Using Varsha Panikar’s poetry series by the same name, as the point of departure, 

, is a visual poetry film co-directed by them and Saad Nawab. 

The film captures four sets of lovers amid passion; to create a portrait of tender intimacy, of longing, of discovery, of desire, of embrace and care, of profound companionship. It is a sensual celebration of genderless love and desire, inspired by the poet’s lived reality. The text follows the poet’s journey of healing and self-acceptance as he rediscovers love, passion and identity after encountering their muse, their lover, who acts as an encounter, a rupture that awakens the poet and his desire to express his inner truth. Immersed in the lover’s thought, the poet recalls moments spent in embrace, the touch, the smell, the little things that evoke feelings and emotions in them, that are complex, multidimensional and fluid, and inevitably puts him on a path of discovering his own power and uniqueness.

Bodies of Desire

In 1999, just six years after the rape and murder of a young gender variant person, Brandon Teena, and two friends in a small town in Nebraska, Kim Peirce released her first film, a dramatic account of the incident. The film, 

, which took years to research, write, fund, cast and shoot, was released to superb reviews and went on to garner awards and praise for the lead actor, Hilary Swank, and the young director, Kim Peirce, not to mention the film’s production team led by Christine Vachon.

The film was hard-hitting, visually innovative and marked a massive breakthrough in the representation of gender-variant bodies. While there were certainly debates about decisions that Peirce made within the film’s narrative arc (the omission of the murder of an African American friend, Philip DeVine, at the same time that Brandon was killed), 

 was received by audiences at the time as a magnificent film honouring the life of a gender queer youth and bringing a sense of the jeopardy of gender variant experiences to the screen. It was also seen as a sensitive depiction of life in small town USA. Kim Peirce spoke widely about the film in public venues and explained her relationship to the subject matter of gender variance, working-class life and gender-based violence.

The casting process for Brandon Teena on behalf of the feature film - Boys Don’t Cry: 

”The actor selected for the starring role was Hilary Swank, a cisgender woman. She earned widespread praise for her portrayal and won the Academy Award for best actress in 2000. But at the outset, co-writer and director Kimberly Peirce (he/she) had intended to cast a trans man. Over the course of more than three years, Peirce conducted hundreds of interviews — both as research for writing the film and in an effort to cast the central role. At the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, you can see Hilary Swank’s audition to play Brandon along with auditions from two trans men who were also considered: Silas Howard and Harry Dodge.” 

Later Dodge and Howard would go on to make by Hook and by Crook (2001).

Boys Don’t Cry

Two San Francisco FTM transexuals sit in their back yard and discuss their daddy/boy relationship, transgender life, love, tattoos and tomato plants.

Boys in the Backyard 

After coming out and leaving his girlfriend, Adam dreams of ﬁnding acceptance within London's gay scene.His burgeoning freedom is soon challenged when he meets Rocky, a handsome stranger who is harboring a secret that he desperately wants to share with Adam.


As their bond strengthens and Rocky prepares to reveal his secret to Adam, their ﬂedgling romance is ruptured by a cataclysmic event that forces the truth to come out in the most explosive manner.

Screened at over 100 ﬁlm festivals worldwide, including Outfest, Frameline, InsideOut Toronto, winner Best Short at Queer-STREIFEN, Germany, The Alfred C Kinsey Award at Bloomington Pride, Indiana, nominated for Best British Short at The Iris Prize Film Festival.

Brace

 chronicles the tale of two unlikely friends who commit petty crimes as they search for a path to understanding themselves and the outside world. Silas Howard plays Shy, a transgender man who leaves his small town after the death of his father, and heads to the big city to live a life of crime. Along the way, he encounters Valentine, a quirky adoptee, in search of his birth mother. An immediate kinship is sparked between these men and they become partners in crime. Suffering money troubles, emotional problems, and physical confrontations, the duo face their issues head-on and learn to trust each other and support each other in pursuit of their goals.

By Hook or by Crook

Growing up in 1950s England in an intolerant and uninformed world, young Chris Winters struggles to ﬁt into the gender roles dictated by wider society.
A more than tough childhood left behind, Chris meets dream woman Julie, and life lightens a little, but the growing feeling that theirs is a life half lived haunts Chris. Endlessly imagining what might have been, Chris is ﬁnally struck by the realisation that for some decisions there is no right answer, and that it's those that truly deﬁne us.

Starring trans actors in both cis and trans roles, 'Dusk' is the award-winning trans short that stormed the festival circuit in 2017/2018, screening at 87 festivals internationally.

DUSK

In a fictional met-critique on trans representation, a transgender actor struggles with what it means to be seen after the beloved captain of his lesbian bowling league dies and a mysterious stranger shows up at the funeral.

Death and Bowling 

Luzia falls in love with Léo, but to live that love she needs to escape the city where she lives and the jealousy of her ex boyfriend, Diogo. Along the way, the couple goes on adventures where Luzia discovers Léo’s true identity.

Desvelo

In this light, comedic but realist love story, we follow Blake, a trans man, exploring his feminine side for the first time post-transition.

Here is a link to our Letterboxd page where you can see how some of our community has reacted to the film

Dungarees

Through beautiful and intimate camerawork, filmmaker Yana Ugrekhelidze illuminates the shadows where many LGBTQ+ people must still reside within their home countries, centering on Alexander, a transgender man forced to live clandestinely in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. 

With no way to change the gender on his passport, Alexander is denied access to a proper job and even professional medical care. Despite such obstacles, his secret life is not one of solitude, living with his doting partner of nearly a decade, Marie—a cis woman—and surrounded by a warm, supportive family who have understood and protected him since childhood.

Winner of the Teddy Jury Award at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, Instructions for Survival is an exquisite and timely documentary portrait featuring outstanding filmmaking craft and a profoundly honest window into one couple’s struggle to live openly.


Alexander’s existence in the margins is untenable. With candour and empathy, Ugrekhelidze follows the couple as they consider seeking asylum in another country—a drastic step that might only be financed if Marie becomes a surrogate mother. In its quietly powerful and deeply humane way, Instructions for Survival captures both the heartbreak and profound joy of ordinary love in extraordinary circumstances.


Instructions for Survival

Interweaving love stories centering real individuals who are utilizing medicine to explore new frontiers of love, sex, and the human form.

New forms of sex and love emerge in the first American film to ever win the Teddy jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival,

When the young hermaphrodite Cynthia (Gaea Gaddy) meets Gen (Tempest Crane) and Jay (Jendeen Forberg), a couple recovering from plastic surgery, she learns of Pandrogony, in which two people merge their facial features in order to reflect their evolution from separate identities into one unified entity.

Inspired by this, Cynthia abandons her husband and suburban life to embark on a road trip with Gen through the remnants of 20th century America.

Simultaneously, a young transman, Syd (Morty Diamond), meets a young punk man, Nick (Daniel Luedtke). After having sex with one another, and someone born of the opposite sex for the first time, Syd and Nick find themselves falling into love, a love that forces them to confront how hormone treatments have forever changed sex and relationships.

Not science fiction, but American reality 

 brings together a cast of real hermaphroditic, pandrogynous, and transpeople to create a revealing look at the pioneers of the new human experience, and the emerging possibilities for humanity at the dawn of a new millennium.

OPEN

A young girl that regularly dresses as a boy falls in love and seduces a young girl that has no clue that her lover has the same sex. When the girl introduces ‘her boyfriend’ to her father he becomes skeptical and unmasks the fraud. Even though strangely, the feelings of the girl persist without shifting, the father does not allow them to ever see each other again.
Furious and delusional the ‘boy’ develops an adventurous plan to prove his true ‘masculinity’ to the father of his lover.

Pierrot Lunaire

Twenty-year-old Lukas is a female-to-male (FTM) Transgender man, taking the steps through his gender reassignment treatment. His friendship with Ine, who is lesbian, is making the changes and assimilation easier. Lukas sees his romantic world open up for him as Ine introduces him to gay life in Cologne. As he becomes more and more interested in a local gay boy, things are getting more and more complicated.

Romeos

JJ is a 'Stud' Lesbian. Together with her best friend Seb, a gay pretty boy, they work as wedding photographers. When JJ falls in love with a beautiful diva, JJ and Seb's friendship is tested. JJ is forced to choose between her hot new lover and her best friend.

Stud Life

 fluctuates between fast and slow movements and methodologies of queer intimacy and lamentations of this idea of the home in relation to the queer body and vice versa.

My practice as of late has mainly centred around a science fictionalised exploration into trans-masc dyke-iness; a queer movement and bodily abjection in regards to searching for modes of home and unhomliness not based upon patrilineal spatialities of biological kinship. This has taken the form of a moving image work that “functions” as a sort of container, or maybe a digitised and chaotic sonic and video collage in which I have been
particularly focusing on the specifics of transition (pun intended); the harsh cut or fluid, pixelated merging of various clips. This has culminated in a piece of work that fluctuates between fast and slow movements and methodologies of queer intimacy and lamentations of this idea of the home in relation to the queer body and vice versa.

The Space Dykes and Other Adventures

Lino trains day and night under the cunning supervision of Loana, a renowned boxing champion. Muscled flirting or sporty bromance? Between coups de fonte and satin bed sheets, their common horizon is the ultimate simultaneous knockout.

The Sports X-trem

A woman, a transgender man, and their cat travel toward a mysterious roadside attraction known as "The Thing".

The Thing

Two 4 One

A journalist (Ina Blum) leaves behind a boyfriend in Germany and moves to San Francisco to write about romance, where she gets involved with a lesbian stripper (Shelly Mars).

Virgin Machine

Pie is a sweet girl who moves into a new college dorm room where she finds out that her new roommate Kim, is a tomboy who looks and dresses like a boy. As their friendship develops, Pie and Kim begin to wonder if the feeling they feel for one another is just an ordinary friendship or true love.

Categories

Romance