Pride 2024
It’s that pride-thang time of year again, and as good a time as any to bask in our spectacularly wide-ranging collection of LGBTQ+ films for Pride 2024. From classic docs and risqué dramas, to off-kilter experimental films, we offer Shirley Clarke's mesmerizing and controversial Portrait of Jason, Derek Jarman's transcendent Blue, Wayne Koestenbaum's poetic rhapsodies, Bertrand Mandico's lesbian 'El Topo in Space!' oddity After Blue, John Cameron Mitchell's erotic romp Shortbus, profoundly moving portraits of HIV-positive Black gay men in Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien by Marlon Riggs, and a drug and sex fueled drama by Ira Sachs, Keep the Lights On. We have several documentaries on Stonewall (Before and After!), plus bio-docs on poet Allen Ginsberg, queer activist Pedro Lemebel, and ACT-UP activist Vito Russo. Other highlights include Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Silverlake Life, based on Tom Joslin’s video diaries during the AIDS crisis; and Gabriel Baur’s iconic gender odyssey Venus Boyz, situated in Club Casanova, home of the legendary Drag King Night in New York City.
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The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg
Directed by Jerry Aronson • Documentary • With Joan Baez, William F. Buckley, William S. Burroughs • 2005 • 84 minutes
This documentary chronicles the life of American beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Born and raised in New Jersey, Ginsberg attends Columbia University alongside fellow beats Jack Keroua...
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Narrow Path to Happiness
Directed by Kata Oláh • Documentary • 2023 • 83 minutes
Gergő and Lénárd are a young gay male couple living in a remote Roma settlement in the poorest part of Hungary. They live in a community where being gay is considered an unforgivable sin, yet they dream of making a musical film about their ...
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Saturday Night at the Baths
Directed by David Buckley • Drama • 1975 • 82 minutes
Newly restored in 4K, David Buckley's landmark excursion into bisexuality, 70s relationship politics, and the historical importance of gay bathhouse culture is celebrated in his 1975 film Saturday Night at the Baths. When struggling pianist M...
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Gay USA
Directed by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. • Documentary • 1977 • 72 minutes
Beautifully restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in collaboration with Frameline and Outfest, Gay USA is the first American feature-length documentary by and about LGBTQ+ people. Director Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. (best ...
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After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
Directed by Bertrand Mandico • Drama • With Elina Löwensohn, Paula Luna • 2021 • 129 minutes
In a faraway future, on a wild and untamed female inhabited planet called After Blue, a lonely teenager named Roxy (Paula Luna) unknowingly releases a mystical, dangerous, and sensual assassin from her p...
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Stigma Pudding
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Wayne Koestenbaum • 2023 • 6 minutes
Koestenbaum performs here in the persona of his alter ego, October Castelnuovo Spielhaus, who delivers an impromptu monologue, half-spoken, half-sung, describing imagined and actual ecstasies and tribulations...
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I Like Girls
Directed by Diane Obomsawin • Animation • 2016 • 8 minutes
First love is an intoxicating experience, but with it can come excruciating awkwardness, unrequited emotions, and confusing issues of identity. In her trademark playful style, Quebec cartoonist and animator Diane Obomsawin, a.k.a. Obom, ...
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The Many Lives of Kojin
Directed by Diako Yazdani • Documentary • 2020 • 88 minutes
Diako Yazdani, an Iranian Kurd and political refugee in France, goes to Iraq with Kojin, a 23-year-old gay friend. He confronts - with a great sense of humor - his devout family, friends and other members of the Kurdish community with t...
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Rock Hudson's Home Movies
Directed by Mark Rappaport • Documentary • With Eric Farr • 1992 • 63 minutes
Rock Hudson’s Home Movies is a provocatively entertaining and hugely influential film essay from Mark Rappaport (From the Journals of Jean Seberg). It uses a collage of film clips from throughout Hudson’s career, and a...
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Moroni For President
Directed by Saila Huusko & Jasper Rischen • Documentary • 2017 • 82 minutes
The Navajo Nation is the largest Native American reservation in the United States. Every four years, the Navajo tribe elects its president, whom many consider the most powerful Native American in the country. In the mids...
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Stonewall
Directed by Mathilde Fassin • Documentary • 2020 • 52 minutes
Whether in NYC or in Paris, every year in June, the Gay Pride parade is a wild party, where music resonates, floats roll by and glitter is thrown every which way. It hasn’t always been like this. While 2020 marks the fiftieth annivers...
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The Gays
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Wayne Koestenbaum • 2022 • 13 minutes
This film is a flashy document of an improvised monologue by Koestenbaum’s alter ego, October Castelnuovo Spielhaus, who tragi-comically inveighs against the studio system and other passé networks of power. ...
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To A More Perfect Union: U.S. v. Windsor
Directed by Donna Zaccaro • Documentary • With Edie Windsor, Nina Totenberg • 2018 • 63 minutes
To a More Perfect Union tells a story of love, marriage and a fight for equality. The film chronicles two unlikely heroes, octogenarian Edie Windsor and her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, on their quest fo...
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The Ex-Lovers
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Josh Lockman, Ben Toubia • 2023 • 11 minutes
In this serio-comic adventure in contemporary queer cinéma-vérité, Koestenbaum films an encounter between two handsome ex-lovers, Josh Lockman and Ben Toubia, who recreate the arguments and tussles th...
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Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell • Drama • With Sook-Yin Lee, Paul Dawson, Justin Vivian Bond • 2006 • 101 minutes
NSFW. Contains nudity and graphic depictions of sex.
John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS explores the lives of several emotionally challenged characters as they navigate the comic an...
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The Blood Drinkers
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Drama • With Armando Grant, Alonso Díaz Rickards • 2024 • 17 minutes
Koestenbaum calls this film his first “horror film,” and says he was inspired by early David Cronenberg works, which juxtapose mental derangement, bodily metamorphosis, and modernist buildings. I...
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Silverlake Life
Directed by Tom Joslin, Peter Friedman • Documentary • With Tom Joslin, Mark Massi • 1993 • 99 minutes
Independent Filmmaker Tom Joslin and his longtime lover Mark Massi battle AIDS in the days before effective medication existed. Silverlake Life debuted in 1993 — a time when demonizing queerne...
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No Ordinary Man
Directed by Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase Joynt • Documentary • With Susan Stryker, Stephan Pennington, Billy Tipton Jr. • 2020 • 80 minutes
American jazz musician Billy Tipton developed a reputable touring and recording career in the mid-twentieth century, along with his band The Billy Tipton Trio. A...
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Callas and Spinoza
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Francesco Gagliardi • 2023 • 4 minutes
Shot in Koestenbaum’s painting studio, with a backdrop of 16mm film strips hanging from the wall, and a painted, silver-foil-decorated bureau-on-wheels, this playful short film explores a famous moment from...
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575 Castro St.
Directed by Jenni Olson • Documentary • With Harvey Milk • 2008 • 7 minutes
575 Castro St. reveals the play of light and shadow upon the walls of the Castro Camera Store set for Gus Van Sant's Oscar-winning feature film Milk. These mundane shots are almost bereft of movement and sound. So quiet,...
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The Window and the Door
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • 2023 • 3 minutes
This phantasmagoric film derives from a roll of 16mm film that Koestenbaum shot on a Bolex in Brooklyn, as well as analog 35mm photographs (self-portraits and cityscapes) he took on a Nikon. In this collage film/video, “The Window an...
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Voices from the Front
Directed by Testing the Limits • Documentary • 1991 • 90 minutes
In New York City, a distraught activist confronts the mayor with a story of a friend who languished on a cot in an emergency room hallway for nine days, only to die 48 hours after leaving the hospital. In 1988, thousands of activis...
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Intimacies and Agglomerations
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • 2024 • 3 minutes
This film is a stop-motion animation work that incorporates various elements in Koestenbaum’s painting studio. Tiny dramas and collisions—adventures, aspirations, encounters, rapprochements, downfalls, redemptions—blossom into existe...
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Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker
Directed by Richard Schmiechen • Documentary • With Patrick Stewart • 1991 • 75 minutes
Academy Award-winning director Richard Schmiechen (The Times of Harvey Milk) vividly portrays the life and work of a woman who changed both the medical community and society in Changing Our Minds: The Story o...