Windows on Worlds Far from Home
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The unexpected find of the festival was Some Nights I Feel Like Walking from Filipino writer-director Petersen Vargas, which takes us from the colorfully lit nighttime streets of Manila to a blazing bonfire amid a countryside village festival. Uno, Bay, Ge, and Rush are jaded teenage street hustlers trading sex for rent money in the capital city when Zion, a naïf with a mysterious past, joins their scene. Uno, the protagonist, first encounters a bruised and fragile Zion while seeking sex in a bus station restroom, and then they’re reunited when a man in a porn theater hires them for a three-way. Uno is drawn to Zion’s innocence and feels protective of him: this newcomer hasn’t been hardened like Uno and his friends. “This thing that we do, it brainwashes us into thinking we can’t own anything. Even our bodies,” he tells Zion.

            After tragedy strikes, the teens begin an odyssey that changes them individually and resets relationships among them. Uno’s affection for Zion and the literal and metaphorical journey they make together recall the 1991 Gus Van Sant film My Own Private Idaho, in which a hustler portrayed by River Phoenix falls for a dilettante played by Keanu Reeves. But the connection between Uno and Zion proves to be deeper. Russell Morton’s cinematography is gorgeous on Manila’s streets but never more impressive than at the film’s climax, which takes place during a single continuous shot lasting at least 15 minutes and covering a mile or more, from an isolated encampment of drag queens and trans women to a village square where the group forges a lasting bond.

It has been 32 years since Taiwanese writer-director Ang Lee and his longtime screenwriting partner James Schamus brought The Wedding Banquet to arthouse screens, and a lot has changed for the LGBT community since then. Korean-American writer-director Andrew Ahn, working with co-writer Schamus, has crafted a loose remake of Lee’s film that’s quick to acknowledge the current reality. As the 2025 version of The Wedding Banquet opens, PFLAG mom May Chen receives an award for supporting her lesbian daughter Angela, who quietly simmers with frustration over her mother’s late-in-coming acceptance. In the new version, Angela and her wisecracking best friend Chris (played by Bowen Yang) are saddled with self-doubts that weigh down their respective relationships: Angela’s with Lee and Chris’ with Min.

            Min, a Korean grad student whose visa is expiring, hatches a plan for a green card wedding to Angela so he doesn’t have to leave Seattle or come out to his family. To sweeten the deal, he offers to fund in vitro fertilization for Lee, who badly wants to be a mother and has already undergone two unsuccessful rounds of treatment. But to pull off their ruse, they’ll need to impress Min’s canny grandmother Ja-Young, who is wiser and more insightful than anyone anticipates. This Wedding Banquet is frequently moving but also packed with belly laughs. The sold-out crowd at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts clearly ate it up.

Director Kaye Adelaide’s satirical found-footage horror-comedy, The Rebrand, may be the first scary movie in which the Big Bad is a social media lifestyle influencer. Blair (Andi E. McQueen, playing a muscular butch who bears a striking resemblance to Penn Badgley of Netflix’ You) and Thistle (Nancy Webb, who cowrote the film with Adelaide, as a femme styled like a drag queen cosplaying as Lindsay Lohan) appear to share an ideal heteronormative-lesbian life but have been publicly canceled by their online admirers after Thistle made unspecified anti-trans comments during a livestream. “We ultimately feel honored to be attacked by our community,” one of them says to the camera, fully deadpan.

            The vapid couple hires a heavily pregnant bisexual videographer, Nicole, to shoot an apology video and document their life together. Dangling increasing sums of money in front of Nicole, the couple eventually persuades her to stay for the weekend, during which Thistle repeatedly escalates her demands and intrusions into Nicole’s privacy. Thistle’s passive-aggression becomes increasingly aggressive until the situation develops into a full-on horror movie scenario, though the film never entirely stops being funny.

One of the most indelible figures of director Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which captured New York’s queer ballroom scene as the 1980s drew to a close, was a young trans performer named Venus Xtravaganza. Venus, who shared relatable dreams of love and success in the film, was murdered during its making, a crime that was never solved. I’m Your Venus, a documentary from director Kimberly Reed, details efforts by her Italian-Puerto Rican birth family, the Pellagattis, and her chosen family, the House of Xtravaganza, to find her killer and honor her legacy.

            The Pellagatti brothers posthumously change their sister’s legal name, replace her tombstone, and press for a deeper investigation into her murder, while her queer and trans family from the House of Xtravaganza works to get her home in Jersey City designated a historic landmark. Her brothers meet with friends from her life in New York and face the ways in which they failed to support Venus during her lifetime, and ultimately the two families find themselves united in a shared cause, across a series of moving scenes that demonstrate how even the most unlikely groups can find common ground.

ACLU attorney Chase Strangio is the first openly trans lawyer to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Strangio is at the center of Heightened Scrutiny, a documentary exploring the rising tide of attacks on trans rights. In the film, dozens of other trans people and allies also have their say, providing a broad survey of the arguments surrounding gender-affirming healthcare and the rights of trans people simply to exist.

       Director Sam Feder follows Strangio as he prepares for his December 2024 argument before the high court against a Tennessee law blocking treatment for trans minors. That narrative is intercut with talking-head segments with trans and allied journalists, as well as scenes that include trans rights rallies and intimate gatherings with trans celebrities such as Elliot Page and Miss Peppermint, and with a startlingly articulate twelve-year-old New York trans girl named Mila. This is a thoughtful, moving film and a useful primer for anyone who needs to know more about trans people or the conservative efforts to wipe them out of existence.

Several other films stood out for their ingenuity or perspective, including the Canadian documentary Bulletproof: A Lesbian’s Guide to Surviving the Plot, which examines the “Bury Your Gays” trope in television and film by exploring the backlash that followed the onscreen deaths of beloved lesbian characters. A San Francisco-set feature, Outerlands depicts a nonbinary alcoholic re-examining their messy family relationships after a hookup with a coworker leads to surrogate parenthood for their precocious twelve-year-old daughter. Pooja, Sir, made in Nepal, sends gender-nonconforming Detective Inspector Pooja Thapa from Kathmandu to a distant town to find two young boys kidnapped during the country’s 2015 Madhesi protests. Dante’s Inferno gets a contemporary, candy-colored Colombian spin in Rains Over Babel, as a motley group of misfits gathers at the titular nightclub to face matters of life, death, sexuality, and gender, with help from a talking salamander named Rosa. Opposite to that film’s zany tone is the spare but searing Sandbag Dam, a Croation coming-of-age drama about a teenage love affair snuffed out by parental disapproval but rekindled when one of the boys returns home for his father’s funeral.