Queer and LGBTQ+ Films to Watch at Sundance Film Festival 2026

The Sundance Film Festival 2026, running from 22 January to 1 February, brings a clear group of queer and LGBTQ+ films that feel grounded in lived experience. Across features, documentaries, and shorts, these stories spend time with desire, distance, power, and memory, without trying to explain themselves too much.

What stands out this year is how often queerness appears as something lived rather than stated. Folklore, sport, horror, and archive become ways to look at intimacy and pressure, not messages to decode. Many of these films sit in closed worlds, remote places, tight systems, private spaces, where connection feels fragile and hard won.

There is also a strong sense of personal voice. Several of the films feel shaped by the filmmakers’ own histories and fixations, leaving room for humour, tenderness, discomfort, and longing to exist side by side. Sundance 2026 gives these films space to unfold in their own time, unresolved, human, and self directed.

Below are the queer and LGBTQ+ films shaping that presence this year.

The Incomer
United Kingdom, 2026, 102 min
Director: Louis Paxton
Set on a remote Scottish island, the film follows siblings Isla and Sandy as their isolated way of life is disrupted by the arrival of a government official sent to relocate them. What begins as resistance slowly opens into something gentler, touching on folklore, belonging, and the quiet need for connection.

Gender Studies
United States, 2026, 11 min
Director: Jamie Kiernan O’Brien
When a trans college student becomes fixated on another woman, admiration turns into imitation. The short traces how desire, envy, and insecurity blur personal boundaries, leading to a risky attempt at self reinvention.

zi
United States, 2025, 99 min
Director: Kogonada
Over the course of one drifting night in Hong Kong, a young woman encounters a stranger who unsettles her sense of time and self. Moving between the everyday and the unreal, the film reflects on memory, future selves, and the quiet ache of missed connection.

The Brittney Griner Story
United States, 2025, 105 min
Director: Alexandria Stapleton
The documentary gives Brittney Griner space to tell her story in her own words, from her career in basketball to her detainment in Russia. Grounded in family, love, and survival, it moves past headlines to focus on the cost of being turned into a political symbol.

Give Me the Ball!
United States, 2025, 101 min
Directors: Liz Garbus, Elizabeth Wolff
Through archive footage and candid reflection, the film traces Billie Jean King’s fight for equality in sport. Alongside public victories, it also sits with the private toll of hiding, pressure, and the choices required to keep going.

Jaripeo
Mexico, United States, France, 2026, 70 min
Directors: Efraín Mojica, Rebecca Zweig
Returning to the rodeos of Michoacán, the film moves through memory, desire, and masculinity. Beneath the noise and bravado of jaripeo culture, it reveals hidden queer lives shaped by longing, secrecy, and home.

Public Access
United States, 2025, 107 min
Director: David Shadrack Smith
Built from rare archive material, the film explores New York’s public access television scene, where queer creators used cheap airtime to challenge censorship and invent new forms of expression long before social media existed.

Big Girls Don’t Cry
New Zealand, 2026, 100 min
Director: Paloma Schneideman
Set during one summer in rural New Zealand, the story follows a fourteen year old girl navigating desire, shame, and early internet culture. As she imitates the people she wants to be close to, identity becomes something unstable and unfinished.

I Want Your Sex
United States, 2025, 90 min
Director: Gregg Araki
After landing a job at a Los Angeles gallery, a young man is pulled into the orbit of an artist who blurs sex, power, and performance. What begins as fantasy quickly turns darker, circling obsession, control, and violence.

Barbara Forever
United States, 2025, 102 min
Director: Brydie O’Connor
Using Barbara Hammer’s own archive and voice, the film reflects on her life, work, and refusal to be erased. It becomes both a portrait of an artist and a record of lesbian visibility shaped on her own terms.

Callback
United States, 2025, 16 min
Director: Matthew Puccini
A small domestic moment spirals when an audition callback exposes tension between two partners. Ambition, jealousy, and affection collide inside a relationship already under strain.

Leviticus
Australia, 2026, 88 min
Director: Adrian Chiarella
In a religious small town, two teenage boys fall for each other while something violent and unseen stalks them. Blending horror with tenderness, the film looks at queer love under pressure from faith, fear, and desire itself.