1 Gay Cinema: LGBTQ Films That Matter, 2010-2019 (Lesbian)

The acclaimed God’s Own Country, a British drama about a sheep farmer’s (Josh O’Connor) relationship with a Romanian migrant worker (Alec Secareanu), was a hit at the 2017 Sundance Film Fest, where it won the directing award in world cinema for first-time filmmaker Francis Lee.

The film is a beautiful, visceral, and at times violent depiction of how self-hate, societal stigma, and prejudice can complicate queer love. Its themes resonate profoundly in a world where fear is threatening to close borders and reject outsiders. Perhaps it provides, if not an antidote, then a salve.

Colette, about the trailblazing writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who engaged in relationships with men, women, and trans-masculine-identifying people circa the Belle Époque, directed by Wash Westmoreland, who is gay.

Keira Knightley embodies the pansexual bohemian feminist who stepped out of her husband’s shadow to become one of the most famous female French authors in the world.

The film chronicles Colette’s rise to fame as she leaves behind her country upbringing to become the toast of Paris along with her husband, Willy (Dominic West), who spurs her to chronicle her life for his literary factory where only his moniker appears on everything that’s published.

Bracing in its frank depiction of sexual freedom, the film shows Colette and Willy beginning an open relationship in which they end up bedding the same American socialite before Colette falls for the trans-masculine Missy (Denise Gough).

Colette’s unapologetic queerness.

Transgender actors Rebecca Root and Jake Graf play a cisgender couple who flirt with her in a parlor scene.

Colette’s “was a voice that I wanted to hear. It was a voice that I wanted to speak,” Knightley told The Advocate about her choice of role. “I particularly want women, but I want men as well to kind of go, ‘Yes, I have a right to be myself, to explore my identity and my gender and to do it without shame and unapologetically.'”

As divisive as the elongated, acrobatic sex scenes punctuated with slapping and slurping sounds are in Blue Is the Warmest Color, there’s no denying that the film from Abdelatiff Kechiche set tongues wagging with frank discussions about first love and the epic sex that can accompany it. In the film, the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos were so inextricable from the material that they were awarded the Palme alongside their director, making them the second and third women to win the prestigious honor in the festival’s history.

For all of the scissoring under industrial lighting the film offers, the movie also started a discussion about the dangers of the “male gaze,” even if the term in the vernacular became divorced from Laura Mulvey’s original essay in which she spelled out the tenets of the “gaze.”

Despite the sex scenes that had audiences squirming with either schadenfreude or delight, Blue Is the Warmest Color is a heartfelt coming-of-age and love story about young French women that boasts stellar performances from its leads. But the heartrending ending may leave viewers reaching for a bottle of red in which to drown their sorrows.

Tangerine, a 2015 dramedy directed by Sean Baker (The Florida Project) was shot on an iPhone 5s camera with a budget of $100,000. This innovative approach to filmmaking, which sparked many headlines for its thriftiness, is all the more remarkable considering the historic nature of its subject matter. Tangerine is the first film in awards contention to star two trans women of color (Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) portraying trans lives. Although the film ultimately did not receive Oscar nominations for its leads — notably, The Danish Girl, a more traditional “Oscars bait” film starring Eddie Redmayne as a trans pioneer Lili Elbe and Alicia Vikander, was recognized that year — it moved the needle for representation by showing the power and importance of authentic transgender representation. Taylor and Rodriguez portrayed Los Angeles sex workers — a profession they themselves had engaged in. And the film not only spoke to the hardships trans women can face in this work, but the joy and humor found in the friendship between these women. Tangerine is also a commentary on Hollywood; it depicts the marginalized people who walk and ride the bus along the streets where some of the world’s biggest movies are made, but who so rarely receive representation.

A Fantastic Woman director Sebastián Lelio helmed this sensual, thoughtful project that intersects female desire with Orthodox Judaism and grief that one of its stars, Rachel Weisz, shepherded to the big screen. Based on Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel, the film tells the story of Weisz’s Ronit, who’s escaped the cloistered environment of her youth to return to the north London neighborhood where she grew up upon learning of the death of her father, the rabbi. There she rekindles a romance with her first love, Esti (Rachel McAdams), a lesbian who denied her true desire for her faith and married her and Ronit’s childhood friend Dovid (Alesandro Nivola).

Much ado has been made about the culminating “liberating” sex scene between Weisz and McAdams that unfolds partway through the film. And while it’s quite something to behold, Disobedience is really a meditation on freedom, choice, and remaining true to one’s self.

“It was very important to me and to Sebastián that [desire] was at the center of the story,” Weisz told The Advocate. “After you’ve watched however many minutes of this quite repressed society where you can’t express your sexuality if you’re gay, when these women finally are alone together —  the sex scene is incredibly important.”

“[The scene] where Esti comes — probably for the first time — that orgasm, to me, is her liberation. It’s her kind of freedom. It doesn’t just mean sex. It means so much about her agency and her self-determination,” Weisz added.

Directed by Matthew Warchus and written by Stephen Beresford, Pride (2014) tells the amazing, true story of how gays and lesbians in London joined forces with miners to enact political change. This period drama, set during the Margaret Thatcher era, shows how support from the group Lesbians and Gays Support Miners helped change a government decision to close mines across the United Kingdom. It also led to miners becoming allies of the LGBTQ movement for years to come. In addition to its historical importance, Pride, through emotional performances and storytelling, tells the timeless lesson of how marginalized groups are stronger together, and how hearts and minds can be changed through a common cause.

Beyond the fact that it’s a tender, gorgeously rendered coming-of-age story about two young women in love, Rafiki, directed by a Kenyan woman, Wanuri Kahiu, has forever changed the landscape for LGBTQ cinema there.

A modern-day Romeo and Juliet (but with a less tragic ending), Rafiki tells the story of Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) and Ziki (Sheila Munyiva),  young women who fall in love despite their fathers being rival politicians.

While the storytelling alone is groundbreaking for Kenya, the events that ensued once the film was released were just as impactful.

Originally banned by the homophobic head of Kenya’s Film Classification Board, Ezekiel Mutua, because he alleged it would “promote lesbianism,” the film enjoyed massive audiences when the ban was lifted for a brief time in order to make it eligible for the foreign-language Academy Award. But the lift of the ban came only because of Kahiu’s fierce determination in the face of discrimination. She took the Film Classification Board to court and won a seven-day reprieve from the ban. The board chose to submit a different film for Oscar consideration, but Rafiki, with its sold-out audiences, still won in its own way.

“For many Kenyans, viewing Rafiki may be the first step toward building more empathy and acceptance of LGBT people. That will ultimately benefit all Kenyans — apart from those who seek to instrumentalize homophobia to gain political relevance,” Neela Ghoshal, a senior LGBTQ rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, wrote in The Advocate.

Pariah, from director Dee Rees, a queer woman of color, began as a short in the late aughts. In 2011, Rees (Bessie, Mudbound) ushered her film about teen Alike coming into her queer identity while clashing with her mother’s religion and homophobia to the big screen, and it became a film festival hit. Occasionally difficult to watch as Alike (the excellent Adepero Oduye) struggles for acceptance in her own home, Pariah is a heartfelt and lyrical coming-of-age story that excavated the intersections of gender expression and sexual identity well before they became a part of daily discourse. Kim Wayans and Charles Parnell play Alike’s parents while Aasha Davis (South of Nowhere) plays Bina, the young woman she falls for.

Call Me by Your Name, a dream of a film directed by Luca Guadagnino, has enchanted both audiences and critics with its postcard-perfect depiction of northern Italy and its central romance between 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his father’s 24-year-old graduate student, Oliver (Armie Hammer). These actors shine in their portrayal of first love and heartbreak. But it’s a capstone speech from Elio’s father (A Serious Man‘s Michael Stuhlbarg) to his son that will linger in your mind for days, if not live on in film history.

“Do all lovers feel like they’re inventing something?” the betrothed Heloise whispers to Marianne, the young woman hired by her mother to surreptitiously paint her portrait as a promise of her marriage to a Milanese nobleman in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Marianne (Noemie Merlant) drinks in details of her soon-to-be-lover Heloise (who rejects her marriage and refuses to pose) in order to reconstruct the betrothed’s visage on the canvas. Before long, Heloise (out actress Adèle Haenel) returns the gaze full-stop.

The result is a palpable depiction of out director Céline Sciamma’s (Water Lilies, Tomboy, Girlhood) idea of the “eroticism of consent,” in which she defines the cinematic language of the long-debated female gaze while simultaneously re-mystifying the dizzying experience of falling in love. And Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a work of cinematic art as fine as the art, poetry, and orchestral music to which the film pays homage, is destined to be revered, adored, and deconstructed for decades to come. But for all there is to be gleaned from the film’s theoretical acumen, it’s also deeply romantic and sexy.

More than half a century after Patricia Highsmith’s groundbreaking 1952 novel The Price of Salt/Carol was released, Todd Haynes’s big-screen adaptation Carol (2015) became revolutionary in its own way. The film, starring Cate Blanchett as the titular Carol, a soon-to-be-divorced New Jersey socialite and a mother who falls for Rooney Mara’s Therese, the shopgirl who is, as Carol notes, “flung out of space,” earned six Oscar nominations, even if it was snubbed in the Best Picture category. Still, it was the first Oscar-worthy love story about a female couple in which a man does not steal focus and that doesn’t end in disaster or death for the women. In fact, the novel and the film’s hopeful ending offers a possible happily-ever-after for Carol and Therese.

Beyond that, its artistry is undeniable, with a team that includes New Queer Cinema darling Haynes at the helm, screenwriter Phyllis Nagy (who is a lesbian and who was friends with Highsmith), costumer Sandy Powell (who also costumed The Favourite), composer Carter Burwell, and cinematographer Ed Lachmann (Far From Heaven). If that weren’t enough, out Emmy winner Sarah Paulson plays Carol’s best friend and former lover Abby.

Since it was released, Carol, which begins during the days before Christmas and includes Carol and Therese consummating their desire during a road trip on New Year’s Eve, has become a bit of a holiday tradition, especially among queer women.