contexts but must prevail.
Weekend (2011)
Andrew Haigh’s film distils a gay romance in mundane moments and conversation that unlock vulnerability. As sex and talking go hand-in-hand in Weekend, it peers through regular fears between companions that make a relationship endure change and heated beliefs. It’s about reaching out, failing and trying again. Haigh brings a deeply humane gaze to a couple seeking togetherness.
Laurence Anyways (2012)
Spanning a couple’s decade-long on-off relationship, Xavier Dolan’s saga follows shifts that unravel when one of them transitions. Even as the film occasionally lumps together body dysphoria, finer delineations of trans womanhood, there’s no denying the glorious, rich agency it gives its titular protagonist.
Stranger By The Lake (2013)
At a cruising spot for men in France, Franck falls for Michel. Thus begins Alain Guiraudie’s seething, sweltering and seductive film, which was a Cannes ‘Un Certain Regard’ winner. A shock to conservative tastes, it is unabashed about its scorching sex as it inserts menace and unreliability. This frank, fearless queer thriller keeps you guessing and dreading.
Carol (2015)
Todd Haynes’ 50s-set luscious melodrama leans into taboo and repression and the burden of heteronormative domesticity imposed on women. With the incandescent Cate Blanchett-Rooney Mara duo, it’s a precisely designed study of subversion. Haynes orchestrates attraction to the forbidden with livewire possibility. This is an electrifying film about the act of looking—how it recognizes and disrupts in queer lives.
BPM (2017)
Robin Campillo’s 90s-set Cannes Grand Prix winner dives into the fervour of queer activism, community action in response to the AIDs epidemic, the slandering slapped against sexual minorities. Armed with spitfire dialogue and kinetic rhythm, the French film plunges through subsets of mobilization. Its rallying appeal for revolution and the space Campillo reserves for debate, even within the same camp, makes it vital viewing.
A Fantastic Woman (2017)
Chilean director Sebastián Lelio gives Daniela Vega the role of a lifetime, hinged closely to what she herself might have experienced. Trailing a trans woman’s isolation and grief after her older cis male lover suddenly dies, the Oscar-winning film is a beautifully textured portrait of resilience.
Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019)
Céline Sciamma’s film transcends the reach of queer cinema, situating itself where art meets its representation. Revolving around a painter and her subject, the period drama probes female loneliness through the quest to escape the male gaze. Sciamma powerfully re-interprets and lends her heroines defiance amidst narrow times. The exchange of glances between the two women charts a romance that rewrites all rules.
Under The Waters (2022)
Following a transgression and its heady aftermath, Ambiecka Pandit’s Marathi short film taps an explosion of uncertain, flailing queer teenage male desire. It offers a startling, visceral experience because it sits with all the confusion, rage and hurt that the unfamiliar desire sets off. Before one’s vocabulary steps in to shape a response, how does one process it? Suspended between not knowing and the desire to fling oneself into the vortex, Under The Waters brings a rare emotional nakedness to queer teenage desire. Pandit understands the violence surging within this specific yearning. An unforgettable Nishant Bhavsar maps every hurtling shade of the film’s internal journey right to its searing climax.
