Queer Cinema 2023: New Voices

Sophia Nahli Allison describes herself as a “Black queer radical dreamer,” and the wide range of her work shows a filmmaker who’s just getting started.

She earned an Oscar nomination for the Netflix-backed 2019 short documentary “A Love Song for Latasha,” which celebrates the life of Latasha Harlins, a Black girl shot by a convenience store owner in Los Angeles in 1991, through joyously edited archival footage.

In 2021, she participated in the Sundance New Frontiers with “Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler,” using web-based extended reality to craft an Afrofuturist narrative inspired by the visionary sci-fi writer.

Jerrod Carmichael introspective HBO stand-up special “Rothaniel,” in which the comic not only came out as gay but also revealed his unusual birthname to audiences. Also this year, his directorial debut “On the Count of Three” finally hit theaters more than a year after the acclaimed death-wish comedy, co-starring Christopher Abbott, riled up Sundance. Oh, and he also hosted “Saturday Night Live” earlier this year.

He stars in Yorgos Lanthimos’ feature “Poor Things,” opposite Abbott, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley.

He’s proven his mettle as a deft filmmaker and queer icon thanks to “On the Count of Three” and “Rothaniel.”

New York-based filmmaker Matthew Fifer multi-tasked as the co-director (along with Kieran Mulcare), co-writer, and star of 2020’s festival hit “Cicada.” The erotic and darkly funny drama follows a Brooklyn gig-economy worker (Fifer) whose days are shaped by empty sexual encounters and hangovers — until love shows up, and he’s forced to confront a past trauma.

The movie puts the messy particulars of gay sex and the contagious struggle for intimacy front and center, making Fifer a uniquely provocative voice. The film earned him and co-star/writer Sheldon D. Brown a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay. He’s already putting the finishing touches on “Treatment,” a queer-themed psychological horror film for Shudder and starring “Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party” breakout Cole Doman.

Writer-director Jared Frieder scored a deal with the Paramount+ premiere of his pandemic-made feature “Three Months,” starring LGBTQ icon Troye Sivan as a young small-townster facing possible HIV exposure and navigating the sticky entanglements of young love.

That logline wasn’t an easy sell to executives, but Sivan’s feverish international following helped secure the movie a wider release on an accessible streaming platform.

Frieder, who previously served as a staff writer on MTV’s “Sweet/Vicious” said it’s near impossible” to “gat gay shit made.” He said, “And that’s the truth of my experience. I don’t want to speak for anybody else. For up-and-coming young people like myself and my friends, it’s really challenging. And I’m a white man, so imagine how challenging it is for trans, non-binary, people of color, Indigenous people, Black storytellers to get their films made. It’s really, really challenging.”

“Justice League” and “Army of the Dead” sound engineer Lauren Hadaway is carving her own path as a feature filmmaker, starting with last year’s “The Novice.” The IFC release, which scored five Independent Spirit Award nominations, centered on Isabelle Fuhrman as a lesbian who joins her college rowing team, only to get swept up into the brutality of competitive spirit.

“I saw ‘Kill Bill’ when I was 15 and I was like, ‘I want to be a fucking director. Got to do it.’ Blew my mind. … Went to college and immediately was hit with imposter syndrome,” Hadaway, who left her Southern Methodist background in Texas to for LA.

Her hailed directing debut “The Novice” has already made Hadaway a queer creator to watch.

Chris Kelly cut his teeth as a scribe behind the scenes at “Saturday Night Live” as the series’ first openly gay writer. During his time at “SNL,” he brought a queer sensibility, along with his writing partner Sarah Schneider, to sketches like the ‘70s cop-show parody “Dyke and Fats” with Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant.

While he earned plaudits for his 2016 feature directorial debut “Other People,” starring Jesse Plemons as a comedy writing reeling from a break-up, Kelly is becoming a household name thanks to “The Other Two.” The HBO Max comedy series, co-created with Schneider, about a warped brother and sister pair trying to make it in the industry fearlessly took on gay taboos this past Season 2 — including an entire episode about the social-media fallout of accidentally posting a “hole pic.” A cult classic destined for full-on classic status, “The Other Two” was renewed by HBO Max for a third season last fall.

Trans Filipina filmmaker Isabel Sandoval made a splash with 2019’s sensuous immigrant drama “Lingua Franca,” acquired by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY and released on Netflix, bringing the burgeoning visionary a wider audience for her unique stories.

Sandoval already has plenty more in the works since signing with CAA last year, including a drama “Vespertine” for FX as well as the film “Tropical Gothic” in pre-production, which won her the VFF talent highlight award at the Berlinale last year, worth 10,000 Euros toward filming.

Most recently, she directed a moving episode of the FX on Hulu true-crime series “Under the Banner of Heaven” featuring Andrew Garfield.

“My first two or three features are kind of inadvertent homages and nods to master filmmakers whose work I’ve admired,” she said. “I realized that those stylistic nods are not the engine themselves, but I think it’s important to evolve as a filmmaker to see those stylistic nods as means to an end.”

Jane Schoenbrun’s thrillingly gloomy, creepypasta-inspired “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” played the (aptly, in this case) virtual Sundance Film Festival over a year ago and this spring became a word-of-mouth indie hit in theaters. Their transition, as the filmmaker explained to IndieWire, has indelibly linked to the conception of this film about a girl whose internet obsession takes on dark real-world forms.

“Anyone who makes a film would look back a year later and feel a little bit different, but it’s very much compounded by transition and how getting to be comfortable in your own identity and skin, how radically and quickly that can shift your emotional perspective on the world,” they said.

This well-read cinephile lays out a distinctive vision, equal parts horror and confessional, that should have intrepid story-backers lining up.

Macedonian-Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski shook the 2022 Sundance Film Festival with his feature debut “You Won’t Be Alone,” a brain-bending folk horror about a shape-shifting witch seeking human connection in the 19th century. The film’s introspective twist on identity through a genre lens has an inherently queer bent. But his next film, the already-completed “Of an Age,” pushes that gaze further with an intense 24-hour romance between a 17-year-old Serbian ballroom dancer and his friend’s older brother, set in 1999. Focus Features, which released “You Won’t Be Alone” earlier this year, also acquired the film.

Stolevski said that after releasing the “grungy gay love story,” he’ll next prep a “queer comedy-drama set in very present-day Macedonia.”

Rain Valdez became the second transgender person nominated for a Primetime Emmy for acting, after Laverne Cox, as the writer and star of “Razor Tongue.”

The Manila-born creator told IndieWire in 2020 that “when we submitted for FYC and then I started campaigning, I had a very specific message, which was: ‘Here’s to adding an option on the ballot that’s queer, that’s trans, that’s a person of color, that’s female-led, and that empowers an LGBTQ community of artists, that’s Asian American.’”

After appearing in the Netflix documentary “Disclosure” alongside her trans peers, Valdez is now a filmmaker with the upcoming rom-com feature “Re-Live: A Tale of an American Island Cheerleader,” announced in early 2022. Valdez is also starring in the film, set to shoot this November in Hawaii.