Why We Need Pride

World-renowned Drag Queen Miz Cracker helps a Texas family that’s experiencing strange occurrences after renovating their 1892 home. As a lover of the paranormal, can Miz Cracker solve their ghost problem and help them coexist peacefully with the spirits?

Over the course of a year, film follows Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen to various international Pride events, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, Sri Lanka and others where there is great opposition to pride parades. In North America, Pride is complicated by commercialization and a sense that the festivals are turning away from their political roots toward tourism, party promotion and entertainment. Christie documents the ways larger, more mainstream Pride events have supported the global Pride movement and how human rights components are being added to more established events. In the New York sequence, leaders organize an alternative Pride parade, the Drag March, set up to protest the corporatization of New York Pride. A parade in São Paulo, the world's largest Pride festival, itself includes a completely empty float, meant to symbolize all those lost to HIV and to anti-gay violence.

In the spotlight of global media coverage, the first transgender woman ever to perform as Don Giovanni in a professional opera, makes her historic debut in one of the reddest states in the U.S.

Are You Proud? is a vivid and engaged docu-celebration of the LGBT rights movement from the partial victory of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act to Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front , the AIDS crisis, Legal Marriage and finally the 2016 Pulse night club shooting. The film gives an extensive history of the course of LGBT rights campaigning, but it also shows how much more work there is to be done.

Chenevelles, population just over 400. A grocery store-bar-service station. Its church and château. A village lost in New Aquitaine. Nothing to distinguish it from neighboring towns. Until the day when a few posters, community social networks and local newspapers invited the surrounding area to participate in the first rural Pride - on July 22, 2022! The region's LGBTQIA+ community, along with Cyril, the mayor, and his constituents, got together to ensure that this celebration resonated throughout the country. The grocer, Léo, a young man in transition, and the Poitiers-based Coloc Drag collective all had the same goal: to surpass 1,000 participants to spread the word that the countryside has broken free from prejudice and celebrate tolerance. 

Three young queer people share their experiences on what it’s like to deviate from the straight cis-norm. Throughout the film, painful experiences make room for a more positive perspective, such as the overwhelming sense of connection with millions of other queer individuals worldwide or the freedom that arises as one can relinquish certain expectations. This so-called ‘queer-joy’ is being discovered, providing inspiring and moving insights.

Canadian icon Shane Koyczan has brought his spoken word poetry to stages all over the world, including TED Talks that have gone viral and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. This documentary, both an introduction to his poetry and an exploration of his relationships with those around him, highlights his journey of seeking reconciliation with his father who abandoned him at an early age, and how in order to accomplish this, Koyczan has to rely on his poetry's vulnerability like never before.

The world of hip-hop lyrics has changed, simple rhyme schemes just don't cut it. Rhymes are put under a microscope, and there is no lyrical leeway for emerging artists. This gripping documentary tells the story of Jeff Walker.

Poet, rapper, playwright and recording artist Kae Tempest is one of the most viscerally exciting artists working in Britain today. They are the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious Ted Hughes prize and have been nominated for both the Brit and Mercury music awards. Tempest has always found support and respect within the queer art scenes, a place close to their heart. In July 2020, they came out as non-binary, announcing that they would publish and perform under the name Kae. This film delves deep into their creative process and gains rare, intimate insights into Kae’s life throughout a period of profound personal and artistic change.

In partnership with filmmaker Lauren Tabak and writer/consulting producer Barry Walters, we dive into the music career of Sylvester, starting from church choir in South Central LA to his early years in San Francisco. It follows his ascent to stardom through his evergreen, international hits "Dance (Disco Heat)" and "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)". Through his groundbreaking career, Sylvester blew open the doors for queer visibility and gender fluidity in mainstream music, leaving a legacy that continues to influence today's pop music.

Following the lives of Queer creatives behind Norwich’s queer collaborative ‘Stripped Sets’. We discover the reasoning behind the need for safe spaces, and the stories that come with them. Through live events, photoshoots and history, we see the process in creating such an important event.