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At SXSW, Sophia Bush, Jeremy O. Harris, Jaboukie Young-White & Zoë Chao Champion LGBTQ Resistance & “The Queering Of Filmmaking”
Although LGBTQ representation was scarce at SXSW 2025, several indie darlings broke the industry’s cis-heteronormative mold at this year’s festival.
From Special Jury Award winner Fucktoys, multi-hyphenate Annapurna Sriram’s bold celluloid fever dream of a feature debut, to The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, co-writer/director Pete Ohs’ captivating model for cooperative filmmaking, there’s a glimmer of hope that the future of the industry lies in the hands of a new generation of marginalized folk with the right amount of passion, vision and ingenuity. Although she laughed that she “didn’t actually realize how gay I was making my movie,” Sriram assembled a talented queer ensemble including Sadie Scott, Francois Arnaud, Brandon Flynn and Big Freedia — who also performed at Stubb’s during the music leg of SXSW. While the headliners at SXSW were lacking in the LGBTQ representation department — with the exception of a bizarre Blake Lively-on-Blake Lively kiss scene in Another Simple Favor — it’s the smaller-budget titles that swung for the fences and made the case for a new post-strike era of filmmaking that returns the craft to the artists.
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