Ahead of the Curve

Gerry Rogers, a filmmaker in Newfoundland, documents her personal battle with breast cancer. With her partner Peggy and lots of support from family and friends, she makes her way to recovery.

This exploitation classic purports to expose the secrets of the 1960s lesbian underworld.

A heady, energised mash-up of animation, unseen archive footage and interviews, Rebel Dykes provides an intimate insight into the politically charged, artistically radical subculture in 1980s London, and the individuals who helped shape and change their world. Bringing together BDSM nightclubs, inclusive, sex-positive feminism, DIY zine culture, post-punk musicians and artists, squatters, activists and sex workers, these rebel dykes went out onto the streets to make their voices heard. [Feature length version of 2016 short of the same name.]

In 2012, Stephen Vaughan and Kay Ferreter are invited to address the congregation at St. Joseph's Redemptorists Church in Dundalk, Ireland for the Solemn Novena Festival. In a powerful speech, the pair describe their experiences being gay and lesbian in Ireland, feeling excluded by Catholic doctrine, and the importance of a more inclusive church.

For the last quarter century, Houston native Arden Eversmeyer journeyed across the country to record hundreds of oral "herstories" with a mostly invisible population that is rapidly disappearing. Old Lesbians honors Arden's legacy by animating the resilient, joyful voices she preserved in the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project, from first crush to first love, from the closet to coming out, and finally from loss to connection.

Women (many of them lesbian) artists, writers, photographers, designers, and adventurers settled in Paris between the wars. They embraced France, some developed an ex-pat culture, and most cherished a way of life quite different than the one left behind.

Amid shifting times, two women kept their decades-long love a secret. But coming out later in life comes with its own set of challenges.

Since the 1970s, lesbians from around the world have been drawn to the island of Lesvos, the birthplace of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. When they find paradise in a local village and carve out their own queer lesbian community, tensions simmer with the local residents. With both groups claiming ownership of lesbian identity, filmmaker Tzeli Hadjidimitriou—a native and lesbian herself—is caught in the middle and chronicles 40+ years of love, community, conflict, and what it means to feel accepted.

A representation of queer and feminist imagery that was mainly shot in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, remote and developing areas in southwest China, and metropolitan cities like Beijing from 2000 to 2004 to document the social changes in contemporary China. The director sympathetically and erotically represents a variety of women, including women as laborers, women as prayers, women in the ground, women in marriage, and women who lie on the funeral pyre with their dead husbands. Her camera juxtaposes the mountains and rivers in old times, the commercialized handicrafts as exposition, the capital exploitation of the elders’ living space, and the erotic freedom of the young people in a changing city.

First there was ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, then ‘My Brilliant Career’, and now best of all ‘The Getting of Wisdom’. It is incomparably moving and powerful.

The story of the life, loves and work of US writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-95), told through her unpublished diaries, her own voice and that of those who knew her, both family and close friends.