Queer cinema was alive, well and subversive as ever at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

It may have mostly happened in the living rooms of movie lovers, but the Sundance Film Festival just successfully pulled off its first — and hopefully only — pandemic edition. And with it came the same quality of LGBTQ-themed filmmaking we have come to expect from a festival that has built a pretty unparalleled reputation in that regard in its four decades of existence.

Alongside the many new films that will surely go on to represent the very best queer cinema of 2021 (which I'll get to in a minute), this year's festival gathered a multi-generational Zoom panel of LGBTQ filmmakers, asking them "to look back and imagine forward." The "looking back" specifically was in reference to New Queer Cinema, a movement of energetic and disruptive filmmaking in the early 1990s that I discussed at length in last week's edition of this column.

"It was a time of immense despair and immense energy," said the panel's moderator B. Ruby Rich (who coined the phrase "New Queer Cinema" in 1992), specifically with regard to the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan/Bush administrations. "So I think it's a fitting moment to [discuss] now in 2021, when we are just hopefully leaving another horrific regime and beginning to figure out, in the midst of a very different pandemic, what on earth is going on. How can film inspire us, and what is there within the queer community and coming out of the queer community to lead us forward through intersections with other groups and other struggles?"

Alongside New Queer Cinema icons like Gregg Araki, Tom Kalin, Lisa Cholodenko and Cheryl Duyne, filmmaker Andrew Ahn (who made his feature filmmaking debut at Sundance in 2016 with the wonderful Spa Night) brought up something during the discussion that certainly seems to me to be one of the greatest threats to LGBTQ-themed content going forward.

"As a filmmaker in this phase of my career, I think a lot about the future and this 'mainstreamification' of queer culture and how that can, and has, abandoned parts of our community," Ahn said. "The parts that aren't cis, white, privileged. So I think about infrastructure and having to proactively build it. I think if we get lazy with it and be like, 'Oh, queer culture's going to be fine,' then it's just going to turn into the most palatable, least challenging, unhealthy thing for us. It's just candy when we really need fibre. We can't be complacent."

Examples of said candy have definitely been handed out a little too often lately (see Happiest Season, Love, Simon and anything Ryan Murphy touches). But thankfully, there was enough fibre-rich queer cinema at this year's Sundance to suggest a balanced diet going forward. This was evident from the festival's first night, when the world premiere of Jonas Poher Rasmussen's powerful, poetic animated documentary Flee kicked things off.

Ultimately the winner of the festival's Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary and surely already a contender for one of this year's best films, Flee is a singular, visceral achievement. It weaves together beautiful animation with archival footage to tell the true story of Amin (a pseudonym), a 36-year-old academic hiding a painful past he has kept secret for 20 years — even from his soon-to-be-husband. As he finally tells his story to the film's director (who is a longtime friend), we learn of his harrowing journey to Denmark as a child refugee from Afghanistan.

"I was 15 when Amin first showed up in my sleepy Danish hometown," Rasmussen says. "He arrived from Afghanistan all by himself and lived in a foster home, right around the corner from where I lived. We met every morning at the bus stop, on our way to high school, and we slowly became close friends. That was 25 years ago. In all that time, he never told me about how or why he came to Denmark. In fact, he never told anyone."

The fact that he finally decides to tell Rasmussen, and that in turn Rasmussen adapts Amin's story into an animated cinematic catharsis unlike anything else, was a gift to anyone lucky enough to catch Flee at Sundance.

Two more traditional documentaries also explored remarkable LGBTQ lives at Sundance, and both are very much worth adding to your list of anticipated 2021 films. Jamila Wignot's Ailey documents the life of pioneering choreographer Alvin Ailey, while Betsy West and Julie Cohen's My Name is Pauli Murray tells the story of lawyer, activist, poet and priest (among other things) Pauli Murray.

Ailey is likely a figure that most audiences are already familiar with, but Wignot's film thoughtfully digs so deep into his talent and impact that you'll come out of the film with a new level of understanding of his legacy. As for Murray, I'm embarrassed to admit I knew very little about them going into the film — but West and Cohen (the duo behind the 2018 Oscar-nominated doc RBG) changed that with their beautifully made, wholly captivating tribute to a Black transgender trailblazer. Hopefully they'll make Murray's name well-known to many more as the film makes its way to audiences beyond Sundance.

What Jane Schoenbrun's film We're All Going To The World's Fair offers is of an entirely different nature. A haunting highlight of the festival's NEXT section (which they program with "bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling"), the film dives deep into themes of identity and isolation through its wild-ride narrative of a teenager playing an online role-playing horror game alone in their attic. 

Schoenburn — who identifies as nonbinary — says the film is "an attempt to use the language of cinema to articulate the hard-to-describe feeling of dysphoria."

"Growing up, I did not know this word, nor did I know the words 'transgender,' or 'non-binary.' These terms hardly existed at the time, and today I believe we're still just beginning to develop a language through which we can articulate our transgender experiences, whether verbally or cinematically."

Schoenburn says that they're not sure they've ever seen dysphoria explored in American film in this way, at least not by an openly trans filmmaker.

"I think if I had, it would have helped me a lot," they say. "Instead I saw Boys Don't Cry and Dallas Buyers Club and Silence of the Lambs, and I didn't see myself in those films' depictions of transness at all.... The tones of my film can be quite dark, but I feel that at its core this is a gentle work, and I hope that watching it will be a balm for people like me."

Watching also certainly makes clear that Schoenburn is an exciting new visionary in LGBTQ cinema.

Meanwhile, white cis men — the long-dominant focus of most LGBTQ cinema, even at independent-minded festivals like Sundance — were refreshingly nowhere to be found this year. But there was a significant representation of cis women, through two films with wildly different settings that somehow felt equally as far from my current quarantine existence: an 18th-century winter in upstate New York ... and a pandemic-free summer in the countryside of contemporary France. 

The former belongs to Mona Fastvold's The World To Come, which sort of works as the American-set finale of an unofficial international trilogy of recent films exploring queer love (and sex) between women in isolated and frigid 1800s environments, following France's Portrait of a Lady on Fire and England's Ammonite. Featuring ravishing performances from Katherine Waterson and Vanessa Kirby, it also lives up to its cinematic predecessors' ability to warm up the coldest settings with poignant romance.

Set nearly 200 years later, the other film manages to do the opposite. The feature directorial debut of Marion Hill, Ma Belle, My Beauty explores the emotional chilliness that can come with polyamory in the sunny, wine-soaked south of France. That's where newlyweds Bertie (Idella Johnson) and Fred (Lucien Guignard) are living when Fred decides to invite Bertie's ex-girlfriend Lane (Hannah Pepper) for a surprise visit. A complex triangle ensues, and as much as it's occasionally painful not being able to jump into the screen and join them (as a platonic guest!), it's easy to see why the fiery Ma Belle won an Audience Award at the festival. 

Finally, I do feel like it's worth drawing some attention to what was certainly one of my favourite films of the festival, even if it's — on paper, at least — a romantic comedy about two straight people having a baby. But Nikole Beckwith's Together Together so delightfully subverts the norms of the genre it belongs to, it might as well be queer.

Following the friendship between a 40-something man (Ed Helms) and the 20-something woman (Patti Harrison) he hires to be a surrogate for a child he intends on raising alone, Together Together messes with gender dynamics and pays homage to the too-often-disregarded importance of platonic love. It also offers a very thoughtful depiction of the surrogacy process (as a sperm donor who was involved in a similar process, I felt very seen!), and gives Harrison — who is genuinely one of the funniest people on the planet — an opportunity to show her range in what is largely a dramatic (and, ideally, star-making) role. And while I wish it wasn't so notable that Harrison — a trans woman — was cast as a pregnant cis woman, Together Together certainly feels like one giant step forward. Hopefully by the time it feels less remarkable, we can watch movies in cinemas together together again.