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
Valentina, the debut feature from Brazilian filmmaker Cássio Pereira dos Santos, ends with an alarming statistic. In his native land, an estimated 82% of transgender students drop out of school. When you consider the country has a population of just under 214 million, and gender-diverse individuals—that being, all those who don’t identify as cisgender—make up […]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
In Poppy Field, the philosophy of art blends with the sad reality of our current political landscape, where there is still an attempt to silence and censor queer art and expression in seemingly liberal European countries. When Levan Akin’s film And Then We Danced was released in 2019, ultra-conservative groups raided screenings of the film […]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
Family tensions simmer and new flames spark at a British holiday caravan site in Sweetheart, an honest and witty debut from director Marley Morrison. Lucy Clarke reviews. If I asked you when you were at your most annoying, teenagehood would be a popular answer. The ages of 13–18 are so awkward that by the time […]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
Boy Meets Boy, the debut directorial feature from Daniel Sánchez López, does everything in its power to subvert your expectations of what a romance film is. From the silent, languid opening scene to its melancholic and sobering ending, Boy Meets Boy is an experience that shows love how it really is, rather than how Hollywood […]Read More
Tom Prior and Oleg Zagorodnii star as Soviet Air Force soldiers grappling with sexual tension and professional pride in Peeter Rebane’s debut feature. But with its familiar structure and sanitized approach, Firebird is perhaps enthralling to a fault. Based on a true story, Estonian director Peeter Rebane first discovered Sergey Fetiso when he read his […]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
Grandmother and grandson connect in Jump, Darling, a touching if familiar rumination on life and identity. When we first hear Russell (Thomas Duplessie), the young man at the centre of writer/director Phil Connell’s debut feature film, he’s leaving a voicemail to his elderly grandmother. “Since when have you stopped driving?” his upbeat, crackled voice asks. […]Read More
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