SXSW 2023 LGBTQ+ Film & TV Selections That Absolutely Slay

Each year, the SXSW Film & TV Festival brings together stories of perseverance, artistic expression, culture, and beyond to the SXSW audiences to uplift, empower, and create an open forum of discussion in our communities.

Check out the following LGBTQ+ films making your streaming services more fabulous than ever including director Emma Seligman's Bottoms, Ektara Collective's Ek Jagah Apni, Lisa Cortes' Little Richard: I Am Everything, Julio Torres' Problemista, and more from SXSW 2023.

Learn more about how LGBTQ+ initiatives, ideas, and icons spill into nearly every industry represented at SXSW Conference sessions including Queers Create: The Creative Economy is Community, LGBTQ + DEI: Queer Representation in STEAM, Perspectives on the Corporatization of Pride, and more 2023 LGBTQ+ programming. Listen to each session in full on the SXSW Schedule.

Bloody Hell

 

Bloody Hell is a coming-of-age "traumedy" that follows 16-year-old Lindy (Maddie Ziegler) who is unexpectedly diagnosed with a reproductive condition, MRKH syndrome. The diagnosis upends her plans to have sex, her presumptions about womanhood and sexuality, her relationship with her mother (Emily Hampshire), and most importantly, herself. Bloody Hell is a semi-autobiographical feature written and directed by Molly McGlynn (Mary Goes Round).

Director/Screenwriter: Molly McGlynn
Principal Cast:Maddie Ziegler, Emily Hampshire, Djouliet Amara, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Ki Griffin

Bottoms

 

Directed by Emma Seligman and written by Seligman and Rachel Sennott, Bottoms follows two unpopular girls in their senior year who start a fight club to try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders.

Director: Emma Seligman
Screenwriters: Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott
Principal Cast: Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Nicholas Galitzine, Miles Fowler, Marshawn Lynch, Dagmara Dominiczyk, Punkie Johnson

Cora Bora

 

Cora senses her open relationship is on the rocks. When the struggling musician and messy millennial goes home to Portland to win her girlfriend back, she realizes it’s much more than her love life that needs salvaging.

Director: Hannah Pearl Utt
Screenwriter: Rhianon Jones
Principal Cast: Megan Stalter, Jojo T. Gibbs, Manny Jacinto, Ayden Mayeri, Thomas Mann, Chrissie Fit, Andre Hyland, Chelsea Peretti, Margaret Cho, Darrell Hammond

Down Low

 

Down Low is an outrageous comedy about one wild night, a deeply repressed man, the twink who gives him a happy ending and all the lives they ruin along the way…

Director: Rightor Doyle
Screenwriters: Phoebe Fisher, Lukas Gage
Principal Cast: Zachary Quinto, Lukas Gage, Simon Rex, Sebastian Arroyo, Christopher Reed Brown, Audra McDonald, Judith Light

Ek Jagah Apni

 

Laila and Roshni, two transwomen, are looking for a house after they are evicted from the place they rented. Their search for a home is also their ongoing search for a place in this society that wants to keep them away in a section that can not be the center. They have a friend in Sharukh, but many of their other interactions don’t turn out as expected. Laila is torn between being true to herself and preserving links with her biological family. Roshni treads a fine line between concealing her identity and living the life that she wants, but it is not without its dangers. The film was part of NFDC Film Bazaar's, Work in Progress Lab 2021, and showcased in Goes to Cannes, Marche du Film 2022.

Director: Ektara Collective
Screenwriters: Rinchin, Maheen Mirza
Principal Cast: Manisha Soni, Muskan, Akash Jamra

Fancy Dance

 

Following her sister's disappearance, a Native American hustler kidnaps her niece from the child's white grandparents and sets out for the state powwow in the hopes of keeping what’s left of her family intact.

Director: Erica Tremblay
Screenwriters:Erica Tremblay, Miciana Alise
Principal Cast: Lily Gladstone, Isabel Deroy-Olson, Ryan Begay, Crystle Lightning, Audrey Wasilewski, Shea Whigham

The Herricanes

 

The Houston Herricanes were a part of the first women's full tackle football league in the 1970s. Their unknown story is one of commitment, courage, and strength. Despite adversity and hardship, they fielded a team purely for the love of the game. What they started is a movement that is still in motion today.

Director: Olivia Kuan
Principal Cast: Dr. Jen Welter, Collette V. Smith, Annise Parker, Dan Pastorini, Phoebe Schecter, Linda Carpenter, Vivan Acosta

Kokomo City

 

Kokomo City is the feature directorial debut of two-time Grammy-nominated producer, singer and songwriter D. Smith. Smith, who made history as the first trans woman cast on a primetime unscripted TV show, also filmed and edited this wildly entertaining and refreshingly unfiltered documentary that passes the mic to four Black transgender sex workers in Atlanta and New York City – Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver - as they hold nothing back while breaking down the walls of their profession. Executive produced by Lena Waithe, the film won the Sundance Film Festival NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award.

Directors: D. Smith
Producerss: D. Smith, Harris Doran, Bill Butler
Principal Cast: Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell, Dominique Silver

Little Richard: I Am Everything

 

Little Richard: I Am Everything tells the story of the Black queer origins of rock n' roll. It explodes the whitewashed canon of American pop music to reveal the innovator - the originator - Richard Penniman. Through a wealth of archive and performance that brings us into Richard's complicated inner world, the film unspools the icon's life story with all its switchbacks and contradictions. In interviews with family, musicians, and cutting edge Black and queer scholars, the film reveals how Richard created an art form for ultimate self-expression. Throughout his life, Richard careened like a shiny cracked pinball between God, sex, and rock n' roll - he was unabashedly everything.

Director: Lisa Cortes

Only The Good Survive

 

A traumatized young woman named Brea Dunlee is found alone in rural Texas where a local sheriff named Cole Mack questions her. He discovers Brea and three of her friends tried to steal rare coins from a farmer and his wife, but they uncovered something far more valuable in the process. As a result, the four friends become targets of a powerful cult. The story gets more convoluted as Brea recounts her night of terror. Cole has to find out if Brea is telling the truth. Brea has to find out if Cole is who he says he is. The only thing for certain is, only one of them will survive.

Director/Screenwriter: Dutch Southern
Principal Cast: Sidney Flanigan, Frederick Weller, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Ropp, Darius Fraser, Lachlan Watson, Jon Gries

Problemista

 

Alejandro is an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador, struggling to bring his unusual ideas to life in New York City. As time on his work visa runs out, a job assisting an erratic art-world outcast becomes his only hope to stay in the country and realize his dream. From writer/director Julio Torres comes a surreal adventure through the equally treacherous worlds of New York City and the U.S. Immigration system.

Director/Screenwriter: Julio Torres
Principal Cast: Julio Torres, Tilda Swinton, RZA, Isabella Rossellini, Larry Owens, Catalina Saavedra, Greta Lee

Queendom

 

Gena, a queer artist from a small town in Russia, dresses in otherworldly costumes made from junk and tape, and protests the government on the streets of Moscow. Born and raised on the harsh streets of Magadan, a frigid outpost of the Soviet gulag, Gena is only 21. She stages radical performances in public that become a new form of art and activism. By doing that, she wants to change people’s perception of beauty and queerness and bring attention to the harassment of the LGBTQ+ community. The performances - often dark, strange, evocative, and queer at their core - are a manifestation of Gena’s subconscious. But they come at a price.

Director: Agniia Galdanova
Principal Cast: Gena Marvin

 

Watch On Demand Content

For the full nine days of 2023 SXSW event premieres, exclusive interviews and Red Carpet photos, check out the 2023 SXSW Film & TV Festival Rewind.

See You At SXSW 2024

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Teaser Images: SXSW 2023 Bottoms

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