Sundance hit 'Jimpa' explores love, family, and queer identity

Editor's note: This review contains spoilers for Jimpa, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

One can safely bet that Jimpa will soon become a go-to comfort movie for many queer people and their families.

Sophie Hyde's Jimpa is about a family, focusing on the heterosexual filmmaker mother Hannah (Oscar winner Olivia Colman), her 16-year-old nonbinary teen Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde, the director's child), and her gay father, Jim, known affectionately by Frances as "Jimpa" (Oscar nominee John Lithgow).

The movie establishes that Frances is having a hard time in school in Adelaide, Australia. Despite being the president of their school’s LGBTQ+ club, they don't have much of a queer community there.

When the family goes on a trip to Amsterdam to visit Jimpa, Frances reveals that they want to move in with him to finish high school. This revelation throws Hannah for a loop as she is forced to come to terms with her relationship with her father and her child.

In Amsterdam, Frances gets involved with two very different (but still connected) queer communities. While spending time with Jimpa, Frances gets to go to dinner and have discussions with Jim, who has made a career and life out of fighting for gay rights ever since he came out alongside his group of elderly gay friends.

Jim's coming out happened shortly after Hannah's birth. While her parents stayed together for a while, Jim left when she was a young teen. Jim decided to move to Amsterdam to be more directly involved in the movement. And, ever since, he's been a distant, but loved, part of her life.

When you're a young queer and trans person, the generation of elders who fought during the AIDS crisis and at the rise of the LGBTQ+ movement can be deified and seen as untouchable heroes, which is exactly how Frances sees Jimpa. Even though the saying goes that you shouldn't meet your heroes — especially if they're going to misgender you and tell you bisexuality doesn't exist — Jimpa shows that there's still a lot of value and so much love to be found in those relationships.

Frances also gets a chance to explore the young community of queer and trans people who take them out dancing, bond over being poly, and make Frances feel like they're not alone. Frances even meets a girl, and they fall for each other, fast! There are some definite bumps along the way, but this visit goes mostly well until Jim suffers a stroke and is hospitalized. Now, Hannah and Frances have to come to terms with their relationship with him in a much more urgent way.

Jimpa is a very personal and sweet movie about family — and it is based on Hyde's own relationship with her father and child. It shows how we can all come together, even when we have different sexualities, genders, worldviews, and generations.

The movie ends with the song "I Know a Place" by MUNA, which perfectly sums up the feeling of finding community and family that Frances and Hannah have done.

Colman is great as Hannah, a straight filmmaker trying to connect with her queer family and doing her best to let them live the lives they need to live to be themselves, even if it means they aren't as close to her as she wants. Lithgow is mighty as Jim, perfectly embodying the older generation of queer elders who have lived through the fight and are struggling a bit with the complexities of young people. For instance, he makes fun of his daughter for being too straight and his "grandthing," as he calls Frances, for being too queer.

Mason-Hyde is great and brings real authenticity to the role. They definitely hold their own opposites from these two acting legends. More jaded viewers might grumble at the sentimentality and softness of the film, but in these times, a sentimental film about love, empathy, curiosity, and connection is a welcome and needed thing.

Hollywood definitely needs more depictions of families that love and support trans children — and when they're as good as Jimpa, it's even better.

Four out of Five stars.