Queer Guide to Sundance 2026

The Sundance Film Festival has named some of the films that will be showing at its final Salt Lake City/Park City event. Here are a number of films that have queer content to help you decide what tickets you should buy when they go on sale.

US Documentary Competition

Barbara Forever

United States 2025 98 min English

An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.

Turning the lens on a celebrated filmmaker is no easy task, particularly one whose work is as groundbreaking, sensual, and life-affirming as Barbara Hammer’s. Yet, director Brydie O’Connor does her justice. Weaving a kinetic tapestry of archival footage guided by Hammer’s own voice, the film offers an intimate front-row seat into the mind of a visual poet.

Barbara Hammer was deeply concerned with who makes history and who is left out, which motivated her to record her life, her body, her lovers, and the joy found in her lesbian identity. O’Connor’s portrait is an inspiring tribute and candid document of artistic process, capturing the persistence, unabashed ambition, and inevitable tensions such drive creates. Barbara Hammer’s work opened the door for so many artists, and her legacy, so deftly captured here, reminds us why. — SO

Director: Brydie O’Connor

Brydie O’Connor is a Kansas-born, New York–based filmmaker. Her work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space. Her past work includes the documentary shorts The Roaming Center for Magnetic Alternatives (2025), The Fault Line (2024), and Love, Barbara (2022), which was nominated for an IDA Award.

Public Access

United States 2025 108 min English

An unprecedented look inside one of the greatest media experiments to hijack American screens. Rare archives from New York’s underground capture a world of creators who shattered rules, defied censors, and transformed our televisions into a free-speech battleground where anyone could be a star.

The internet and social media platforms may have given birth to influencers and content creators, but decades before their popularization, public access television, such as New York City’s Manhattan Cable Television, opened up the floodgates for technological free expression. With no editorial input allowed, ordinary New Yorkers had carte blanche to create — from the interactive Grube Tube to Glenn O’Brien’s underground scene free-for-all TV Party and the pioneering LGBTQ+ series The Emerald City. But when sexually explicit programming pushed the boundaries and stirred public debate, First Amendment court battles followed. David Shadrack Smith takes viewers through the unfiltered creativity and chaos of this paradigm-shifting new technology, which presaged today’s media-driven world. As Public Access cheekily warns, “Brace yourself! Nothing you have ever seen before can prepare you for this.” — BT

Director: David Shadrack Smith

Brooklyn-born filmmaker David Shadrack Smith began his career reporting in China and producing for National Geographic before founding Part2 Pictures. He’s produced award-winning nonfiction for CNN, Hulu, HBO Max, and more, which has earned Emmys and James Beard Awards, among other honors. Public Access is his feature directorial debut.

World Cinema Dramatic Competition

Big Girls Don’t Cry

New Zealand 2026 100 min English

Over one transformative summer in rural New Zealand in 2006, 14-year-old Sid Bookman discovers desire, identity, and the internet as she imitates the people she longs to be loved by.

Paloma Schneideman, mentored through Jane Campion’s film program, crafts an artful coming-of-age portrait of queer adolescence that beautifully inhabits the liminal space between youth and adulthood, desire and experience — a time when we’re conscious of everything, but lacking language for any of it. With aching recognition, we’re inescapably drawn into Sid (newcomer Ani Palmer in a stellar breakout performance) — her trying on of identities, mimicry, feigning of maturity, shame, and longing for acceptance — as she endears herself to a group of older teens, the first generation for whom sexual curiosity is entwined with the internet. Schneideman’s voice is fresh and vibrant, her intimate, shallow-focus photography drawn to faces and bodies, full of precarity and vulnerability and perfectly attuned to these young people. The film breathes with specificity and authenticity, ironically rendering so sharply an interior life that is, by its nature, so obscure. — JN

Director/Screenwriter: Paloma Schneideman

Paloma Schneideman is a filmmaker and musician from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her work examines the human condition, often through a queer and/or female lens, blending sharp cultural observation with emotional nuance. Schneideman is an alum of Jane Campion’s A Wave In the Ocean program; Big Girls Don’t Cry is the first incubated feature film to emerge from the initiative.

Extra Geography

United Kingdom 2026 93 min English

In an English girls boarding school, two teenage best friends grapple with the challenges of girlhood — friendship, boys, studies, and growing up — and embark on their school project, falling in love.

In her thoroughly funny, stylish debut feature, Molly Manners (In My Skin, One Day) offers a wry, poignant story about best friendship. Brought to life through standout debut performances from Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan, Minna and Flic exist entirely in each others’ worlds — their perfectly synchronous thoughts and movements playfully accented by Manners’ visual style. Charming, adorably self-centered, codependent, and snide, they audition together for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (despite Shakespeare being rubbish) and — knowing that love makes one “worldly” — decide their school project will be to fall in love with the first person they see: their geography teacher (Alice Englert). They hatch a plan, enamored of their own cleverness (“We should probably dream about her.”), but their synchronicity soon falters.

Extra Geography offers a bittersweet lesson in unsinkable friendship: in life, love, and Shakespeare, someone always gets upstaged. — JN

Director: Molly Manners

Molly Manners is a BAFTA-winning director. She is best known for the Netflix series One Day, which received three BAFTA nominations including best director. Before this, she directed the critically acclaimed series In My Skin 2 (BBC 3/ Hulu), for which she won a BAFTA. Extra Geography is her feature film debut.

LADY

United Kingdom/Nigeria 2026 96 min English, Nigerian Pidgin

In the sprawling African metropolis of Lagos, a fiercely independent young cab driver meets a band of radiantly reckless sex workers whose sisterhood pulls her into danger and joy, setting her on a journey toward her own transformation.

Lady is a strong woman in a man’s world. A taxi driver on today’s streets of Lagos, Lady makes enough money to care for herself and her grandmother while most Nigerians must choose between breakfast and lunch. When her oil-producing motherland eliminates fuel subsidies for its citizens, Lady’s childhood friend, Pinky, propositions her to join ranks with her boss who is looking for a night driver for his ladies. Director Olive Nwosu’s exciting debut feature pulses with the potent energies and complex realities in Lagos. LADY radiates the love and dreams between people, the choices made to forge pathways for living through debilitating circumstances and intergenerational traumas, and the sea change of a new generation, rising to DJ Revolution’s call to decolonize their minds and take back their lives. — SF

Director: Olive Nwosu

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, London-based filmmaker Olive Nwosu is an award-winning screenwriter and director. She wrote and directed two acclaimed shorts: 2019’s Troublemaker, the first Igbo-language film on the Criterion Channel; and 2021’s Egúngún (Masquerade), which premiered at TIFF and screened at the Sundance Film Festival, winning multiple international awards. LADY is her feature debut.

Tell Me Everything

Israel/France 2026 109 min Hebrew

Amid the late ’80s pop craze and rising HIV epidemic, 12-year-old Boaz uncovers a devastating secret about the father he idolizes that threatens to tear his family apart. Over a years-long journey, Boaz seeks to heal the wound and reclaim the father-son bond he has never stopped yearning for.

On the heels of his impressive first feature, Karaoke, Moshe Rosenthal crafts a captivating, deeply moving father-son story that explores the upheaval in a family after a startling revelation. Tell Me Everything is told with warmth and intimacy through the experience of Boaz, a boy nearing his bar mitzvah and manhood, yet still trying to understand masculinity and his father, his perspective blurred by confusion and fear. In exploring the truth, Boaz leaves his childhood behind with every step, carrying his shame, guilt, and anger into adulthood. Propelled by phenomenal performances, richly detailed storytelling, a vibrant visual sensibility, and a vivid evocation of the ’80s, Tell Me Everything is a poignant story of family, reckoning, and the search for a father — or maybe just the attempt to truly see him. — JN

Moshe Rosenthal

Moshe Rosenthal is a director and screenwriter. His debut film, Karaoke, premiered at Tribeca and won Best Director and Best Screenplay at Raindance. It was acquired for U.S., German, and French remakes and was nominated for 14 Israeli Academy Awards. Tell Me Everything is Rosenthal’s second feature.

Natalie Erika James is a Japanese Australian writer, director, and producer focused on dark genre stories told with heart. Her debut feature, the psychological horror Relic, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. She co-wrote and directed Apartment 7A, a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby.

Premieres

The Brittney Griner Story

Premieres
United States 2025 100 min English

Explores the circumstances that led to Brittney Griner playing basketball outside the U.S. despite being one of the best players in the sport, including her harrowing detainment, unwavering determination to secure her freedom, and her advocacy for the release of other wrongful detainees.

The media frenzy surrounding the detainment and eventual release of Brittney Griner was highly politicized, fueled by speculation and attempts to leverage her narrative to advance political agendas. Now, director Alexandria Stapleton gives the floor to Griner to tell her story, alongside her wife, Cherelle, and an inner circle of friends and family.

This intimate access grounds the film in Griner’s humanity, reminding us she is a wife, parent, daughter, sister, and friend — far more than just an athlete-turned-political pawn. Griner opens up about her childhood, the disappointment and fear surrounding her detainment, her harrowing experience in a Russian penal colony, and the complicated negotiations to get her home. It’s a riveting story of resilience, anchored by a family who never stopped pushing for her release and that of others. — SO

Director: Alexandria Stapleton

Alexandria Stapleton is an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and the founder of House of NonFiction. She directed The Brittney Griner Story for ESPN and Sean Combs: The Reckoning for Netflix, as well as films for Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, and HBO. She is currently working on a feature doc about NFL Hall of Famer Terrell Owens.

Give Me the Ball!

United States 2025 101 min English

World champion tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King has had a game-changing impact on culture and sports. Rare archive and candid interviews with Billie Jean and those closest to her reveal how one woman put changing the world ahead of saving herself.

The story of professional women’s sports could not be told without Billie Jean King. Her status is so iconic that some may lose sight of the real human being — her struggles, her flaws, and her all-consuming, competitive drive. In fighting for equity for herself and others, King was uncompromising, to the point of subordinating her personal well-being by hiding her sexual orientation and eating disorders. Directors Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff present Billie Jean King in full, in her own words, with archival footage that brings the dark times and indelible victories to life. With refreshing honesty and the hard-won perspective of having lived through it all, Give Me the Ball! is an electric portrait of one of the greatest of all time. — SS

Director: Liz Garbus

Liz Garbus is a two-time Emmy Award–winning and two-time Academy Award–nominated filmmaker. She has helmed celebrated genre-defying documentaries and premium drama series as a director and executive producer under her company Story Syndicate.

Director: Elizabeth Wolff

Elizabeth Wolff is drawn to the ways stories from the past help us make sense of the world today. Named one of DOC NYC’s 2023 “40 Under 40,” she specializes in adapting biography, memoir, and political histories into documentaries and has collaborated with Liz Garbus on several acclaimed projects.

I Want Your Sex

United States 2025 90 min English

When fresh-faced Elliot lands a job with artist and provocateur Erika Tracy, his fantasies come true as she taps him to become her sexual muse. But Elliot finds himself out of his depth as Erika takes him on a journey into a world of sex, obsession, power, betrayal, and murder.

In writer-director Gregg Araki’s latest feature, a sex-forward Los Angeles art gallery hosts a delightfully enigmatic sadomasochistic game, as Cooper Hoffman’s eager Elliot is pushed to the edge by the sharply sardonic Erika, masterfully portrayed by Olivia Wilde. More than an art-world satire or a celebration of depravity, Araki and Karley Sciortino’s quick-witted writing and circular narrative structure reveal a spunky yet earnest reflection on the current state of sex — challenging misaligned conceptions of kink/predation, exhibition, and generational predispositions toward sexual freedom and autonomy.

I Want Your Sex is Araki’s 11th Sundance Film Festival premiere (following the episodic Now Apocalypse in 2019), constituting a fresh, prismatic validation of form for the auteur — an outrageously playful sexual crusade that only the one Gregg Araki could make. — CA

Gregg Araki

Gregg Araki, a fixture in indie film for over 30 years, is the writer-director of Mysterious Skin, White Bird in a Blizzard, and The Living End. He recently restored his cult classics The Doom Generation and Nowhere. For television, he worked on Dahmer, American Gigolo, and Now Apocalypse.

NEXT

The Incomer

United Kingdom 2026 100 min English

On a remote Scottish isle, siblings Isla and Sandy hunt birds and talk to mythical beings while fighting off outsiders. Their lives change when Daniel, an awkward official, arrives to relocate them.

Relocating a pair of siblings is easier said than done in Louis Paxton’s delightful, uproariously funny, heartwarming first feature. A comedic inflection of Scottish island folklore, The Incomer draws us into its eclectic vision through sublime deadpan humor, formal inventiveness, a sprinkling of animation and fantastical creatures, and the charm of its oddball characters. Having lived in isolation and mistrustful of mainland folk, Isla and Sandy (brilliantly played by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke) initially try to toss Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson) off the island — literally. But several days and one initiation ritual later, there’s a thaw. The siblings share their lore and Daniel speaks of mainland virtues, like avocados and the internet. Their interactions are fresh and funny, but there’s also a poignant exchange around belonging. These three people — who have experienced isolation, loss, and loneliness — lower their guard and embrace human connection. — JN

Louis Paxton

Louis Paxton is a writer and director from Edinburgh, Scotland. After studying at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, he earned a master’s degree in directing at the National Film and Television School in London. His award-winning short films have screened at major festivals. The Incomer is his feature debut.

Jaripeo

Mexico/United States/France 2026 70 min Spanish, English

A journey to Michoacán’s hypermasculine rodeos descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing, leading to a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.

“I brought you here to Penjamillo so you could see a little bit of what it’s like to be a young queer ranchero,” explains Efraín Mojica, who makes their feature directorial debut with Jaripeo, alongside Rebecca Zweig. Mojica serves as our guide into the vibrant world of the “jaripeos,” rural rodeos that draw macho cowboys, drunken revelers, and — enabled by the bacchanalian atmosphere — hidden queer encounters. Through vérité and Super 8 footage, the camera captures secret glances and fleeting touches and lingers lovingly on the riders’ bodies — manifestations of machismo as filtered through a queer lens. Mojica constructs rich portraits of queer rancheros sharing memories and confidences in warm, sometimes flirty, conversations and brings their past experiences to life in indelible, stylized dreamscapes celebrating queer self-expression, desire, and belonging. Jaripeo invites viewers to enter this space of traditional, performative masculinity and discover what lies beneath its surface. — BT

Director: Efraín Mojica

Efraín Mojica is a Michoacán-born artist based in Mexico City. Their multidisciplinary work, shown from Berlin to Mexico City, explores light, sound, and matter through a conceptual art lens. Video art is central to their practice. Jaripeo is their first feature film.

Director: Rebecca Zweig

Rebecca Zweig is a Mexico City–based filmmaker and writer. Published in The New York Times and The Nation, she is a Sundance Institute fellow and (Egg)celerator Lab grantee. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her filmmaking is shaped by her poetic practice. Jaripeo is her first feature film.

TheyDream

United States 2025 89 min English

After 20 years of chronicling his Puerto Rican family, a director and his mother face devastating losses. Through tears and laughter, they craft animations that bring their loved ones back to life, discovering that every act of creation is also an act of letting go.

In TheyDream, director William David Caballero brings together decades’ worth of his family’s stories in a profoundly moving and creative work of intergenerational healing through art. At its center is Milly, Caballero’s mother, who dutifully bore the responsibility of caregiving for her father, mother, and husband as they dealt with aging and various health concerns. Working in close collaboration with Milly, Caballero uses miniatures and motion capture technology to transform old home movies and recorded conversations with departed family members into sometimes whimsical, often bittersweet animated sequences. Demonstrating deep vulnerability and candor, TheyDream and its stories of familial love and loss are both uniquely personal and universally resonant. Caballero was once told by a documentary professor that no one would ever want to see a film about his family. How wrong she was. — BT

Director: William David Caballero

William David Caballero is a Los Angeles–based queer Puerto Rican American filmmaker, writer, animator, Guggenheim fellow, and Creative Capital awardee. His animated documentary shorts about his family have screened at the Sundance Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art and won a Webby for Best Art Direction.

zi

United States 2025 99 min English, Cantonese, Mandarin

In Hong Kong, a young woman haunted by visions of her future self meets a stranger who changes the course of her night — and possibly her life.

Kogonada plays with — and returns to — form in this sensitive cinematic poem. Held within a stylish jaunt through the streets of Hong Kong, zi is a film with soul and a wavelike confidence that commits to recursivity as a mode and central theme. Kogonada regulars Michelle Mao, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jin Ha carefully portray transitory misfits, grappling with a clever fusion of existential anxiety, romantic misgiving, and personal memory.

Somewhere between sci-fi and supernatural, a deep, easy warmth takes root. Following Columbus (2017 Sundance Film Festival), After Yang (2020 Sundance Film Festival), and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Kogonada crafts a decidedly contained film, exploring a pervasive sense of unmooring, yet cultivating an unrelenting sense of peace. Through the igniting/smoldering embers of relationships lost/forming, zi is an invitation to surrender to Kogonada’s truly indie world of temporal fragmentation. — CA

Director: Kogonada

Kogonada is a writer and director. His first feature, Columbus, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017.

Midnight

Leviticus

Australia 2026 86 min English

Two star-crossed teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most — each other.

A haunting and sensitive feature directorial debut from writer-director Adrian Chiarella, Leviticus promises a new, poignant entry into the canon of coming-of-age horror. An isolated Australian small town hosts the evils of religious fanaticism and its consequences for queer youth, creating an atmosphere that’s chilling and near-claustrophobic. Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen tenderly embody Naim and Ryan, magnetically attracted teens coming into their sexuality, yet facing physical and spiritual violence at every bend.

At times sensual, and just as often thrilling, Leviticus shines as both a harrowing Midnight experience and a queer social horror. At the core of this merciless curse narrative is an authentic reflection on what it means to love queerly despite the persistent dangers from within and without. — CA

Director: Adrian Chiarella

Adrian Chiarella is an award-winning Australian writer and director. His television credits include Totally Completely Fine (Sundance Now), Erotic Stories (SBS), and Five Bedrooms (Paramount+). His short films have screened at numerous international festivals and earned him AACTA and Australian Directors’ Guild Award nominations. Leviticus is his feature film debut.

Saccharine

Australia 2025 113 min English

Hana, a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.

Natalie Erika James follows Relic (2020 Sundance Film Festival) with this revoltingly punchy, modern, and timely take on body horror. Through sickeningly syrupy scenes of literal and spiritual consumption, Midori Francis embodies Hana, a body-dysmorphic young woman bent on chasing her weight goal at all costs. The archetypal myth of the hungry ghost manifests literally, creating a uniquely tense atmosphere fit for a physically and metaphorically dangerous haunt.

The viscosity of James’ exploration of haunting and body horror in the era of accessible weight-loss medications is especially poignant, as Saccharine works to deconstruct weight and fatness as metrics by which we classify antagonism and personal shortcoming. What if the desperation to conform is a destructive consumption itself? What if we manifest our own bottomless specters? — CA

Director/Screenwriter: Natalie Erika James

Park City Legacy

Mysterious Skin

United States 2004 105 min English

Two preadolescent boys both experienced a strange event and later it affects their lives in different ways. One becomes a reckless, adventurous sex worker, while the other retreats into a reclusive fantasy of alien abduction.

A picture of youth and trauma in late-20th-century Middle America, Mysterious Skin presents a sensitive, disquietingly hypnotic coming-of-age entry into writer-director Gregg Araki’s canon. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet deliver exceptionally embodied performances as boys on near-opposite sides of the vast canyon of their shared psychological wound — both approaching revelation in distinctly vulnerable capacities.

A notable formal departure from Araki’s established auteur style, Mysterious Skin screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. Deftly marrying Araki’s bold filmmaking and youthful flair with the gravity of Scott Heim’s lauded novel, the film realizes an unflinchingly honest attention to the American socioeconomic underbelly; the queer psychosexual; the random, undeserved consequences of living. Two decades later, Mysterious Skin remains an unconventional, provocative classic. — CA

Director: Gregg Araki

Gregg Araki, a fixture in indie film for over 30 years, is the writer-director of Mysterious Skin, White Bird in a Blizzard, and The Living End. He recently restored his cult classics The Doom Generation and Nowhere. For television, he worked on Dahmer, American Gigolo, and Now Apocalypse.

Sundance Shorts

Callback
US 2025 16min English
Short Film Program 5
Max arrives home to find that his boyfriend has booked a callback. All hell breaks loose.
Director: Matthew Puccini

Gender Studies
US 2026 11 min English
Short Film Program 2
When a trans college student learns the girl she idolizes is sleeping with their teaching assistant, she takes drastic steps to emulate her.
Director: Jamie Kiernan O’Brien

Seniors
US 2026 12 min English
Short Film Program 2
A high school senior goes on his first college campus tour the day his parents’ marriage begins to fracture.
Director: Adam Curley