Desire & Defiance
Seven films about queer love queer love in all its messy, tender, hilarious, and unexpected forms.
Friendship breakups that hit mid-workweek. Passionate dreams that arrive when you stop expecting them. A cockroach that changes everything. Church ladies who live in your head and will not shut up. These films are about queer desire in all its mess, the wanting, the shame, the reaching, and the moments where you finally reach back.
Who are we, if not absolute, daily defiance as we live and breathe? Our fiercest history has been about desire, including the love we have for our chosen families. This is a reminder about our history and present as outlaws.
The Films
Black Tea
An artist and a collector argue over an antique teacup. They make their cases over a cup of tea and a crush develops.
Letters to Nowhere
In Letters to Nowhere, we see that sometimes, friendship breakups happen in the middle of the work week. Crashout status: imminent.
2 of Hearts
In 2 of Hearts, Alzira, a retired seamstress, starts having intense, passionate dreams when her gambling partner stops showing up to their games.
Edges of the Earth
Edges of the Earth shows us a place where TCM and BDSM collide.
Waste Time: A Complicated Love Story
Waste Time follows a queer couple, a Black woman and an Indian woman, through the fragments: first date, first kiss, first fight. When one woman looks back on what they had, the film shifts into a music-driven sequence asking whether love is worth coming back to.
Cockroach
In Cockroach, a Black transgender man plans to exchange sex for top surgery money with an older gay man, until the night takes a turn involving an actual cockroach, an unexpected conversation, and a reckoning with what he’s afraid of.
Pink Oz’s
In Pink Oz’s, Khris, a shy lesbian working at an art gallery, is desperate to get closer to a co-worker. One problem: every time she almost gets the kiss, a Greek chorus of judgmental church ladies in her head erupts to mock and shame her. When the gallery’s featured artist starts pursuing the same woman, Khris has to fight on two fronts, the rival in the room and the voices that won’t let her want what she wants.
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