Acclaimed Pakistani film leads QCinema’s LGBTQ+ section

Winner of the Jury Prize and the Queer Palm at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Joyland, headlines the LGBTQ+ slate, the RainbowQC Section, of QCinema International Film Festival, which will run from 17 to 26 November in Quezon City.

QCinema is one of the few films festivals in the Philippines and Southeast Asia with a regular section dedicated to showcasing the diverse voices of the LGBTQ+ communities. This year, RainbowQC offers a lineup of recent releases as well as older titles that are worth watching, depicting a wide range of LGBTQ+ experiences.

Joyland, the directorial debut of writer-filmmaker Saim Sadiq, has created quite a buzz since premiering in Cannes, the first Pakistani film to be featured in its film festival. It is also Pakistan's entry to the Best International Feature Film category of the Academy Awards. Pakistani Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai serves as executive producer of film, which has garnered wide critical acclaim and is set to be released in Pakistan on 18 November.

Set in Lahore, the Urdu-language film is about the romance between a young man from a patriarchal family who secretly joins an erotic dance theater and an ambitious transgender woman performer.

On the other hand, a Jehovah's Witness community in the 1990s is the setting of the debut film of Canadian writers-directors Mark Slutsky and Sarah Watts, You Can Live Forever, a sensitive and insightful story of teenage love amid religious repression.

A lesbian teen is sent to live with her religious relatives and soon develops a romantic relationship with another girl from the same close-knit congregation. The consequences of their intense affair soon leads to major conflicts that will reshape their young lives.

Angry Son, by Japanese director Kasho Iizuka, was awarded the Grand Prix Award in the Osaka Asian Film Festival. In the film, a high-school student lives with his Filipino mother who works at a bar.
The relationship between mother and son is fraught with tension. Wondering about an absent father whom he never met and conflicted with his emerging gay identity, he decides to leave their household when his mother brings home a customer whom she will be marrying.

The erotically-charged Stranger by the Lake returns to the big screen after it won the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard Best Director award in 2013, and was mentioned on multiple top-ten lists of the best films of that year.

Director and writer Alain Guiraudie offers a voyeuristic glimpse into a French cruising spot for men, tucked away on the sun-drenched shores of a lake. Franck, who loves to sunbathe, encounters the attractive and mysterious Michel who becomes his object of desire. The former knows the danger of his strange attraction and yet he continues to pursue his passion. A dramatic thriller reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock, this film is restricted for mature audiences only.

Other similarly-themed titles in a parallel LGBT+ section co-sponsored by the French Embassy Manila featuring Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Billie And Emma, The Divide and a menu of short films, RainbowQC Shorts.

The 2019 French historical romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma is the first film directed by a woman to win the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. Sciamma also won the award for Best Screenplay at Cannes. The film tells the story of a lesbian affair between an aristocrat and an artist commissioned to paint her portrait.

Billie and Emma is one of QCinema 2018's Circle competition grantees. It won the Gender Sensitivity Award and Best Supporting Actress trophy for Cielo Aquino. The film is a coming-of-age story set in the mid-1990s about Billie, who is forced to move to the province, and Emma, an ambitious model student who gets pregnant.

The Divide is the 2021 Queer Palm winner. Director Catherine Corsini's film is about two women on the verge of a breakup, in a hospital, who are further stressed on the night of a big demonstration by the overwhelmed staff and by angry, injured protestors who end up besieging the building.

The RainbowQC Shorts will feature films from previous festivals including #QCShorts 2021 Best Picture "i get so sad sometimes" by Trishtan Perez; #QCShorts 2019 film "Isang Daa't Isang Mariposa" by Norvin de los Santos; the 2021 silent film "Alingasngas ng mga Kuliglig" by Vahn Leinard Pascual; "Dikit" by Gabriela Serrano; and QCinema Asian Shorts film "How to Die Young in Manila" by Petersen Vargas.

From its premiere last year with QCinema, "How to Die Young in Manila" is about a surreal meet-up amidst a violent setting. The film, which has been exhibited in Busan, LA Outfest and Singapore, stars Elijah Canlas portraying a teenage boy following a group of young hustlers, thinking one of them may be the anonymous hook-up he has arranged to meet for the night. As he anxiously finds a way to get closer, each of the other boys inexplicably turn up as dead bodies strewn in pavements, until only one of them is left.

The third short film by Cinemalaya Best Director awardee Serrano is loosely based on a lost silent film by Jose Nepomuceno that reimagines classic Philippine folklore into a contemporary diptych of feminine bodies, rage, and freedom. "Dikit" portrays a young woman with a monstrous secret and she desperately longs for a different body. When a new couple moves in next door, she sees her chance to finally get one.

Another silent short similarly explores queer horror elements. "Alingasngas ng Mga Kuliglig," which is a product of the Mit Out Sound Lab last year, shows a young man who is coerced by his father to become the next folk healer of their town. Things do not go as planned when he falls in love with a tikbalang.

Young filmmaking duo, Kaj Palanca and Celeste Joven, won the 2016 QCinema Audience Award for their debut short, "Contestant No. 4," which depicts a young boy, who frequently visits an old man who lives alone, chancing upon the latter watching a dated clip of himself as a cross-dressing boy. As the movie progresses, the two main characters gain a richer understanding of how the weight of life and identity should be carried.

"Isang Daa't Isang Mariposa" was nominated as Urian Best Short Film in 2019 and is about a religious, 100-year-old trans woman who visits her ex-lover's son to bail him out of jail. She uses her P100,000 government award for centenaries for one last chance at love.

Focusing on a gay teenager who develops a sexual affair with an anonymous man online, "i get so sad sometimes" won the Best Short Film at QCinema last year. When the stranger finally promises that he'll reveal his face the day after, the former couldn't contain his excitement but must only keep it to himself.

In the Screen International section for acclaimed prestige titles comes the Cannes grand prize-winning film, Close, by Belgian director Lukas Dhont. In its intimate gaze into the innocent yet deep friendship between two young boys, it explores how a tragic event brings one to become close to the other's mother.

These films will be screend at Gateway Cineplex 10, Trinoma cinemas, the new Cinema76 (on Tomas Morato Avenue), Rockwell Power Plant Cinema, and SM North EDSA. They will be also available for streaming on Vivamax.