Gay Films For Thought

Let’s get something, err, straight: What better way to celebrate Pride Month than with a handful of Sundance-supported films from a wide rainbow stripe of LGBT directors, writers and actors.

After all, when the Sundance Film Institute (and its Festival and labs) first began to nurture and showcase works by LGBT filmmakers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a great shift occurred almost immediately in the microcosm of independent cinema away from what Vito Russo called “The Celluloid Closet” toward films that proudly bore their queer insides without hesitation. Take the films Paris is Burning (pictured left) or The Living End, for example.

That meant that filmmakers such as Rob Epstein, Jennie Livingston and Todd Haynes, among many others, could finally show the world what LGBT men and women really looked like, and on a more extended scale, how they lived, loved and made love on-screen with the same sort of heartfelt precision and detail as their straight counterparts—none of which was achieved easily.

As director Derek Jarman once said, “Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you.”

So help make Pride Month even more gay by paying tribute to the following Sundance-supported LGBT films, some old and some new—a list that comes courtesy of Sundance’s Manager of Media Relations Casey De La Rosa.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Director: John Cameron Mitchell

Paris is Burning
Director: Jennie Livingston

The Times of Harvey Milk
Director: Rob Epstein

Longtime Companion
Director: Norman Rene
Screenwriter: Craig Lucas

small town gay bar
Director: Malcolm Ingram

The Kids Are All Right
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Screenwriters: Lisa Cholodenko, Stuart Blumberg

To learn more about these and other Sundance-supported LGBT films, including detailed descriptions, click here.