My First Summer was just one of many excellent productions on offer at this year’s BFI Flare festival. Yet writer-director Katie Found’s debut feature really stands out from the crowd, mainly because of just how beautiful the Australian production is. This film is (almost) everything a teen romance should be: sweet, wholesome, grounded in the reality […]Read More
The BFI Flare Festival, which took place from 17 to 28 March 2021, showcased a wide range of incredible films from across the globe. With a sole focus on LGBTIQ+ narratives and stories, both fiction and factual, BFI Flare brought lesser-known stories to the forefront over its two-week calendar. Features such as Rūrangi, Sweetheart and […]Read More
Directed by Shana Myara, Well Rounded is easily one of the most colourful entries at 2021’s BFI Flare Festival. The documentary’s mission: to tell as many plus-sized people as possible that their bodies are beautiful, and that—as Kimmortal’s ‘Sad Femme Club’ repeatedly tells us—“Baby, you are enough”. Trigger Warning: this review contains mentions of r*pe. […]Read More
When watching films from a festival that champions queer voices and stories, you would expect them to highlight stories that did just that. What you don’t expect is for a film to end with the only out gay character being told that God has something great in store for him—especially after said character has denounced […]Read More
Tove, a new biopic of Tove Jansson—famous for creating the children’s comic book characters the Moomins—explores a pivotal decade in the artist’s life. The film, directed by Zaida Bergroth, is set in Helsinki in the decade following VE Day and follows Tove experimenting with her sexuality and her art. Early on in the film, our protagonist […]Read More
Rūrangi, created by writer Cole Meyers, director Max Currie and producer Craig Gainsborough, is one of the standout entries at this year’s BFI Flare. Cut from the 2020 web series of the same name, the film follows a young transgender man who is forced to come to terms with a difficult past upon returning to […]Read More
Rebel Dykes, a new documentary—directed by Harri Shanahan and Sîan Williams and produced by Siobhan Fahey—is a wild and wicked retelling of the lives of a group of feminist lesbians in 1980s London, at the forefront of socio-political progress. The documentary provides an oral history for the group: a loose collective of friends and lovers […]Read More
Black high schooler Tunde Johnson is trapped in a time loop where each day ends the same way: with the reading out of his obituary. There’s a sight we’ve become all too familiar with over the past decade: black teens being killed by cops. In the opening moments of The Obituary of Tunde Johnson, the feature […]Read More
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