Film

13 films to watch out for at this year’s BFI Flare LGBTQ+ Film Festival

Feb 18
Written by Marcus Wratten

Ponyboi, Outerlands, and Queens of Drama are among the films on the BFI Flare LGBTQ+ Film Festival line up. (BFI/Fox)

BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival is back for 2025 with a programme overspilling with queer talent, spanning feature-length should-be blockbuster hits, searing debuts, and global LGBTQ+ stories.

Opening with Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone’s rom-com remake The Wedding Banquet and closing with the steamy political thriller Night Stage, the dozens of films in between will span coming-of-age tales, an array of East Asian titles, hard-hitting documentaries, star-studded dramas and blistering explorations of queer sex in all its forms.

BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival begins on 19 March and runs through to 30 March, with the full programme split into three distinct categories: body, heart and mind.

Here are 13 of the biggest hits-to-be at the queer film festival.

Hot Milk

Hot Milk has star power in spadeloads. The original novel by British author Deborah Levy, ubiquitous on the London Underground since 2016, was nominated for that year’s Man Booker Prize. This hotly anticipated adaptation is helmed by dramatist and director Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Oscar and BAFTA-winning for her revered (if controversial) 2013 Polish film, Ida. British talent both established and rising, Fiona Shaw (Killing Eve, Harry Potter) and Emma Mackey (Sex Education, Barbie), lead the cast. There’s a lot going for it.

Hot Milk follows Shaw and Mackey as mother-daughter duo Rose and Sophia, the former left wheelchair-bound by an unexplainable ailment, the latter in search of an identity away from the clasp of her controlling mother. They venture to Spain in search of a cure for Rose’s mystery illness, but Sophia finds a lot more: an inexorable connection with a local seamstress, Ingrid (Corsage star, Vicky Krieps).

Ponyboi

Brits have been drip-fed the groundbreaking feature Ponyboi for years at this point, with the drug gang thriller beginning as a short by intersex activist River Gallo in 2019 (making it the first film to feature a lead intersex character, Ponyboi, played by an intersex actor, also Gallo).

2022 saw the cast announced, a ream of viral streamer-age stars including Murray Bartlett (The White Lotus), Indya Moore (Pose), Dylan O’Brien (Twinless) and Victoria Pedretti (You). It premiered at Sundance Film Festival last year, noted as one of the festival’s best queer offerings, and now, it’s heading to the UK.

Beginning in a post-9/11 New York on Valentine’s Day, Ponyboi follows the titular intersex character, juggling work in the sex industry (Gallo) with their job at a laundrette, and their hidden relationship with their pimp and lover (O’Brien). After being caught up in a drug deal gone awry, Ponyboi turns into a ceaseless trip about a sex worker on the run from the mob.

Dylan O'Brien and River Gallo in Ponyboi — Dylan O’Brien and River Gallo in Ponyboi. (Fox)

Outerlands

Orange is the New Black stars Asia Kate Dillion and Lea DeLaria star in the feature-length debut from filmmaker Elena Oxman. Dillion (Billions, John Wick) plays a non-binary gig worker in San Francisco, precariously balancing their jobs as a nanny and drug dealer. They spark a connection with their crush after being asked to look after their child, but a temporary childcare set up leads to them having to tackle their own childhood trauma and addiction struggle.

Queens of Drama

It’s a safe bet to assume that any film featuring two singing contest competitors turned lesbian lovers is likely to be a hit with a modern queer audience, but throw in the fact it’s a musical, and features cameos from a Eurovision Song Contest star and Drag Race winner, and you’ve got a sure-fire smash.

Directed by Alexis Langlois and set in 2005, Queens of Drama (appealing for the title alone) features newcomers Louiza Aura and Gio Ventura as leads Mimi Madamour and Billie Kohler. The former finds pop success after her singing contest career booms, while the latter is rejected and falls into the underground punk scene. Their relationship veers from rivalry to red-hot passion, but Mimi’s career blows up when their love affair is discovered. Drag Race Belgique winner Drag Couenne and France’s 2019 Eurovision entrant Bilal Hassani also star.

Enigma

HBO documentary film Engima, directed by Emmy-nominated This Is Me producer Zackary Drucker, traces the lives and legacies of two trailblazers travelling very different paths, allegedly transitioning during the same era, the 1950s.

The late April Ashley MBE began her career as a Vogue model and cabaret star, before teetering on the edge of film superstardom. She was outed by the British press in 1961, and her career faltered. Amanda Lear, a French singer, TV presenter, actress and model, allegedly sold almost 30 million records worldwide. In Enigma, both stars share their own stories through archival footage, while a visit to Lear’s mansion in Paris – where she still lives today – sees her examine their separate yet intrinsically linked journeys.

Trailblazer Amanda Lear in Enigma. (BFI).

The Silence of My Hands

BFI Flare has form for running the gamut of queer cinema, from industry heavyweight offerings (Love Lies Bleeding) to arthouse cult classics (In From The Side) and work from blossoming newcomers (Big Boys). Each year, the programme scales the breadth and depth of the queer experience, and 2025 is no different. The Silence of My Hands, directed by Manuel Acuña, looks certain to be one of this year’s most pioneering.

Told entirely in Mexican Sign Language, the film tells the love story of Rose, a deaf law student, and Saira, an immigrant from California navigating her gender identity. Their complex tale, and the memories they make together, come alive in silent scenes.

The Wedding Banquet

Opening BFI Flare is Andrew Ahn’s remake of the Oscar-nominated 1993 rom com The Wedding Banquet, upgraded here to put a lesbian love story front and centre, and buoyed by a cast of heavy-hitters including Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone.

Sapphic couple Lee (Kelly Marie Tran) and Angela (Gladstone) are struggling to fund their next round of IVF treatment, while Min (Han Gi-chan) and Chris (Yang) are a gay couple plagued by the former’s visa issues, and the latter’s commitment phobia. When Chris rejects Min’s offer of a green card-securing marriage proposal, he suggests getting hitched to Angela instead, offering to fund their IVF in exchange. Carnage and chaos follow in this classic comedy of errors.

Dreams In Nightmares

Non-binary, award-winning Test Pattern director Shatara Michelle Ford returns with Dreams In Nightmares, a cross-country road trip drama about three Black queer femmes who go in search of the fourth friend in their quartet.

The Gilded Age‘s Denée Benton, Single Drunk Female‘s Sasha Compère, and newcomer Dezi Bing star as the three besties Z, Lauren and Tasha, with Broadway history-maker Mars Rucker playing their off-grid companion, Kel. Expect some stellar guest appearances from The Acolyte’s Charlie Barnett, Yellowjackets’ Jasmin Savoy Brown, and Golden Globe winner Regina Taylor in this BFI Flare Special Presentation.

Night Stage

Multi award-winning filmmaker and actor Marcio Reolon and writer Filipe Matzembacher have made arguably their most daring project to date with the psychosexual thriller Night Stage, which has been elected as BFI Flare’s closing night film. The heart-pounder follows the down-low love affair of a politician and actor, both on the rise, but both at risk of sending their careers up in flames due to their fetish for sex in public.

A Night Like This

In From The Side and Emmerdale star Alexander Lincoln and Wolfblood‘s Jack Brett Anderson star in this unlikely lovers romance from director Liam Calvert. Struggling actor Lukas (Anderson) and big shot businessman Oliver (Lincoln) spend the course of one evening together amid London’s nightlife, and despite their polar-opposite demeanors – Lukas is timid and contemplative to Oliver’s blustering bravado – the pair form an unexpected connection. Harry Potter legend David Bradley also stars.

I’m Your Venus

One of the brightest stars of Paris Is Burning, an essential piece of work in the annals of queer cinema, tragically didn’t get to see it hit the big screen. Transgender woman and ballroom performer Venus Xtravaganza was brutally killed in 1988, aged just 23, two years before the exploratory film was released. In I’m Your Venus, existing members of her ballroom family House of Xtravaganza team up with her biological family in search of justice, as they campaign to re-open the cold case investigation into her death.

Drive Back Home

Before Scot Alan Cumming became known for his lavish fits as host of The Traitors, he was (and remains) a world-class actor (Prague, The Good Wife, Cabaret). He brings thespian flare to this harrowing real-life socio-political drama, directed by Canadian filmmaker Michael Clowater.

Set in the ‘70s, Drive Back Home sees Cumming play Perley, a man arrested in Toronto for having sex with another man in a park. His brother, plumber Weldon, is forced to drive hundreds of miles to bail his brother out. On their journey back to rural New Brunswick, the two brothers dissect their troubled relationship and upbringing.

The story is reportedly based on the true story of Clowater’s grandfather Ernie and great-uncle Hedley, and highlights a common tactic used by police in Canada at the time: picking up gay men for having public sex, and forcing their family members to come and retrieve them, outing them in the process.

High Tide

The newest offering from playwright Marco Calvani has been dubbed a “beautiful”, “haunting” and “devastating” watch by early reviewers, with its portrayal of an undocumented immigrant searching for a sense of self praised for its “poignancy”.

Gen V star Marco Pigossi is the romantic drama’s irresistible lead, Brazilian immigrant Lourenço, who wanders the streets of Provincetown, Massachusetts in search of purpose and his place in the queer community. Along the way, he strikes up an intense romance with New York doctor Maurice (Giants’ James Bland), with the pair forging a bond despite their wildly different backgrounds.