EKG

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Two strangers, each having a terrible night, cross paths and embark on a profound conversation about missed opportunities, fate, and the twists of destiny.

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Volunteering at an AIDS clinic in 1985 Manhattan tests an uptown rebel’s benevolence.

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After a brief conversation on the Grindr app, two men are meeting for a BDSM hook up, which goes beyond their expectations, blending fantasy and reality.

Short

In 1990s Athens, Angelo, an Albanian young man working at a record store, is eager to begin anew. A fleeting encounter with a client draws him into a world that feels strangely familiar. But will that cost him much?

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When relationship issues push Alex into finding a job, he ends up in the Czech gay porn industry.

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Following the loss of his husband, a grief-stricken retiree finds renewed connection with a mysterious young woman who's attempting to terminate a pregnancy.

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A group of unknown gay men connect via a dating app for casual encounters. The starting point is a chemsex party, where drug use intensifies sexual experiences, but also reveals the depths of human emotions. The film explores both the fascination and liberating energy of these encounters and the emptiness and loneliness that can haunt a gay man's life.

Made au CanadaCompetitionFeature

In the vein of the Tony award-winning musical Stereophonic, this must-see drama is a Behind the Music-style glimpse of a 2000s Toronto indie band with Fleetwood Mac-like flare ups. With a trans frontman and queer members, The New Normals break boundaries while breaking one another’s hearts. Building off the source material, the novel Heidegger Stairwell by Kayt Burgess, Karen Knox maintains balletic control of multiple perspectives and aesthetics, following how each of the five core members handles firsts: first music video, first phone sex job, first love triangle. Music saves this close-knit crew from quarrels when it’s not causing them, but it’s the in-fighting, the “threads of connection and tension” that keep their audience hungering for more. Will the trans frontman (Lane Webber) stay with his queer girlfriend and songwriting partner (June Laporte) or find a different tune with Lugh (Daniel Gravelle)? Will the band survive or live on only in tribute? These concerns converge in a film charged with envy, creative friendship, and reckless love, and chock-full of pedigreed talent, including co-writing credits from award-winning Canadian writer, Zoe Whittall and festival alumni, Pat Mills as well as original songs from Stars’ Torquil Campbell.

CompetitionFeature

Jorge is tousled and handsome, seemingly carefree, shouldering changes with cheerful resignation. But after his sudden death, his young mother and best friend, Carmen, is left grief-stricken, forced to reckon with the veracity of her son’s life, including his two lovers—one female, one male—left wondering why he’s ghosted them. At first, Carmen (Ludwika Paleta) refuses all comforts in the wake of her son’s death, cared for, despite her protests, by her kindly queer brother (Darío Rocas). Then, she goes digging. According to Jorge’s estranged father (Luis Velazquez), Jorge (Nicolás Haza) was depressed shortly before he drowned in the sea. Is this true—if so, why? And is this enough to prove his death was intentional? The search for answers will acquaint Carmen with Jorge’s jilted girlfriend (Adriana Palafox) and lovesick boyfriend (Alan Oliva), and reconcile her with a passion for music that hounds her even when she tries to leave it behind. In this expertly crafted tearjerker, writer-director Sofía Gómez-Córdova uses seamless flashbacks and home videos of happier times to reveal who the characters were. And Ludwika Paleta’s blistering performance-of-a-lifetime shows us who Carmen may be in the Thereafter.

Made au CanadaCompetitionShort

Robin is a young woman who lives alone above a gas station in North Bay. Every night she watches truckers fill their tanks up and munch on pepperettes. Robin has a secret. Robin is a porn addict. Robin can’t feel anything anymore.

CompetitionFeature

SPANISH • ENGLISH ST | Argentinian filmmaker Matías is an intense perfectionist struggling to shape his autobiographical film as the past wriggles from his grip. Is Alexander—a dashing fabulist from Sweden he met in Italy as a boy—the lost love of his life? Or just a lovely, bittersweet dream? At the United World College of the Adriatic, with its diverse, exuberant student body, young Matías (Santiago Madrussan) finds a freedom he never knew in Argentina. There, he is befriended by Alexander (Oscar Morgan), whose rousing stories and bedroom eyes make the world more magical, and whose family’s vast holiday home becomes a memory palace for all that was left unsaid. In his 40s, Matías (co-writer/director Juan Pablo Di Pace) looks back at this time and, with a festival deadline looming, tries to fathom the sizzling closeness and coded interactions. A key piece of evidence lying dormant for when he least expects it. With its meta intrigues and captivating sweep, Duino is an elegiac masterwork crackling with swoon-worthy chemistry. A film that asks: how far are we willing to go for a proper conclusion, and what, in the end, remains voices in the wind?

Made au CanadaCompetitionFeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Small towns are no place for secrets. Among the churchgoing folk of a Newfoundland fishing village, Eliza leads a double-life: exploring transgressive photography while managing an unspoken romance with a shunned woman and the insistent advances of a married man. Hearsay only two steps behind. Sneaking around the neighbours, Eliza (Michaela Kurimsky) stages increasingly revealing photoshoots in locations both remote and close to home—perhaps too close. With every new post to her 318K Instagram followers, she imperils the careful balance she’s cultivated between her coexistence with fellow villagers, her burgeoning romance with Toni (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), and the married man (Peter Mooney) whose desire for her titillates as much as it terrifies. As a church fundraiser she’s helping to organize approaches, so too does a blaze of gossip, and choices are made that could leave her forever shattered. By turns kinky and kind-hearted, Melanie Oates’ second feature explores our wildest selves with a complexity that continues to deepen through to the final striking frame. All the while, embodying a true sense of place, depicting the rough shores and spirited personalities of one of the most isolated—and spectacular—of Canadian locales.

CompetitionFeatureVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

DUTCH • ENGLISH ST | Capturing the recklessness of youth and the excitement of newfound sexual liberties in sensuous black-and-white cinematography, Dennis Alink’s Out offers up a vivid and tender tale of being young and gay. Tom (Bas Keizer, in a star-making performance) and Ajani (an effervescent Jefferson Yaw Frempong-Manson) are closeted secondary school sweethearts who yearn for life outside of their small-minded, rural community in the Netherlands. Their solution is Amsterdam, where the queer scene is thriving and they can work at their dreams of becoming filmmakers. Quickly falling into the Dutch capital’s gay nightlife offers the pair some initial thrills: cheeky games of Never Have I Ever, limo rides across the city, eye-opening trips to the bathhouse. But the challenges quickly follow, pushing them to separately question: “Who am I, and where do I fit in?” Recalling such classic monochromatic films about wayward youth as The Last Picture Show and Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, Alink and his queer collaborators present a lived-in, piercing portrait that proves coming out isn’t just a pronouncement of one’s sexuality, it’s a simultaneously joyous and heartbreaking journey of self-discovery.

CompetitionShort

Jaya and Fatima, two women in love, are separated because of Jaya's marriage arranged by her conservative father. Helpless, Jaya is about to give up, when life suddenly brings her to a strange crossroad.

CompetitionDocumentaryVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

Outspoken Micheline (81) and sensitive artist Yves (68) have “insatiable” longings for sexual and relational intimacy. Francis (70) is a proudly “loudmouth(ed)” activist who wants to ensure that yearnings become reality. All, under the banner of Grey Pride, have no less an ambition than to change the world. Able to detect, as a minority, things that are unjust to all, queer seniors in France are revealing universal truths about the cult of youth and the medicalization of old age. These Grey Priders are combatting indifference, overhauling the nursing home model, and rethinking how spaces for the elderly accommodate libidos. Micheline, Yves, and Francis may have had their sex lives stifled by repression, loneliness, or AIDS, but they are far from ready to enter “The Zone” of societal relegation. They are prepared to take on embedded prejudices, as well as partners and friends with divergent views on death, in their revolutionary intentions. With stirring poeticism—seasons redolent of adaptation; trees symbolizing how bodies bend or break; desire represented by a glowing red sex toy—filmmaker Alexis Taillant shows us what it means to live “a quiet, wild life.”

CompetitionFeature

PORTUGUESE • ENGLISH ST | Wellington (defiantly nicknamed Baby) trades his detention centre cell for the streets of São Paulo, absorbed into the life of an in-demand “escort” with old school methods. Torn between this erotic father figure, two chosen families, and the mother who left him, Wellington must discern which link is the strongest. Against a backdrop of corrupt cops, vengeful kingpins, and Brazilian ball culture, maybe-18-year-old Wellington (João Pedro Mariano) falls for 42-year-old sex worker cum drug dealer Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), who has a son not much younger than Wellington being raised by lesbian mothers. The two share a charged, teasing bond with yo-yoing power dynamics. Wellington softens Ronaldo, schooling him in voguing’s ebullience and showing him his battle scars, while Ronaldo grounds his protege, giving him boxing lessons while doling out paternal advice and setting strict boundaries. Boundaries that Ronaldo is desperate to maintain and Wellington comes to resent when youthful potential and a biological parent draw him away. Propelled by Marcelo Caetano’s stylish direction, this gritty coming-of-age tale wrestles with themes of love and coercion, considering what’s still possible for a restless heart when a ‘baby’ becomes a man.

CompetitionDocumentaryVIRTUAL EXCLUSIVE

The work of Two-Spirit, nêhiyaw (Cree) artist George Littlechild took the reality of residential schools head-on decades before it would enter the collective Canadian conscience. A Sixties Scoop survivor, Littlechild uses his “whimsical,” improvised technique to unlock colourful exuberance and long-held trauma. Conor McNally, a Métis filmmaker, honours his journey. Littlechild was given his great grandfather’s name, nanekawâsis, at a Powwow in 2001. Both Littlechild and the eponymously named film embody its meaning: “swift child.” As we pay witness to a childhood shuffled between foster homes and Littlechild’s emergence as a fleet-fingered artist, the documentary makes fluid connections between past and present. Archival footage blends with warmly tinted 16mm interviews of 65-year-old Littlechild, still evolving in his practice, still passing on his deeply felt knowledge of his ancestry and “Rainbow” spirit. Whereas his partner, John Powell, uses art to govern his freewheeling tendencies, Littlechild harnesses paint to break free of his circumscribed daily life, healing himself and his audience through enlightened transcendence. nanekawâsis begins and ends with a sky full of colour, beautifully eliding time, revealing how light and dark, expectancy and reflection are all indispensable parts of life’s circle.