Prathyush Parasuraman
The film begins with a gratifying 20 minute scene in a gay sex club, but under the nurturing directorial gaze of Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, the film's emotional heft takes over, and it becomes a gut-emptying tale of urban loneliness, longing, love, lust, and disease.
Saadat Munir and Saad Khan's documentary follows a cast of queer characters — trans women (they refer to themselves as khwaja-sara, a cultural identity, not just a sexual or genderd one), gay men, and bar dancers who struggle to make ends meet in contemporary Pakistan.
Josh Thomas' comedy-drama, 4-seasons strong, takes apart trauma and vulnerability with humour that isn't reductive, derisive or gratuitous. Josh, the central character, is gay and his various sexual escapades on quick-sex apps or the longing aftermaths, pepper the story that follows not him necessarily, but his world
Bulbul Can Sing, Rima Das' follow up to the tender and rooted Village Rockstars continues to follow the three friends — two girls, one boy — as they come into their own, slashed by society's stares, built by the affectionate shoulders of friends and lovers.
Madhuri Dixit and Huma Qureshi play women who stroke the passions of Babban (Arshad Warsi) and Khalujan (Naseeruddin Shah). But the story twists the female companionship into something so profoundly, so subtly queer, that all that seemed missing was the big kiss to seal the story shut.
Homegrown queer cinema that stung without the accompanying melodrama, Sudhanshu Saria's film takes affection and attraction and pushes it to its most logical, crude extreme. It follows two childhood friends, played by the late Dhruv Ganesh and Shiv Panditt, who set off on a weekend trip to the Ghats where feelings simmer, till the complicated tether snaps.