Frameline50 is the queer film festival the world needs in 2026

Fifty years of queer cinema. San Francisco, June 17 to 27.

Frameline turns 50 this month and nobody is treating it as a moment to look back and feel good about things. Executive director Allegra Madsen said it plainly when the lineup dropped: "Our rights are being taken away now. Attacks on our bodies and identities are happening now. And it is precisely this moment that 50 years of queer cinema matters most."

Over 140 films from 35 countries across 11 days in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland. Opening night is D'Arcy Drollinger's Lady Champagne at The Castro. The Centerpiece is Brydie O'Connor's Barbara Forever, a documentary on Barbara Hammer that won the Teddy at Berlinale. Closing night is Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which opened Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May, closed SXSW London on 6 June, and arrives at The Castro with the Queer Palm and a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. There are also retro screenings, Paris Is Burning at 35, a BFI-restored Caravaggio, Bound at 30, but the new work is the reason to be there.

Lady Champagne (Opening Night)
Dragsploitation slapstick filmed entirely in San Francisco. Exotic dancer Champagne White gets framed for murder, ends up in Lady Prison, and escapes using disguises, one-liners and dance moves to bring down a perfume empire. D'Arcy Drollinger is a San Francisco institution and the festival opening with this rather than something more obviously prestigious tells you something about where Frameline's loyalties sit.

Barbara Forever (Centerpiece)
Barbara Hammer made films for decades that most of the world had no idea what to do with. Experimental, explicitly lesbian, formally weird, built almost entirely outside anything mainstream. Brydie O'Connor's documentary does not tidy her up into a legacy moment. It sits with her work and her voice and traces how that work keeps moving through other people. Won the Teddy at Berlinale. As a Centerpiece for the fiftieth it says something about what Frameline thinks this anniversary is actually for, and it is not a gala.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Closing Night, West Coast Premiere)
Jane Schoenbrun's third feature opened Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May, won the Queer Palm, closed SXSW London in June, and is sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from 48 reviews. Hannah Einbinder plays a young director hired to reboot a dead slasher franchise who tracks down the original film's reclusive final girl, played by Gillian Anderson, and ends up somewhere between obsession, desire and genuine horror. The Irish Times called it a near unqualified triumph. The Cannes audience reportedly cheered the title card. Schoenbrun picks up the Frameline Queer Lens Award before the screening. MUBI has it in UK cinemas from 21 August.

I Want Your Sex
Gregg Araki's first film since 2014. An erotic comedy thriller with Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman and Charli XCX, which premiered at Sundance in January and sold to Magnolia Pictures for seven figures. Araki works in a mode that is hard to describe without just watching it, and Frameline has it before the US theatrical run.

Girls Like Girls
Hayley Kiyoko wrote and directed this herself, adapting her own song and novel. It screens at Frameline on 18 June, one day before it opens wide in the US through Focus Features. Two teenage girls, a small town, first love with no language around it yet. Seeing it here the night before it goes everywhere is a different thing.

Our Effed Up World (World Premiere)
Alice Maio Mackay's world premiere, produced by Jane Schoenbrun. Cast includes Jack Haven, Brandon Flynn and Annapurna Sriram. Mackay makes films fast and with a specific kind of political anger that does not soften. Two Schoenbrun-connected titles anchoring the same programme is not something that happened by accident.

Before I Do (World Premiere)
A rom-com, world premiere, and no apologies for it. Groom-to-be John Michael arrives at his bachelor party weekend and finds himself face to face with his best man, who is also his ex. The whole wedding party gets pulled in. A Castro full house on a Friday night is probably the best possible room for this.

Leviticus
Named for the book of the Old Testament most used to justify homophobia. Two teenage boys in a small religious community in Australia are circling each other, the way you do at sixteen when you have no words for it yet, when a killer starts targeting the town's queer youth, appearing to each victim as the person they want most. Desire is the threat. For a lot of queer teenagers that is not a metaphor.

Chiarella takes his time with these two before things go wrong, which is what makes the horror work when it arrives. Mia Wasikowska co-stars as a mother whose faith does a lot of damage. Premiered in Midnight at Sundance, then New Directors/New Films in New York, then SXSW London. Neon has the US release. The It Follows comparison is everywhere and not wrong, but there is something more specific being worked through here.

Maddie's Secret
John Early writes, directs and stars in his first feature. If you know his work you already know why this is on the list.

Montreal, My Beautiful (West Coast Premiere)
Xiaodan He's sapphic romance arrives as a West Coast Premiere with Joan Chen in the lead. Slow, careful, not in any rush to tell you what it means.

The Brittney Griner Story
Alexandria Stapleton's documentary covers Griner's detention in Russia but the part that stays is the economics. The pay gap in professional women's basketball is what put her on that flight. Her detention became a political story. The conditions that created it got treated like context. Sundance standout, screens 20 June as part of the Juneteenth strand.

The Hockey Player (World Premiere)
Luke Prokop came out as gay while under an NHL contract, the first active player in the league to do so. Professional hockey is a particular kind of environment for that. Jacqueline Doorey's documentary gets its world premiere at Frameline.

Give Me the Ball!
Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff on Billie Jean King. Garbus makes documentaries that follow an argument all the way through and King has been building and fighting and being openly queer through most of modern professional women's sport. There is a lot of material here.

Also worth your time: Afternoon Delight

A shorts package, 90 minutes, five films in English, Portuguese and French. Several directors are attending.

Dr. Poppers is the funniest thing in the package. A poppers accident leaves Antoine stuck in an emergency room with the man he was trying to sleep with and then get rid of. They have to talk. French director Arthur Morard is attending.

Morpheus and Charon is about a queer elderly throuple living with one partner's dementia. As the illness gets worse the line between dream and what is real starts to go with it. Both Brazilian directors attend. Fourteen minutes.

The Motorcycle. Scorching Italian summer, a shy teenager, an older boy with a motorbike. The feeling of wanting someone before you know what to do with that.

The Pleasure Dome follows a man through downtown São Paulo into a public bathroom and somewhere into dream logic. The most formally strange film in the package. Director and lead actor both attending.

Talk Me is set in a Spanish village where language has replaced touch. A man in a loveless marriage meets someone who gets it.

Beyond the screenings

On 19 June, Emmy-winning actor Colman Domingo receives the festival's Creative Conscience Award, followed by a public conversation about his career and where queer representation in film and television actually is right now. Domingo is one of the most interesting people working in either medium.

Fifty years of Frameline in 2026, half a century, and nobody has come close. San Francisco owns this, and an impressively diverse, carefully curated programme is exactly how it should be done.

Frameline50 runs 17 to 27 June in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland.

See the full lineup at frameline.org.