Love in All Colours: 10 Queer Films 🏳️🌈
Bucharest Pride is coming up (July 21-29) and we wanted to celebrate diversity, free love, and the fight for equality for the LGBTQIA+ community the best way we know how: through a list of films that honour queer history and art. From films that shine a light on the drag subculture to provocative works that have become a benchmark for queer cinema, and even those stories that bring out the intense love between two prisoners.
The recommendations are made by Films in Frame writers and contributors, film critics, journalists, filmmakers, supporters of free love.
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Happy Together (dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)

Imagine me and you, I do
(it’s so nice to see this film at the cinema with the person you love)
I think about you day and night, it’s only right
(it’s also very hard at the same time)
To think about the one you love and hold them tight
(this film that made me fall in love with Astor Piazzola’s tangos)
So happy together
(among others)
If I should call you up, invest a dime
(I hope to visit Buenos Aires at least once before I die)
And you say you belong to me, and ease my mind
(although, here, Argentina is a land of doom)
Imagine how the world could be, so very fine
(a country where love passes fleetingly on the watched streets)
So happy together
(lonely every night, in front of a colonial-style club)
I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but you
(I can’t recall a more beautiful film about incompatible and unquenchable loves)
For all my life
(with its premonitory ending)
When you’re with me, baby, the skies’ll be blue
(with the most heart-wrenching dance in history)
For all my life
(there’s no mystery to be solved here, nothing incomprehensible)
Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba
(only if you’ve never loved someone)
Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba
(only if you’ve never escaped to a place far, far away)
Me and you, and you and me
(only then the Walkman scene remains unsolved)
No matter how they toss the dice, it had to be
(only then you can’t cry when you see it)
The only one for me is you, and you for me
(only then you still utter edicts about love)
So happy together
(only if you don’t know)
So happy together
(what it feels like)
And how is the weather?
(when)
So happy together
(that thing)
We’re happy together
(finally happens)
So happy together
(the one you’ve imagined)
Happy together
(so many times)
So happy together
(and you feel like you’re going to explode)
So happy together
(although it’s not exactly how you imagined it would be)
(Flavia Dima)
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The Watermelon Woman (dir. Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

Even though it is a landmark film of the New Queer Cinema, I chose to include it here because I saw it recently.
Played by the director herself, Cheryl Dunye is a young aspiring filmmaker who works at a video rental store (that’s so 90s❤️) with her friend, who is also African-American and queer. Cheryl wants to make a film about an African-American actress who plays obscure roles as a mammy in 1930s Hollywood movies. Unlike the other actors, she is credited under a pseudonym on the film credits: The Watermelon Woman. Building on this premise, the film achieves a bold and casual formal approach, combining 16mm film with the grainy texture of VHS tapes, skillfully using “news report-like” intertitles, in a playful font. Despite being a low-budget indie film (or because of it, as it sometimes appears to be filmed directly on the streets), Dunye depicts in great detail a world that is, today, as inaccessible as it is relevant: that of queer African-American women in 1990s Philadelphia. (Cristina Iliescu)
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Tropical Malady (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

In the heat and among the layered sounds of the jungle, Keng, a soldier stationed in a quiet Thai village, and Tong, a local boy, live their romance. With lingering frames flowing like the sweat on their skin, their love feels as necessary as every little part of the fauna, until one of them disappears, and we learn that he is actually the shape-shifting tiger that his lover ends up hunting.
To say that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films are dreamlike may sound like a cliché, but the way they stay in your body, in a feverish state, cannot be compared to anything else. The infinite sensory possibilities explored in the first part of the film and the limitations of closeness explored in the second one blend into a definition of love that no other filmmaker could achieve in a form that is as abstract as it is physical.
Some summer afternoons, I fall asleep deeply, suffocated by Tropical Malady, and then wake up, transformed. (Teona Galgoțiu)
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Please Like Me (created by Josh Thomas, 2023-2016)

For this Pride, I recommend a TV show that brings me great comfort. It doesn’t have an overtly political message, but rather a casual atmosphere and stories about the everyday lives of some queer people. I’m talking about Please Like Me written by Josh Thomas, a queer Australian comedian diagnosed with autism. I empathise a lot with Josh and his way of interacting with others: he tells the truth to your face, makes mean jokes sometimes, argues, can be impulsive and get into absurd situations, but by the end of the day, he shows that he cares about those around him and will be there for them in his own way. It gives me hope to see queer characters forming friendships, relationships, and communities, even if they are imperfect. And after all, it’s quite political to be hopeful and happy as a queer person, considering that we are constantly attacked by homophobic laws, harassed on the street, and singled out. (Luca Istodor)
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Tongues Untied (dir. Marlon Riggs, 1989)

How can one explain such deep-rooted oppressive systems like patriarchy or racism? Marlon Riggs answered this question through a largely autobiographical film that combines documentary, fiction, and performance. With a mix of irony and candour, Tongues Untied navigates a multitude of topics (gender roles, the AIDS epidemic, institutional racism, heteronormativity) through numerous stylistic approaches, which mainstream cinema could never have balanced as precisely or with the same emotional impact.
The film caused a lot of negative reactions when it was aired on television by PBS, but it received enthusiastic praise from the African-American intellectual sphere – for example, bell hooks praised it as a more nuanced and innovative representation than its contemporary (and better-known) Paris is Burning (dir. Jennie Livingston, 1990). Unlike the latter, Tongues Untied did not enjoy the same success in the cultural zeitgeist, perhaps due to its more ambitious stylistic aspirations, but mostly due to its deeply militant nature, which contrasts with Livingston’s more voyeuristic approach.
Even 30 years after its release, Tongues Untied remains an uncomfortable and provocative film that has since become a benchmark for queer, independent, African-American cinema. (Iulia Necșulescu)
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Kaboom (dir. Gregg Araki, 2010)

I think that until Kaboom, I understood and expected queer cinema to come up with much more polished, militant, and complex efforts. It’s also the first film by Araki that I saw, watching it last summer in a strange daze. I’m not saying that it’s not a polished film, on the contrary, in his desperate attempt to include a bit of everything, it ends up turning from a cold mishmash into a delicacy. From cult mania, science fiction, sitcom, slasher/murder mystery, we have before our eyes a queer coming-of-age story set in college, with a narrative in the likes of “the chosen one will save humanity from destruction”. Yes, it’s “simple, light, summery”, it’s shallow and at the same time, it builds, with a small budget and limited means of expression, mostly through a clever combination of hyper-stylized imagery and dialogue, a campy sci-fi tableau, without Bruce Willis or Milla Jovovich. It’s also the first film to be awarded the Queer Palm at Cannes. And yes, of course, I expect us to agree that a movie like Kaboom, in its genre-bending frenzy, is just as interesting as a film like Days (dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 2020).
My eyes hurt at the most kitschy transitions between shots, and I laughed hysterically at the scene where the witch student induces telepathic orgasms to her girlfriend. It’s a mumbo jumbo almost built to be forgettable, but it’s so tender and down-to-earth that it’s anything but. (Bogdan Balla)
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Paris Is Burning (dir. Jennie Livingstone, 1990)
What does a queer film mean anymore when all films are a bit queer? Arguably the pinnacle was reached in 1990 with Jennie Livingstone’s documentary Paris Is Burning, which, before RuPaul’s Drag Race, Pose, and Renaissance, brought the drag subculture into the spotlight with unprecedented empathy. This wasn’t the first time it was captured on the big screen (Frank Simon’s 1968 documentary The Queen is also fascinating), and the term “vogue” was already on everyone’s lips thanks to Madonna, but it had never been more fascinating to watch than here. An electrifying film about belonging and reinvention, Paris Is Burning is a true life lesson: it uplifts and tears you apart at the same time. (Laurențiu Paraschiv)
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Un chant d’amour / A Song of Love (dir. Jean Genet, 1950)

Un chant d’amour (1950) by Jean Genet, a perfect and impossibly free film. I’m particularly interested in the acting there, how a few dance scenes seem to have contaminated all the other gestures of the film, turning it into a silent choreography. Otherwise, the story itself, about the fleeting sex in a prison, the mad love of one prisoner for another, and the voyeuristic frustration of the guard, contains the entire later cinema of a Fassbinder, only that Genet has a much simpler poetic imagination: the flowers genitals in Un chant d’amour, for example. How I would like a reissue of The Thief’s Journal, translated and published in Romania by Pandora in 2002: poppers on paper.
But also, the bonus footage at the end of Aaron’s Russian Boy Orgy I (2001). Aaron Lawrence used to be a fairly popular American porn actor in the 2000s, mostly known for his travel videos. Arriving in the East, he organised filmed orgies in Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. At that time, Eastern boys were a great international fantasy – the foreign language, the spectacular hypermasculinity, the entry into capitalism (in other words, poverty) made the subject of many Western porno movies. There are even films about how exploitative their imagination and practice were, such as William E. Jones’s The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) and Wiktor Grodecki’s Body without a Soul (1996). But something else interests me now: the final three minutes of this strange Moscow video orgy, when Lawrence, his guide, Maxim, and cameraman, Vidkid Timo, go out to Pushkin Square to the first Russian McDonald’s and join the queue, where they throw video glances at a sad boy nearby. This recording perfectly captures the mise-en-scene of conformity, just as interesting as that of resistance. (Călin Boto)
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The Crying Game (dir. Neil Jordan, 1992)

A professor of Irish cinema in Dublin told me she no longer shows The Crying Game in her dedicated course because students find it “offensive”. I find that students have somewhat forgotten to let themselves be challenged by art. And that they started reducing a film to its manifest message, ignoring the fact that what made cinema a grand thing, for which some (not a few) gave their lives, are not the messages (often banal) but the way they are clothed in images and sounds. And Neil Jordan still knew, in the 90s (following a great film like Mona Lisa and anticipating the wonderful The Butcher Boy), how to dress them provocatively and sexy.
The Crying Game is one of those films that do give meaning to and honour the cigarette smoke in a decadent bar, the hoarse voices, the wet streets at night. I know few films that turn late 80s London into an infinite reservoir of intrigues pulsating somewhere outside the frame. Few films capture better the heavy existence, throbbing with sexuality, that still trembles when day breaks after a long night of debauchery. Few films have such narrative freedom, when one major event leads to another, and then to another, and then to another. Not quite Céline, but a cocktail of sex, race, and class, with Jaye Davidson as a trans starlet, a core of exotic darkness that blurs reason and overly strict categorizations, the ones that breed war. A cocktail that may be outdated, but one I enjoy tasting every now and then, when I long for a dangerous era that I did not live. (Victor Morozov)
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My Own Private Idaho (dir. Gus Van Sant, 1991)

This Shakespearean road movie by Gus Van Sant is among the first queer films I’ve seen and will always hold a special place in my heart, much like the shape and intensity that a sleeping River Phoenix holds in Keanu Reeves’ heart. (Anca Vancu)

An article written by the magazine's team