New to NYC, Neda seeks stability and connection while keeping a technologically wounded relationship with their father in Slani Štapić, Croatia. In a late night session of Internet browsing, Neda comes across a queer cyberfeminist group, Elektroničke Vještice. Their discovery grows into an obsession, and then an IRL search to find them.

One night, the young, lonely protagonist Paint, styled as an archetypal Pierrot, captures the attention of a sexy biker named Leather. A wordless, romantic fantasy ensues, capturing the thrilling feeling of lust at first sight with an erotic, campy glamor that calls to mind James Bidgood and Kenneth Anger.

Sakura’s illustrated essay film takes on respectability politics and trans literary porn, asking why certain sexual desires must remain unseen—even in progressive contexts that are willing to “discuss” them. Anchored by cheeky analyses of Marquis de Sade, Torrey Peters, and Naty Menstrual, the filmmaker makes a case for the explicit.

Inspired by Rose Bamberger, a founding member of the Daughters of Bilitis, this experimental short revels in the joyful possibilities of opacity over visibility. The flickering tactility of celluloid film invokes a private world of lesbian desire.

This lush 16mm short awakens centuries of rage embedded in the tropical landscape of Borikén (now known as Puerto Rico). A queer retelling of a Taíno legend, Muerde Sin Miedo summons the island’s history of colonialism and resistance through contemporary cruising culture, culminating in a passionate act of revenge.

When Rom Sheratzky discovers a local livestream in Frankfurt, he becomes fixated on the stranger behind the camera. Largely told through webcam footage, Notes app confessions, and social media screenshots, Follow Back charts the filmmaker’s escalating desperation to connect, offering an unsettling study of loneliness, obsession, voyeurism/exhibitionism, and surveillance in the digital age.

Oscillating between the past and the present—and the paternal and the romantic—Portrait of the Father at 71 explores a volatile bond between a father and adult child. Twenty years ago, Diego Semerene cast their father to play the role of some of their former lovers in a film. With a camera trained on the father’s reactions as he watches the resulting work for the first time, Semerene boldly confronts the unresolved feelings and unspoken barriers that have long stood between them.

Zimmerman draws from their substantial personal archive to reflect on a precarious early life in Munich, a challenging adolescence, and ultimately their current life in London. From decaying videos to hazy projections and emotive photographs, they’ve created a powerful document that challenges normative ideas of family, including estrangement.

A childhood birthday VHS becomes a locus for Huss Al-Chokhdar to contemplate his relationship to a distant Cairo and his relatives there. What once was an idealistic utopia is now out of reach. By incorporating sequences of performance for camera, the filmmaker underscores that, against all odds, the ache to return persists.

Donned in airy gender-fluid garb, an array of queer and trans dancers perform the pericón, a traditional group folk dance that is considered to be Argentina’s national dance. Interspersed with the dancers’ personal monologues, the film challenges perceptions of Argentine nationhood that are often presented as white, binary, and civilized.

An energetic, sensory meditation on the connections between a variety of Black diasporic dance scenes and music genres. Archival images of dancehall and voguing play off the sounds of house, footwerk, and spoken word to comprise an homage to the voices left unheard and unacknowledged.

Bianca “Exotica” Maldonado was an Ecuadorian-born transfemme dominatrix who became a trailblazer for trans visibility in 1990s media and New York City nightlife. Her niece, María José Maldonado, has tenderly assembled the moments surrounding her aunt’s funeral in 1996. The resulting film offers a rare view into a family’s grief following the tragic loss of their loved one to AIDS-related illness.

How’s a girl supposed to get off when she has pending Venmo requests? This darkly comedic thesis animation deftly interrogates the commodification of women’s desire in a haze of neon-drenched, low-res polygons and wire frames.

Part personal diary, part essay film, and part post-apocalyptic queer fiction, this 16mm short simultaneously offers a history lesson and a glimpse into our near future. The deserts of Utah are parched, a bomb has poisoned the land and its people, and we hold onto each other because we don’t really know what else to do.

Spanning an end times phone call between Shenzhen and New York, Su captures both cities with quietly arresting cinematography. The film’s dynamic aural universe shifts between meteorological warnings, radio reports, and correspondence reminiscent of Hong Kong cinema or Chantal Akerman’s News From Home.

Composed primarily of cut, pasted, and otherwise rearranged footage from a 2024 pro-Palestine protest in Berlin, Mahboubifar reflects on state brutality, the history of police, and Germany’s cooperation with Israel. Here, the camera is at once a tool for resistance as well as for intimidation, alienation, and persecution.

A journey of monumental scale through the virtual (after-?) life of an unseen protagonist, from their point of view. With cosmic meditations on selfhood and mental health, and searing critiques of the contemporary pharmo-medico regime, the theoretical influences here are as diverse as their representations.

Madsen’s self-reflexive experiment turns the “trap door” of trans visibility (to use Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton’s term) inside out, bringing the spectator into the innards of a universalized trans body. In a meditative final sequence, the thoroughly excavated orifice returns our gaze.

Elegantly shot on black-and-white 16mm stock, Transmutation is a surreal tale of bodily transformation and rebirth(s). Drawing on a host of disparate influences—from the early avant-garde cinema of Buñuel and Deren to the English folk horror wave to the body horror prosthetics of Yuzna and Cronenberg—Jimenez crafts a wholly distinctive world of queered bodies.

A manifesto (or manifisto) on the vulnerability and resiliency of the anus takes the form of a Wagnerian opera. A papier-mâché pair of buttocks, as master of ceremonies, waxes poetic on the writings of Leo Bersani, Gayle Rubin and Patrick Califia amid extended sequences of impassioned, slickly-lit group sex.

A portrait of the late writer, filmmaker, theologian, and fisting evangelist Purusha Larkin, author of the influential text The Divine Androgyne. Through interviews with Purusha’s friends, lovers, followers, and admirers—including BDSM legends Ron Athey and Guy Baldwin—and sun-dappled 16mm photography of the California landscape where Purusha built the titular fisting community, Ashby crafts an elegiac love letter both to Purusha and his world.

The interior space in Jack Smith’s Apartment is made of brick-and-mortar, not flesh, but its curved structural lines—inspired by Islamic architecture—are no less erotically savored. Shot in 1989, soon after Smith’s death from AIDS-related complications, the short was conceived by Serra as “a document for New York's art history,” a necessary gesture of preservation for a soon-to-be-whitewashed realm.