The NY LGBTQ+ Film Festival, one of the country’s most prestigious queer film events, turns 35

NEW YORK — The New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival is celebrating 35 years of elevating queer and trans stories by bringing all facets of the LGBTQ experience to the screen.

From now through Oct. 24, one of the nation’s largest LGBTQ film festivals will once again shine a rainbow-colored light on the power of queer, trans and nonbinary storytelling.

This year, for its milestone anniversary, the festival is screening 132 films from over two dozen countries, featuring stories that were carefully selected to make audiences both reflect on the past 35 years of LGBTQ film and imagine what the next 35 years — and beyond — will bring.

This year’s eclectic and ambitious selection includes the work of emerging filmmakers, Oscar-buzzy features, award-winning foreign films, queer classics, and even a special screening of “May December,” a “deliciously witty film” starring gay icons Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. The screening of the flick — described as“the most fun film” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — will be followed by a chat with its director, queer filmmaker extraordinaire Todd Haynes.

Since the festival’s first edition in 1998, organizer NewFest has focused on highlighting and expanding LGBTQ voices through film and related programming — offering queer and trans storytellers a platform to share their perspectives, as well as a space for the community to come together.

Staying true to its motto that “representation matters [and] queer film can change the world,” the festival has grown from a local queer movement, created in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, into one of the world’s most prestigious LGBTQ film gatherings.

NewFest has “grown tremendously” over the past few years, executive director David Hatkoff told the Daily News, excited about the “incredible momentum [the festival has] going into the 35th anniversary year.”

“We’ve really grown in every metric,” Hatkoff said, referring to an increase in the number of films shown during the festival and other events throughout the year — including “NewFest Pride” and the queer classics retrospective “Queering the Cannon” — along with a growing number of projects providing support for emerging storytellers. Those include the “Black Filmmakers Initiative” and the“New Voices Filmmaker Grant,” a partnership between NewFest and Netflix designed to support the work of underrepresented filmmakers.

For the festival’s 35th edition, NewFest’s programming team received more than 1,000 online submissions from filmmakers worldwide, a testament to the organization’s ever-growing expansion, which is also reflected in a wider variety of stories and experiences brought to the screen, according to director of programming Nick McCarthy.

Besides the occasional big-award-season contenders — including “Nyad,” a film about marathon swimmer Diane Nyad starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, and “All of Us Strangers,” a romantic-fantasy starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal — films that have grabbed the top queer awards on the past year’s international circuit will also delight in-person audiences at theaters in Brooklyn and Manhattan, or virtually across the country.

Those include Japan’s “Monster,” winner of the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay awards at Cannes, and North Macedonia’s “Housekeeping for Beginners,” which took home the Queer Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Two winners of the Berlin Film Festival’s Teddy Award are also part of this year’s lineup. Nigeria’s “All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White” was the winner of a Teddy for best feature film, while France’s “Orlando, My Political Biography” won a Teddy for best documentary and is described by McCarthy as a “delicious delirious manifesto, from a trans point of view, about Virginia Woolf.”

But what’s “really exciting” about this year’s selection is how most films, while made with a queer audience in mind, reflect a broader human experience.

“We’re not just seeing the typical coming out stories anymore,” McCarthy said. “These are queer characters that are existing at the center of their narratives, where the idea that they are queer is not the most prominent one.”

This year’s 12-day queer cinematic extravaganza got started Thursday at the SVA Theatre in Chelsea with the New York premiere of “Rustin,” the much-overdue biography of the gay Black civil rights hero Bayard Rustin.

The story of one of the main architects of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — arrested on anti-gay charges in 1953 and only pardoned in 2020, more than 30 years after his death — was brought to the big screen by the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground.

It felt “really appropriate” to kick off the festival’s 35th anniversary with such an important story, Hatkoff said, noting that Rustin was “a New Yorker who actually lived right around the corner from the SVA Theatre.”

The New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival runs through Oct. 24. Tickets and screening passes can be purchased online.

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