At the 46th Hawai‘i International Film Festival presented by Halekulani, this year’s LGBTQIA+ films arrive in many forms: intimate coming-of-age stories, audacious comedies, sweeping dramas, documentaries, animation, and stories of chosen family and cultural identity. What connects them is not a single definition of queer experience, but their remarkable humanity.
Among the festival’s major highlights is LA BOLA NEGRA, one of the most acclaimed films of the year and a Best Director winner at Cannes. Ambitious in scope and exhilarating in its filmmaking, the film is anchored by an extraordinary ensemble cast and moves across generations with the sweep of an epic while remaining deeply personal.
On the opposite end of the tonal spectrum is CLUB KID, which also debuted at Cannes and emerged as one of the festival’s sleeper crowd-pleasers. Comedian Jordan Firstman makes a smashing directorial debut with a film that is brash, funny, messy, sexy, and unexpectedly heartfelt—a celebration and send-up of queer nightlife that ultimately reveals something much more vulnerable underneath.
That balance between tenderness and bombastic aplomb runs throughout HIFF46’s LGBTQIA+ selections. COWARD and ELEPHANTS IN THE FOG feature some of the festival’s most memorable performances, while the latter brings audiences into Nepal’s Kinnar transgender community through a story of love, sacrifice, chosen family, and the complicated pull between individual freedom and responsibility to others.
Closer to home, MAKING THE LINE centers queer Kānaka Maoli kumu hula and life partners Keano Kaʻupu and Lono Padilla, exploring devotion, identity, community, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian culture. WILL YOU STILL BE MY FRIEND, meanwhile, approaches first love with extraordinary gentleness, following two boys in a rural Taiwanese fishing village as friendship quietly begins to become something more.
Across HIFF46, queer lives are not confined to one genre, geography, generation, or mode of storytelling. BIG LITTLE THINGS explores queer identity, cultural tradition, and family expectations through a young Chinese woman navigating what it means to live authentically. Myanmar filmmaker Aung Phyoe’s FRUIT GATHERING, winner of the Grand Prix at Karlovy Vary, finds tenderness and possibility in the growing love between two young women working in a Yangon textile factory.
Nelson Yeo’s THE HOUSE ON THE MOON takes queer love into a fantastical collision of Chinese mythology, science fiction, and 1990s Hong Kong cinema. Co-directed by queer filmmaker Quinn Whitney Wilson, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT revisits the legendary artist and the queer creative world of 1980s downtown New York through rare archival material and intimate memories.
And TANGLES, adapted from queer cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir, follows a lesbian artist returning home to care for her mother as Alzheimer’s takes hold. Together, these films show the breadth of queer storytelling at HIFF46—funny and complicated, romantic and political, intimate and epic—while refusing to define their characters solely through struggle.
HIFF’s QUEER SHORTS brings that breadth together in one program, spanning Hawai‘i, Asia, the Pacific and beyond, with stories of drag, family, sexuality, love, incarceration, self-expression, and the many ways we search for connection.
Taken together, these films represent one of HIFF46’s richest strands of storytelling: cinema made with vision, generosity, and a deft hand. Some whisper. Others explode off the screen. But all insist upon the complexity of their characters and the universality of wanting to love, belong, and be seen.
Come discover LGBTQIA+ cinema from Hawai‘i and around the world at HIFF46—stories that are fearless in their expression, expansive in their filmmaking, and, above all, deeply human.
Explore the films: BIG LITTLE THINGS · CLUB KID · COWARD · ELEPHANTS IN THE FOG · FRUIT GATHERING · THE HOUSE ON THE MOON · JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT · LA BOLA NEGRA · MAKING THE LINE · QUEER SHORTS · TANGLES · WILL YOU STILL BE MY FRIEND
