2025 was an impressive year for LGBTQIA+ films at the 75th edition of the Berlinale (13–23 February 2025), where these films on the whole demonstrated a turn toward the experience of queerness rather than the identity of such. This was not the case for every film, but there appeared a noticeable shift toward stories that either featured queer characters in the context of their daily lives—without an emphasis on an interrogation of their identities outright—or characters who simply made reference to their sexuality without a large bearing on the plot. While this is not meant to be a normative take on the types of queer films that should or shouldn’t be celebrated, it is refreshing to see a breadth of films that encompass different approaches to heterogeneous queer experiences.
Admittedly, there is one caveat: in part due to the large volume of LGBTQIA+ films, there were also a whole set of queer works I missed. These included Disobedience and Colette screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s eagerly awaited directorial debut Hot Milk, Shatara Michelle Ford’s Midwestern US-set road movie Dreams in Nightmares, Alex Russell’s Lurker coming straight from Sundance, Ira Sachs’ Ben Whishaw-led new feature Peter Hujar’s Day, and Dag Johan Haugerud’s Golden Bear-winning trilogy-closer Dreams (Sex Love) (original title: Drømmer). There were also several feature documentaries, including Billy Shebar’s Monk in Pieces (Panorama Documentary) and Yihwen Chen’s Queer as Punk (Forum). Many of these films are moving quickly to other festivals—including the first two fiction films, which will be featured at BFI Flare.
It felt both like a triumph and a letdown to see Lesbian Space Princess win the Teddy for Best Feature Film (read our review of the film). On one hand, it’s fantastic to see a joyous, riotous animated work championed for this award, alongside the directors as first-time feature filmmakers steering an Australian project (and not a European co-production, at that). On the other hand, it’s a film that plainly skates by on jokes from the zeitgeist, perhaps even a decade late, which makes its selection for this award. Lesbian Space Princess is premised on identity while not necessarily exploring its characters in depth, leading them to be defined much by their label (we know who our protagonist is because of the title, for instance) rather than their experience.
Dreamers by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor
Similar notes could be made about Dreamers, a deeply well-intentioned effort by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor that fails to give her characters substance and relies on visual choices that make the film feel far too glossy for its material. The two main characters, Black African women who end up in a detention centre for undocumented migrants in the UK threatened with looming deportation, are roommates who develop an unlikely romance in the midst of an undeniably terrible situation. While the chemistry between the two lead actors, Ronkę Adékoluęjo and Ann Akinjirin, carries the film through its very brief 78 minutes, Gharoro-Akpojotor gives very little to grasp onto in terms of character development or story. Love may have been found in a hopeless, place, yes, but we are given little to root for. The cinematographic style and sleeked-back production design further make Dreamers feel remarkably superficial for what is ultimately a heavy premise.
Besides the Golden Bear winner, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon became another acclaimed film with a queer lead character. It is constructed like a chamber piece that could have very well been carried out on a stage, led by an astonishing Ethan Hawke as Lorenz “Larry” Hart, the alcoholic and fallen-from-grace lyric partner of Richard Rodgers, played by Andrew Scott. Hart is repeatedly implied, by those around him, to have a preference for men, substantiated by notes from the historical record. But even then, Hart’s affections go toward Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old university student with whom he is smitten. At times, it feels like Linklater is bashing us over the head with the fact that Hart was likely, or perhaps clandestinely, queer with the countless mentions from his friends, but Hawke plays the nervy bisexual with a sense of extremely relatable panic and hopeless romanticism. Hart’s name may have been somewhat forgotten, especially after dying prematurely right after Rodgers and his now-known partner Oscar Hammerstein achieved newfound fame with Oklahoma!, but the acclaimed filmmaker brings him to the present day for a fresh new audience.
Blue Moon by Richard Linklater
Two outstanding works in the newly created Perspectives section for fiction feature debuts: Urška Djukić’s Little Trouble Girls (Kaj ti je deklica) and Valentine Cadic’s That Summer in Paris (La rendez-vous de l’été). As a disclaimer, I served on the FIPRESCI Jury for this new section, where both films were among my favourites of the strand, albeit for different reasons. Djukić takes the unraveling of a 16-year-old Slovenian teen’s sexual and religious stirrings hand-in-hand when her all-girls Catholic school choir goes to a monastery for three days of intensive rehearsals. However, what is more important is the intensive reckoning that occurs when our protagonist, Lucia, is confronted by two seeming polar opposites: the hedonism of worldly pleasures through sexual, corporeal, and sensory contact and the complete abstinence thereof as taken up by the nuns through a devotion to God.
The film could have easily slipped into a sort of lesbian coming-out story in a religious, conservative environment, but Djukić very rapidly does away with any of these tropes, instead leaving the sexual awakenings open for interpretation and very free, refusing to prescribe any inkling of a label on Lucia (Jara Sofija Ostan). The work is epitomised by its spell-binding first scene in which are heroine remains silent for most of the scene—and when she finally opens her mouth, it’s to sing. The first-time feature filmmaker (who won the European Short Film Award in 2022 for co-directing Granny’s Sexual Life (Babičino seksualno živlenje) with Émilie Pigeard), takes on a bit of a Céline Sciamma-like sensibility with her commitment to gesture over speech, a fixation on orality, and a focus on a very small number of characters, including a popular and flirty older student, Ana-Maria (Mina Švajger). The end result is different but equally entrancing, with an unexpected end that, as one colleague put it, makes Little Trouble Girls feel like it has the anatomy of a short film rather than a feature.
That Summer in Paris is much more slice-of-life and delightful in vastly different ways, co-written by Cadic and César-nominated screenwriter Mariette Désert. Cadic’s hero Blandine (Blandine Madec) is your girl next door, but in a literal way rather than one romanticised-for-the-male-gaze. She’s a young piano teacher who has come from small-town Normandy to Paris to celebrate her 30th birthday, treating herself by going to see her favourite swimmer compete at the 2024 Summer Olympics while trying to reconnect with her half-sister, whom she hasn’t been able to meet in 10 years. But of course, she can’t bring her colourful backpack into the venue and the hostel kicks her out for being too old, all of which she takes with a half-smile, even at one point resigning herself to returning home. Wow, she’s just like me, many might say—where we all can relate to her lack of confidence and people-pleasing tendencies, just trying to have a good time in a world that judges one for having fun independently. Blandine lightly peppers in mentions of her recent breakup with her ex-girlfriend, which turned over her life. But of course, she must remain cheerful, and we have the privilege of remaining alongside her for the short 77 minutes of this light and airy, but never too sentimental, work. We also, miraculously, get incredible footage shot in Paris during the actual Olympics, with Cadic capturing the buzz of the environment and Blandine trying to capture the ephemerality of the big city.
That Summer in Paris by Valentine Cadic
Jun Li’s Queerpanorama finds us back in the Panorama sidebar, this time with a black-and-white film (read our full review and interview with the director and star). The young Hong Kong director’s newest film is episodic and takes viewers into personal territory, following a young man who has sexual encounters with men of all different ages and backgrounds, loosely inspired by Li’s own experiences in the urban metropolis. With the still camera and long-take style, the performances and staging make the film feel a bit stiff and stale, as there is no hiding any sort of discomfort that emerges in the cracks. However, what emerges from there are interactions are interesting and introspective musings on life, turning the nature of the hookup as something stereotyped to be fleeting and impersonal into an encounter that stays with you.
Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher’s Night Stage (Ato Noturno), also in the Panorama strand, framed itself as an erotic thriller but emerged more as a melodrama with sexual elements, turning to telenovela-esque tropes of revenge and ambition that don’t service the narrative particularly well (read our full review of the film). The illicit romance between its two main characters, an actor and a politician, makes for a much more erotically driven story that could see the latter hiding behind his performative façade. However, we only see one side of many of Reolon and Matzembacher’s characters, leaving much to be desired over the work’s two hours. Nonetheless, its liberal use of dramatic lighting—including “bisexual lighting”—makes the film’s visual style enjoyable, even if the film revels in turn after turn premised on symbolic elements with no follow through.
Stories about trans and gender-nonconforming characters also made it into the official selection, albeit with less fanfare: Two Times João Liberada (Duas vezes João Liberada) by Paula Tomás Marques (Perspectives) and Janine Moves to the Country (Janine zieht aufs Land)by Jan Eilhardt (Forum) featured more avant-garde approaches, perhaps befitting of a “queered” perspective on cinema. Neither film emerged as particularly impressive, but their grassroots dimension to storytelling—one metatextual, the other written as an homage to mother and hometown—made both films feel decidedly original. Gone, hopefully, are the days of trans narratives coopted by other communities purely for the sake of doing something edgy. Other films at the Berlinale implied the existence of queer relationships, like Where the Night Stands Still (Come la notte) by Liryc Dela Cruz in the Perspectives section, an impressive low-budget effort by a community of filmmakers (Il Mio Filippino Collective). Stories such as this one were less common but also signal a shift away from labelling and into the world of queer existence, rather than simply queer resistance.
