Celebs and cinephiles are all making their annual pilgrimage to Park City, Utah, this week to celebrate this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and among them are some of this year’s most anticipated, and soon-to-be most anticipated, queer films of the year.
In a time when queer representation on screen feels especially poignant, it’s thrilling to see just how many films feature queer narratives, star out-and-proud talent, tell our stories, or simply radiate the spirit of queerness that will be lighting up the silver screen at this year’s event. So, what has us chomping at the bit to see those opening credits roll? Here are 13 films that top our most-anticipated list for this year’s festival.
All film descriptions courtesy of Sundance.
Rock Springs
Rock Springs
Sundance
Director & Writer: Vera Miao
Starring: Kelly Marie Tran, Benedict Wong, and Jimmy O. Yang
Synopsis: After the death of her father, a grieving young girl moves to an isolated house in a new town with her mother and grandmother, only to discover there is something monstrous hidden in the town’s history and the woods behind their new home.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Out actor Kelly Marie Tran toplines this horror film debut from writer and director Vera Miao. The film tackles themes of immigration, grief, and haunting traumas of the past, both personal and historical.Saccharine
Saccharine
Sundance
Director & writer: Natalie Erika James
Starring: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, and Madeleine Madden
Synopsis: Hana, a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: This film comes from Natalie Erika James, whose 2020 film Relic still haunts me to this day. As if that weren’t enough, the film stars out actor Midori Francis as a woman being haunted by a ghost. The film tackles meaty themes of dysphoria, fatness, and weight loss in the era of GLP-1s, all through the lens of body horror.
Big Girls Don’t Cry
Big Girls Don’t Cry
Sundance
Director & writer: Paloma Schneideman
Starring: Ani Palmer, Rain Spencer, and Noah Taylor
Synopsis: Over one transformative summer in rural New Zealand in 2006, 14-year-old Sid Bookman discovers desire, identity, and the internet as she imitates the people she longs to be loved by.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: There is literally no limit to the number of queer coming-of-age stories I want to see hit the big screen. The film comes from Paloma Schneideman, who was mentored through Jane Campion’s film program, and it explores the early stirrings of identity and how we quietly find our way, through mimicry and exploration, to our true queer selves.
Extra Geography
Extra Geography
Sundance
Director: Molly Manners
Writer: Miriam Battye
Starring: Marni Duggan, Galaxie Clear, Alice Englert, and Aoife Riddell
Synopsis: In an English girls boarding school, two teenage best friends grapple with the challenges of girlhood — friendship, boys, studies, and growing up — and embark on their school project, falling in love.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Another queer coming-of-age story, but with a twist. The film sees two teens vying for the love of their geography teacher (Alice Englert), and explores the complications of young female friendship. It sounds like just the kind of messy, aching storytelling we crave.
The Incomer
The Incomer
Sundance
Director & writer: Louis Paxton
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, and Grant O’Rourke
Synopsis: On a remote Scottish isle, siblings Isla and Sandy hunt birds and talk to mythical beings while fighting off outsiders. Their lives change when Daniel, an awkward official, arrives to relocate them.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Scottish folklore, quirky characters, queerness, and Domhnall Gleeson? We can’t wait. Part of the festival’s NEXT programming, this film promises to be equally delightful and strange.
Barbara Forever
Barbara Forever
Sundance
Director: Brydie O’Connor
Synopsis: An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: This lesbian filmmaker was a trailblazer in experimental sapphic cinema. Her films, including Dyketactics (1974), Sync Touch (1981), and Nitrate Kisses (1992), were among the earliest and most influential works exploring lesbian identity and life, and she paved the way for sapphic filmmakers to come. This documentary, directed by Brydie O’Connor, uses archival footage to paint a portrait of an incredible woman who made it her life’s mission to tell lesbian stories.
Jaripeo
Jaripeo
Sundance
Directors: Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig
Synopsis: A journey to Michoacán’s hypermasculine rodeos descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing, leading to a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Efraín Mojica, who directs alongside Rebecca Zweig, uses this medium to bring audiences into the world of rural rodeos known as “jaripeos,” and the secret queer world hidden behind and within its machismo.
ZI
ZI
Sundance
Director & writer: Kogonada
Starring: Michelle Mao, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jin Ha
Synopsis: In Hong Kong, a young woman haunted by visions of her future self meets a stranger who changes the course of her night — and possibly her life.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Another queer story, part of the festival’s NEXT program, promises to be a lyrical and experimental tale that rides the line between sci-fi and the supernatural. Plus, Michelle Mao, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jin Ha star together to explore “existential anxiety [and] romantic misgiving.” Seated.
Leviticus
Leviticus
Sundance
Director & writer: Adrian Chiarella
Starring: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, and Mia Wasikowska
Synopsis: Two star-crossed teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most — each other.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Not all queer coming-of-age stories are light; some are just as frightening as they are profound, especially in a world that is all too often hostile to our love and our lives. This film explores how that horror manifests both outside us and within, through a supernatural lens.
Antiheroine
Antiheroine
Sundance
Directors: Edward Lovelace and James Hall
Synopsis: Singer, songwriter, and actor Courtney Love has long had an impact on rock and pop culture. Now sober and set to release new music for the first time in over a decade, Courtney is ready to reveal her story, unfiltered and unapologetic.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Love her, hate her (for the record, I love her), there is no denying that Courtney Love has the spirit of a rock star. Complex, raw, mysterious, unpredictable, constantly reinventing, and profoundly talented. This documentary offers a view into her next chapter, and we can’t wait to peek through the keyhole and glimpse what she has in store—and who she is now.
Night Nurse
Night Nurse
Sundance
Director & writer: Georgia Bernstein
Starring: Cemre Paksoy, Bruce McKenzie, and Eléonore Hendricks
Synopsis: As a series of perverse scam calls unsettles an idyllic retirement community, a starry-eyed nurse becomes entangled with her mysterious patient.
Waiting to begin her first-day orientation for her new night nurse job at a luxury retirement community, Eleni notices an energy in the geriatric exercise pool. There’s something unexpected about how the bodies are coming together in the water, the mental energy, the tone of conversation, and the way her new client turns around, out of the blue, to stare straight into her eyes.
Why we can’t we wait to see it:Psychosexual thrillers are too few and far between for our liking, so that alone caught our attention. But there’s something strange and transgressive in the description alone, and we can’t wait to see what that will mean.
Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant
Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant
Sundance
Director & writer: THUNDERLIPS
Starring: Hannah Lynch, Yvette Parsons, Arlo Green, and Jackie van Beek
Synopsis: When a messy millennial underachiever accidentally gets alien-pregnant, she must overcome skeptical doctors, a useless baby daddy, and her oversharing mum in order to survive and reclaim her life.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Remember when we said some of these films are spiritually queer? Well, here we are. There’s something wickedly off-kilter and camp about the scenario in this comedy from New Zealand, and we’re claiming it as our own.
The Musical
The Musical
Sundance
Director: Giselle Bonilla
Writer: Alexander Heller
Starring: Will Brill, Gillian Jacobs, and Rob Lowe
Synopsis: When a frustrated playwright and middle school theater teacher finds out his ex-girlfriend has started dating his nemesis, the school’s principal, he decides to ruin the principal’s chances of winning the Blue Ribbon of Academic Excellence.
Why we can’t we wait to see it: Again, is this textually queer? We don’t think so, but we know diva behavior when we see it. Revenge by way of the theater? Yeah, that’s gay—and we can’t wait to dig into this wickedly dark comedy.
