Global Filmmakers Bring Queer Representation to Festival Film Circuit and the Oscar Race

In a year marked by global attacks on trans rights and a lack of LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream film and TV, filmmakers from around the world are portraying queer issues in varying forms.

Films and filmmakers repping the LGBTQ+ community have repped their country’s official Oscar submission in this year’s international feature race, representing the likes of Italy, Thailand, Slovenia, Chile, and Czech Republic. Notably, many of these films are directorial debuts.

One of the most high-profile of these titles, Thailand’s Oscar entry “A Useful Ghost,” is a genre-bending ghost tale about a dead woman’s spirit (Davika Hoorne) possessing a vacuum cleaner. While her widowed husband (Witsarut Himmarat) still vows to love his wife in her new form, his family disapproves of this human-machine relationship, becoming a unique and hilarious allegory for queer relationships.
During the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere, director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke told Variety about his unique approach: “I hope people will pay more attention to Thailand again. This film is quite different from what people expect Thai cinema to look like. This film could expand how people see what Thai cinema is and what kind of stories it could tell.”

Set over the course of a few days with an all-girl Catholic choir, Urška Djukić’s Slovenian Oscar entry “Little Trouble Girls” follows Lucia, a 16-year-old girl (Jara Sofija Ostan) who has a sexual awakening upon meeting fellow schoolmate Ana-Maria (Mina Švajger). When finding the best setting for the story, Djukić found herself drawn to the oscillating sound of choir rehearsals and how they can represent the turn from girlhood to womanhood.

“There, the sexual energy was so strong when they were singing – this awakening energy and expressiveness. There was some power there that really moved me,” Djukić says of observing rehearsals. “I didn’t understand exactly why [at first], but then when I started exploring my voice, I figured out it’s about repression.”

With the major presence of Catholicism in Slovenia, the intersection of religion and sexuality holds particular resonance. “We were all growing up in a society filled with Catholic dogma and rules, and they led us completely in the wrong direction and make so much mess,” Djukić says. “These feelings of shame and guilt are such restrictive mechanisms. It’s important to acknowledge them and to understand them so they don’t hurt you.”

To explore how religion often influences young people to suppress their natural desires as they grow up, the visual look of the film became an important tool to depict Lucia’s internal struggles. At the Tribeca Film Festival, Lev Predan Kowarski even won the best cinematography award for his work on “Little Trouble Girls.”

“We built a sensual experience to make the viewer feel what Lucia’s feeling. I wanted to be very, very close. Even in some of my previous films, I go extra close to the skin to really feel the new landscape of the body,” Djukić says. “The important thing was to look inside the body of a young girl and what’s happening inside her. If we shift the perspective inwards, we can help understand ourselves and the world better.”

Beyond the stories themselves, queer filmmakers are also represented. Italy’s Oscar entry “Familia,” which premiered at the Horizons sidebar of the 2024 Venice Film Festival, is based on Luigi Celeste’s memoir about his upbringing as a far-right militant and the influence of his abusive father. While the film isn’t explicitly queer, director Francesco Costabile explains that his identity as a transgender non-binary person helped him tap into the story’s themes.

“I lived, in my own skin, the stigma and the violence, so I know what it means to be marginalized in the film market. I know how many queer, non-binary talents there are in our country who go on being unexpressed,” Costabile says through translator Silvia Bizio. “My life has helped me tell these stories.”
From a cultural point of view, Costabile says the queer movement is vibrant in Italy, especially in the independent filmmaking scene.

“What is missing is an industry ready to give visibility to these kinds of stories,” he says. “It’s very rare to find a queer film. The industry is still very connected and linked to classical ways of approaching representation.”

In telling stories about queer artists that resonate with modern audiences, filmmakers are also looking to the past. In Czech Republic’s Oscar submission “I’m Not Everything I Want to Be,” director Klára Tasovská documents the life of photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková, who captured vivid images of Prague’s underground LGBTQ+ bar T-Club during the 1980s — images that now keep the memory of T-Club alive.

What’s unique about Tasovská’s approach is that the entire film is composed of Jarcovjáková’s photographs, infusing her artistic spirit into every frame.

“She gave me the keys and total freedom to her archive to freely make whatever I wanted, so it was very exciting for me. And she’s also curious how other people are looking at her work,” Tasovská says. “I spent two years in editing rooms with a huge archive, and at one point we had 70,000 photos on our computer.”
In capturing the energy of T-Club through Jarcovjáková’s vibrant photographs, Tasovská honors a largely forgotten piece of queer history. Encouraged by the Czech Film Fund’s support of the documentary, Tasovská is now in development on a fiction film about T-Club.

“The main character will be a photographer, and it will follow a murder that happened in the club,” she says.

Diego Céspedes’ directorial debut, “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” also examines the past, using the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic and the Western genre to tell an emotional story about found family and human connection. Following its Un Certain Regard win at Cannes, the film was selected as Chile’s official Oscar entry.

“The community went through a lot of shit, and they went through that in such a beautiful way — there was so much humanity happening at the same moment this mysterious disease was killing people. There were people trying to survive and people trying to help others,” Céspedes says. “We need to learn from our queer ancestors because what we are living now is getting worse. So we need to be prepared. We need to keep the history alive.”

Hitting the awards season campaign trail as a debut filmmaker, Céspedes is conscious of how films with queer characters and themes can be unfairly separated with labels.

He also recognizes what values are important to him as a filmmaker: “The easiest thing to be a queer director is not doing films with queer people. That’s how directors survive in this industry. But I don’t agree with this. Films are really related to me, and I cannot see another possibility. I don’t want to be rich. I want to make films. Even if that doesn’t get me [an Oscar] nomination, I prefer not to have it.”

As these directors have been touring the world, they’ve observed how their films resonate with different LGBTQ+ audiences during a time of political upheaval.

“It’s absolutely necessary in this historical moment to pay attention to the mechanisms that generate violence. We’re getting a little bit too accustomed to violence. We are sort of anesthetized about violence,” Costabile says. “All the wars, all the hate we see in society, they all have one single origin.”