‘It’s about being seen’: Devin Shears and Benjamin Turnbull on ‘Cherub’
INSIDE OUT 2025: From graduation project to festival favourite, the director and actor discuss sincerity, vulnerability, and forming relationships through images.
debut feature
All You Need is Love and Queerpop: ‘Queens of Drama’ (2024) by Alexis Langlois
XPOSED 2025: The French filmmaker soars to beautifully chaotic, queer, campy heights with this festival favourite about two star-crossed lovers looking down the barrel of the music industry’s straight and conformist gun.
Beneath the Shade of Your Leaves, I Grow: ‘Cactus Pears’ (2025) by Rohan Parashuram Kanawade
SXSW LONDON / INSIDE OUT 2025: This multi-award winner is a quiet journey into sensorial discovery between a man who goes to the Maharashtra countryside for his father’s funeral and an unwed farmer.
Inside These Walls, I’ll Carry You: ‘The Crowd’ (2025) by Sahand Kabiri
INSIDE OUT 2025: The Iranian writer-director signs a profound testament to community in this tale of celebration, mourning, and impending departure.
‘The writing of history has to be messier’: Paula Tomás Marques on ‘Two Times João Liberada’
INDIELISBOA 2025: The writer-director shares her perspective on the disruption of standardised historical narratives, the politics of representation, and fostering materiality that evokes the power of archival work.
San Francisco, I’m Coming Home: Heterotopia and Elena Oxman’s ‘Outerlands’
SFFILM 2025: The US writer-director makes her tenderly liminal feature debut with a story that’s just as much a reckoning with being stuck in limbo as it is a love letter to The City.
‘The film was a reclamation of this right to imagine our lives, our stories’: Kani Lapuerta on ‘Niñxs’
VISIONS DU RÉEL 2025: Mexican filmmaker Kani Lapuerta shares his experience of spending eight years bringing us into the joyous world of Karla, a young trans girl living in a town outside of Mexico City.
‘In my experience of writing and filmmaking, a lot comes from the gut’: Elena Oxman on ‘Outerlands’
BFI FLARE 2025: The US writer-director explores the origins of her debut feature’s nonbinary central character, finding the nostalgic and sacred through screens and music, and creating a sort of cinematic infinity mirror.
Sex Work, Yassified and Empowered: ‘Fucktoys’ (2025) by Annapurna Sriram
SXSW 2025: In her self-described “bubblegum grindhouse” feature, the Nashville-born actor turned writer-director creates a stylistically compelling, even if at times slightly too plotless, sex work-cum-road movie comedy.
‘It’s a film about how difficult it can be for queer people to love in a world that doesn’t love them’: Alexis Langlois on ‘Queens of Drama’
BFI FLARE 2025: The French filmmaker speaks on their campy, vibrant, and delightfully spectacular debut feature, a musical following the romance between two musical divas through tumultuous decades.