Cyril Collard : À la vie, à l'amour

In November 2014 the Iconic club Madame Jojos closed its doors. This event being interpreted by many as the death knell of Soho.The gentrification of Soho affects the LGBT community and its Drag Queen sub-culture, but the cabaret atmosphere of the entire neighborhood in enormous ways. This active pursuit to destroy a bubbling and vibrant part of the city's heart is viewed by many as an atrocity akin to turning the lights off on Broadway. Over 3rd of London's music venues have been closed in recent years and no one noticed. An active movement to bring a halt to this disaster has begun to unfold with one organization after another emerging to fight for Soho. Organizations made up of citizens and celebrities have sprung up to combat this onslaught. Will they win this battle and save Soho?

For decades, performance artist and writer Kate Bornstein has been exploding binaries and deconstructing gender. And, her own identity. Trans-dyke. Reluctant polyamorist. Sadomasochist. Recovering Scientologist. Pioneering Gender Outlaw. Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, joins her on her latest tour capturing rollicking public performances and painful personal revelations as it bears witness to Kate as a trailblazing artist theorist activist who inhabits a space between male and female with wit, style, and astonishing candor. By turns meditative and playful, the film invites us on a thought provoking journey through Kate's world to seek answers to some of life's biggest questions.

The voices of five gay men who cruised for sex at the World Trade Center in the 1980s and 1990s haunt the sanitized, commerce-driven landscape that is the newly rebuilt Freedom Tower campus.

Displaying the faces and voices of transgender youth, the documentary short shows the authenticity of queer and trans people living in Toronto, while simultaneously discussing the struggles for self-acceptance that people who do not conform to cisgender and heteronormative ideals of gender face. Andy Nguyen, trans director and film student, captures his trans friends in their natural state on 16mm film shot on a Bolex h16 camera. Accompanied by narration written and recited by Salem Rao, this film represents that trans people exist and this is what we look like. Regardless of the obvious everyday transphobia, trans people find community and uniqueness within each other and themselves.

A groundbreaking film that portrays the journey of Gigi Lazzarato, a fearless woman who began life as Gregory, posting fashion videos to YouTube from his bedroom, only to later come out as a transgender female. With never-before-seen personal footage, the film spotlights a family’s unwavering love for a child.

It often happens that at the moment of death, transgender individuals are shorn of their identity. Their families are ashamed, the funeral takes place in secret, and on the tomb appears the name the deceased had before their transition, in one stroke nullifying the entire life path they had chosen. The same thing happened to Antonia. Her girlfriends gather to honor her memory and give her back her identity denied. In telling her story, the film’s stars, all drawn from the variegated transgender world, interweave the narrative with tales of their own lives, experiences, and memories.

Quearborn & Perversion: An Early History of Lesbian & Gay Chicago (2009, 109 min) is a documentary on LGBTQ life in Chicago from 1934 to 1974. Moving from the speakeasys and Henry Gerber’s founding of the Society for Human Rights in the 1930s, to the underground social structure of the 1940s and 1950s, to the dawn of consciousness-raising entities such as the Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine Midwest in the 1960’s, and concluding with the emergence of the gay liberation movement with the first Pride March and opening of the first community center in the early 1970s.

After an unlikely casting onto a reality television show, 47-year old suburban telemarketer Ed Popil leaves his job to pursue a full-time entertainment industry career as his drag queen alter ego, 1960’s era housewife Mrs. Kasha Davis.

A group of filmmakers shadow some glamour photographers in order to discover the skill involved in getting 'magic' to appear on the photos.

A portrait of the lives of a disparate group of patrons and employees at an American watering hole today.

What happened in Rwanda in 1994 was not simply the spontaneous eruption of inter-ethnic hatred. It was planned genocide, on an industrial scale. Something that was prepared for at least a year in advance. Lists were made. Weapons were collected. RTLM radio spent months conditioning their audience to believe that one sector of their population represented a threat.

Garden of Des Moines is an intimate interview-style short film that follows drag performers in Iowa as they navigate the challenges of being queer in a conservative state. Through personal stories, the film explores the difficulties they face, from political pushback to societal pressures, while highlighting the joy, resilience, and freedom they find in drag. Set against Iowa's landscape, the film captures the vibrant, defiant beauty of queer expression flourishing in unexpected places

The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazi reign as a trans woman and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.

In Uganda, AIDS-infected mothers have begun writing what they call Memory Books for their children. Aware of the illness, it is a way for the family to come to terms with the inevitable death that it faces. Hopelessness and desperation are confronted through the collaborative effort of remembering and recording, a process that inspires unexpected strength and even solace in the face of death.

Through a collection of video diary entries spanning more than a year, Pronouns in Bio delivers an offbeat and charming reflection on transness and identity. Part documentary, part video essay and part musical, the film follows director and star Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner, a recently out transgender, autistic woman, as she navigates the first year of her transition. Note: Lucy uses the name Frankie during the film but has since started using the name Lucy.