Monika Treut is a German filmmaker. She made her feature film debut with Seduction: The Cruel Woman, a film that explores sadomasochistic sex practices. She has made over 20 films, including the short documentaries Annie and My Father is Coming. Treut’s involvement extends across writing, directing, editing and acting.
Jenni Olson is a writer, archivist, historian, consultant, and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. She co-founded the pioneering LGBT website PlanetOut.com. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia were acquired in April 2020 by the Harvard Film Archive, and her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history was published as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema from Oxford University Press in 2021. In 2020, she was named to the Out Magazine Out 100 list. In 2021, she was recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the Berlin Film Festival. She also campaigned to have a barrier erected on the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicides.
The Pink Mirror, titled Gulabi Aaina in India, is an Indian film drama produced and directed by Sridhar Rangayan. It is said to be the first Indian film to comprehensively focus on Indian transsexuals with the entire story revolving around two transsexuals and a gay teenager's attempts to seduce a man, Samir. The film explores the taboo subject of transsexuals in India which is still much misunderstood and ridiculed.
Nancy Kates is an independent filmmaker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She directed Regarding Susan Sontag, a feature documentary about the late essayist, novelist, director and activist. Through archival footage, interviews, still photographs and images from popular culture, the film reflects the boldness of Sontag’s work and the cultural importance of her thought, and received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Sundance Documentary Film Program.
Holger Bernhard Bruno Mischwitzky, known professionally as Rosa von Praunheim, is a German film director, author, producer, professor of directing and one of the most influential and famous queer activists in the German-speaking world. A pioneer of Queer Cinema and gay activist from the very beginning, von Praunheim was a key co-founder of the modern lesbian and gay movement in Germany and Switzerland. He was an early advocate of AIDS awareness and safer sex. His films center on queer-related themes and strong female characters, are characterized by excess and employ a campy style. They have featured such personalities as Keith Haring, Larry Kramer, Diamanda Galás, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Judith Malina, Jeff Stryker, Jayne County, Divine, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and a row of Warhol superstars. In over 50 years, von Praunheim has made more than 150 films. His works influenced the development of LGBTQ+ movements worldwide.
Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.
Outfest is an LGBTQ-oriented nonprofit that produces two film festivals, operates a movie streaming platform, and runs educational services for filmmakers in Los Angeles. Outfest is one of the key partners, alongside the Frameline Film Festival, the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival, and the Inside Out Film and Video Festival, in launching the North American Queer Festival Alliance, an initiative to further publicize and promote LGBT film.
The Frameline Film Festival began as a storefront event in 1976. The first film festival, named the Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films, was held in 1977. The festival is organized by Frameline, a nonprofit media arts organization whose mission statement is "to change the world through the power of queer cinema". It is the oldest LGBTQ+ film festival in the world.
The Queer Palm is an independently sponsored prize for selected LGBT-relevant films entered into the Cannes Film Festival. The award was founded in 2010 by journalist Franck Finance-Madureira. It is sponsored by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, filmmakers of Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, The Adventures of Felix, Crustacés et Coquillages, and L'Arbre et la forêt.
The Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) is an annual film festival founded in 1999 and held on Cape Cod in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The festival presents American and international narrative features, documentaries and short films for five days in June of each year.
Intersexion (2012) is a documentary about intersex people. The film was researched and presented by activist Mani Mitchell, New Zealand's first "out" intersex person. It was written, directed and edited by Grant Lahood and produced by John Keir.
Tiger Devore, previously known as Howard Devore and Tiger Howard Devore, is an American clinical psychologist, sex therapist, and spokesperson on intersex issues. He was a member of the defunct Intersex Society of North America. Historian Alice Dreger credits him with starting the work of the intersex movement.
Intersex, in humans and other animals, describes variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies". Intersex is a part of nature and that is reflected in some representations of intersex in film and other media.
The following outline offers an overview and guide to LGBTQ topics:
The International Queer Film Festival Merlinka or Merlinka Festival is an annual LGBT-themed film festival which is annually organized in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Podgorica. The Belgrade edition is organized in the Belgrade Youth Center during the second week of December, and it lasts for five days. The Sarajevo and Podgorica editions are organized in January and February of each year, with the former being organized in the Art Cinema Kriterion, and the latter being organized in the PR Centre. The festival was founded in 2009 by the Gay Lesbian Info Centre and Belgrade Youth Center. It screens feature, documentary and short films from all over the world that deal with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersex and queer issues.
Silas Howard is an American film and television director, writer, and actor. His first feature film By Hook or by Crook (2001) co-directed with Harry Dodge is a seminal trans masc feature. Howard earned an MFA in directing at UCLA and is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He began directing episodes during the second season of Transparent, making him the show's first trans director.
Desiree Lim is a Malaysian-born Canadian independent film director, producer, and screenwriter. She is known for her films Sugar Sweet (2001), Floored by Love (2005), and The House (2011). Lim tends to work within the realm of family drama and comedy, and highlights themes of lesbianism, multiculturalism, and body positivity. She now works in Canada and Japan.
Shitou is a Chinese activist, actress, filmmaker, multimedia artist, and gay icon. She has been active in the Chinese gay scene since the 1990s and was the first lesbian to come out on Chinese television.
