The Gaze Always Leads: ‘Love Letters’ (2025) by Alice Douard
FRAMELINE50: With her feature debut, the César-winning French filmmaker makes her mark: rhythm, a camera that follows, and a story that’s close to home.
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A Smothering Embrace: ‘The Holy Boy’ (2025) by Paolo Strippoli
KARLOVY VARY 2026: The young Italian filmmaker moulds a new face for folk horror in his newest work, which ties the monstrous to the act of repression.
‘People who do not eat well are not to be trusted with artwork’: Viv Li on ‘Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest’
KARLOVY VARY 2026: The China-born, Berlin-based director dishes up East and West without ever tasting resolution.
‘I believe there is something special about queer desires, whether tenderness or brutality’: Aung Phyoe on ‘Fruit Gathering’
KARLOVY VARY 2026: The writer-director shares his conscientious approach to a debut feature focused on desire, intimacy, and economic reality of working women in contemporary Myanmar.
‘While we were exploring the characters, we also found space for a bit of ambiguity’: Mate Ugrin on ‘Petty Thieves’
KARLOVY VARY 2026: Between public spaces and private encounters comes the Croatian director’s debut feature, which trades in different forms of intimacy through all that is left unspoken.
Retracing Our Steps: ‘In a Whisper’ (2026) by Leyla Bouzid
FRAMELINE50: A young sapphic Tunisian woman living in Paris returns home for her uncle’s funeral, both entangling and disentangling the complexities of a familial diorama when she learns her uncle, too, was queer.
‘There’s this effort from queer and trans filmmakers to really look at the media that’s shaped us’: Kate Bove, Frameline associate director of programmes
CURATOR TALKS: On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the world’s longest-running queer film festival, we explore how the event responds to history and sees the transformation of queer cinema.
‘I think identification is the only way we reach the other’: Alice Douard on ‘Love Letters’
FRAMELINE50: The French filmmaker talks to us about staying in the realm of questions, awkwardness, and misunderstandings while building a family in her first feature.
‘It was important to show that transition is very much a collaborative experience’: Amy Jenkins and Adam Sieswerda on ‘Adam’s Apple’
FRAMELINE50: The mother and son duo share their experiences of looking at the same memories from different temporal vantage points and their thoughts on a trans gaze in documentary filmmaking.
‘I want to change the way mainstream media sees queer women and queer Black people’: Sandulela Asanda on ‘Black Burns Fast’
FRAMELINE50: The South African filmmaker shares her no-holds-barred approach to making films, knowing what her audience wants to see, and bringing portrayals of Black girls back to a genuinely recognisable reality.