Akerman’s ambiguous triptych was based on her experiences hitchhiking from Paris to Brussels. A woman (played by the filmmaker) holes up in a room, obsessively eating sugar and rearranging furniture. Then we follow her hunt for love and connection – first with a truck driver, then an ex-lover. With its uninterrupted erotic-free ten-minute lesbian sex scene, this is one of the most radical and assured sequences in any feature debut from the 1970s.

It's the summer of 1983, and precocious 17-year-old Elio Perlman is spending the days with his family at their 17th-century villa in Lombardy, Italy. He soon meets Oliver, a handsome doctoral student who's working as an intern for Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of their surroundings, Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will alter their lives forever.

The acerbic new chapter of Louise Weard’s visionary, post-modern trans epic, Castration Movie, chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift. Here, we follow Izzy (Avalon Fast) who is desperately clawing for any source of (mis)information to sabotage her partner (Henri Gillespi)’s transition. 

Weard confronts the audience across two hours of uncomfortable truths, exposing the grotesque behaviours of cis and trans people alike with razor-sharp precision; Junior Ghosts is a bold satirical splurge of female paranoia, biological essentialism, and the horrors of a Mumsnet echo chamber.

Content warning: contains scenes of graphic violence and sex, themes of suicide and homophobic and transphobic language.

On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.

Bouchra (35), a queer Moroccan coyote living in NYC, is wrestling with writer’s block for her first film. As she begins a series of difficult yet long overdue phone calls with her mother, Aicha, in Casablanca, forgotten memories begin to resurface.  Balancing the precarity of working as an artist in New York, the rift in her identity between her two homes and an array of friendships and romantic interests, Bouchra’s emotional reckoning with her mother and herself becomes her path to expression.

With a lived-in granularity and unmistakable visual style, BOUCHRA, the debut feature from acclaimed visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki (best known together from their 2020 web series 2 LIZARDS), is a singular portrait effortlessly towing the line between documentary, visual art and resonant family drama. Deeply felt, surprisingly sexy and formally adventurous, Bennani and Barki’s distinctive debut forges new ground.

A dark-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring) is left amnesiac after a car crash. She wanders the streets of Los Angeles in a daze before taking refuge in an apartment. There she is discovered by Betty (Naomi Watts), a wholesome Midwestern blonde who has come to the City of Angels seeking fame as an actress. Together, the two attempt to solve the mystery of Rita's true identity. The story is set in a dream-like Los Angeles, spoilt neither by traffic jams nor smog.

When a beautiful stranger leads computer hacker Neo to a forbidding underworld, he discovers the shocking truth--the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence.

A couple take a trip to Argentina but both men find their lives drifting apart in opposite directions.

In this loose adaptation of Shakespeare's "Henry IV," Mike Waters (River Phoenix) is a gay hustler afflicted with narcolepsy. Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) is the rebellious son of a mayor. Together, the two travel from Portland, Oregon to Idaho and finally to the coast of Italy in a quest to find Mike's estranged mother. Along the way they turn tricks for money and drugs, eventually attracting the attention of a wealthy benefactor and sexual deviant.

In Berlin in 1931, American cabaret singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) meets British academic Brian Roberts (Michael York), who is finishing his university studies. Despite Brian's confusion over his sexuality, the pair become lovers, but the arrival of the wealthy and decadent playboy Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) complicates matters for them both. This love triangle plays out against the rise of the Nazi party and the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s French New Wave inspired directorial debut, he stars as Franz, a small-time pimp who finds himself in an offbeat love triangle between prostitute Joanna and handsome gangster Bruno, played by frequent Fassbinder collaborators Hanna Schygulle and Ulli Lommel. When Bruno fails to recruit Franz into his crime syndicate, the three strike up an unlikely allegiance, muddying romantic boundaries as they drift through the streets of Munich, plotting varying degrees of criminal activities. Detached, cool, and branded dilettantism at its Berlinale premiere, Love is Colder Than Death is a nihilistic and impulsive portrait of the relationship between three unanchored criminals. 

Love is Colder Than Death is featured as part of Gangsters Have Feelings Too, a season exploring the sensitive gangster film. The season is presented with the National Film and Television School’s Film Studies, Programming and Curation MA.

There’s a killer on the loose in New York City, and he’s targeting gay men in the West Village. Fortunately for the NYPD, he’s got a type – slim, dark-haired, handsome – and officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino) fits the bill. To crack the case, Steve must journey into the city’s nocturnal underworld of S&M and leather bars, hoping to catch the killer’s eye – but will he lose himself along the way? Controversial with both straight and gay audiences upon its initial release, Friedkin’s film still retains its power to shock and unsettle 45 years later.

Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) moves with his family into the home of the lone survivor from a series of attacks by dream-stalking monster Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). There, Jesse is bedeviled by nightmares and inexplicably violent impulses. It turns out Freddy needs a host body to carry out his gruesome vendetta against the youth of Springwood, Ohio. While Freddy gains influence, Jesse and his girlfriend, Lisa (Kim Myers), race against the clock trying to figure out what’s going on.

The follow up to the film that introduced Freddy Krueger into our nightmares has become an iconically queer film due to its not so subtle context, tones and explicit desires.

With intro from film curator Sarah Cleary.

Reality and fantasy begin to blur when a teenager, alone in her attic bedroom, immerses herself in a role-playing horror game online.

Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.

Don't miss a special preview screening of Jane Schoenbrun's TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA at The Prince Charles Cinema on Thursday 13th August. Warm up for this preview screening with a special CAMP MIASMA INSPIRED MYSTERY MOVIE MARATHON curated by Jane Schoenbrun on Saturday 25th July!

Hacks breakout star Hannah Einbinder and, in a playful bit of meta-casting, Gillian Anderson (The X Files, Sex Education) headline this heady, gory slasher homage from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. Like Schoenbrun’s previous films I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, it uses a horror genre lens to explore a rich array of themes and ideas – queer identity and sexuality, memory and nostalgia, the nature of female desire, the state of the entertainment industry – with humour, vulnerability and affection.

After years of slapdash sequels, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is handed over to an enthusiastic, cerebral young director (Einbinder) – who credits the first film with her own queer awakening – to resurrect. But fantasy and reality collide when she visits the original film’s star (Anderson), now a mysterious recluse living on its old set, and the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of fear, desire and delirium