Happy Pride Month to all as we start off June! I am feeling even more proud than usual at the moment after having just seen a slate of decent queer films at the just-wrapped 2025 Inside Out Toronto 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival, a great event every late spring in our community.
This year’s Inside Out festival did feel more like a community film festival again with films programmed to appeal to the audience, while not sacrificing quality. As a paid member, Inside Out now offers six complimentary tickets to their screenings, which is a great bargain for a film lover like myself and an excellent way to promote memberships. I grabbed 7 tickets overall as that’s all my schedule could handle and I am happy to give you my thoughts on some of them below.
I missed the Brazilian feature flick Baby, which screened on the opening night of this year's festival, as I had some birthday celebrations to attend elsewhere that evening. But this one is high on my list to hopefully catch soon as I heard a lot of positive word of mouth about it.
Of the seven screenings I attended, I have to say that the Canadian documentary Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance by director Noam Gonick was the best and most rewarding. A thoughtful, engrossing documentary, it chronicles using crucial archival footage the fights over the years by various segments of Toronto’s and Canada’s 2SLGBTQ+ community at resisting and overcoming societal and police oppression to become stronger and liberated - to eventually take to the streets proudly as we do every year through Pride parades. First, the queers of the 60s and 70s fought back against constant police attacks, and used the experiences of the 1960s civil rights movements as inspiration. One segment’s gains inspired another still oppressed segment, such as 2S individuals to also fight back and earn respect. Toronto had its Stonewall in the early 80s after the community fought back against police raids of our bath house spaces. These attacks on our community served to unite us together in solidarity, one of the key themes of the film.
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| Parade: Queer Act of Love & Resistance |
This film delicately, honestly and powerfully proves that firm activism willing to take risks and push ourselves out into the open has been an effective tool for winning over both public support and our own self-respect. Conservatives are still taking aim at trans people the world over, and our fight for each other continues. Solidarity is key.
The final chapter tells the story of Black Lives Matter, when activists both queer and Black led the parade in 2016 and brought it to a halt to protest the presence of the very folks who’ve been our sworn oppressors: the police. That action actually led to the ban on uniformed police officers in the Toronto Pride parade, an event originally founded as a protest against police oppression.
Our community still gets targeted by regressive police, more interested as ever in protecting private property than they are for community safety for 2SLGBTQ+ people. That ban needs to stay in place, and if certain conservative elements object, they need to take a history lesson. Watching Parade: Queer Act of Love & Resistance would be a great start.
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| Sauna |
The Danish feature film Sauna stood out as my favourite narrative drama feature. The wonderfully honest film chronicled an absolutely beautiful but less than bright young cisgendered man's touching and awkward romance with a trans man in unvarnished, modern day queer Copenhagen. Played by Magnus Juhl Andersen, our cisgendered hero Johan says very little, letting the audience guess at his motivations as he, recently out of the closet, stumbles into the arms of William, a transitioning trans male student, played beautifully by Nina Terese Rask. Despite a few dumb mistakes, Johan's heart seems genuine. A lost soul trying his best to navigate what can often seem like a cruel, indifferent modern gay community, Johan's efforts to support his new love seem often misguided and naive, but ring true as deeply relatable.
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| Some Nights I Feel Like Walking |
Some Nights I Feel Like Walking from the Philippines was a disturbing but touching story of four young men stuck at the edges of Manila where they typically trade off their bodies to make money and to survive. After one of their friends overdoses, they struggle to deliver his dead body back to his family, eventually realizing only they are each other’s family, the ones keeping themselves alive, not the indifferent society in which they find themselves.
The short narrative film Coming & Going was the best short I saw in the ‘I Know Who You Did Last Summer’ shorts screening. Delightful, well-written and well-acted, I was hooked from start to finish watching a unique one-week romance blossom over its 23-minute running time.
Other films entertained but were less stellar.
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| In Ashes |
In Ashes attempted to show the depths of craziness that heartbreak can cause as one young man obsesses over and stalks his ex-boyfriend of a few months in a series of ridiculous actions that baffle everyone who knows him. The downward spiral is sad to watch, but also one to which many can relate. We’ve all been there, but perhaps hopefully behaved better than this! The cop-out ending though where he simply finds another stunningly cute young man now devoted to him seemed more like a fairy tale than realistic. I was hoping to see a message that promotes the notion that our obsession with relationships is what's driving us crazy.
Sandbag Dam from Croatia was a touching, well-crafted ode to the impossible choices queers have to make between devotion to family and personal liberation.
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| Ponyboi |
Ponyboi from the U.S. has its strengths, including a strong performance by lead River Gallo as an intersexed person struggling to break free from cycles of violence and disrespect in their New Jersey life and reconnect with family. All the acting was bang on and I’ve rarely seen as authentic a depiction of the Jersey vibe than here. But the script was overwrought and sought to squeeze in way too much. I’m all for character arcs, but did everyone need to have major life epiphanies all within the same 24-hour period depicted in this film? This felt a lot like it was trying too hard to be some new queer, intersexed version of
Pulp Fiction, and didn’t quite succeed. Kudos though to the film for finally getting cutie Dylan O’Brien to show off his butt in one nice scene near the film’s beginning.
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