JARIPEO

Every Christmas, cowboys, families and returning migrants gather in Michoacán for the jaripeo, a traditional Mexican rodeo steeped in ritual, spectacle and machismo. But just beyond the arena, another story is unfolding. In fleeting touches, knowing glances and secret encounters, queer desire finds its own place within this deeply rooted tradition. Filmmakers Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig take us inside this world with extraordinary intimacy, weaving raw vérité, Super 8 and dreamlike memory into a sensual portrait of queer life, rural Mexico and the complicated pull of home. At once tender, sexy and visually intoxicating, Jaripeo finds beauty in contradiction and freedom in unexpected places, revealing queerness not outside tradition, but alive within it.

Filmed across nearly two decades, ADAM'S APPLE is a deeply intimate portrait of growing up, letting go, and becoming yourself. Visual artist Amy Jenkins turns the camera toward her son Adam as he moves through adolescence and into life as a trans man, while Adam brings his own writing, music and perspective to their shared story. Home movies, vérité footage and journal entries create something rare: a film about transition told from both sides of the parent-child relationship. Tender, joyful and deeply personal, ADAM'S APPLE finds its power in the rhythms of everyday adolescence: falling in love, going to prom, figuring out who you are and imagining the person you want to become. 

Rayya Elias lived big. A musician, writer, hairstylist and fixture of New York’s downtown scene, she survived addiction, homelessness and incarceration before rebuilding her life on her own terms. Then, at 56, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. By her side was her best friend turned partner, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, who put everything else aside to care for the woman she loved. With remarkable intimacy, award-winning filmmaker Marc J. Francis follows Rayya through her final year as making music becomes more essential than ever, and she finds her way back to family, Detroit and the Arabic roots she once pushed away. Raw and deeply moving, HERE I AM is a love story, a homecoming and a portrait of an unforgettable woman determined to live fully to the end.

At 93, Roy Blakey has lived more than a few lives: theatrical figure skater, obsessive archivist and pioneering photographer of the male nude. Born in Oklahoma, Roy followed his dreams onto the ice, touring the world with Holiday on Ice before landing in New York, where his photography documented a generation of gay men and pushed the boundaries of queer image-making. Filmmaker Keri Pickett turns the camera toward her uncle and their decades-long relationship, drawing from an extraordinary personal archive of photographs, films and skating ephemera. As Roy begins to slip into dementia, preserving his remarkable legacy becomes increasingly urgent. Uncle Roy is an intimate portrait of an eccentric, fiercely private man whose extraordinary life opens a window onto a much larger queer cultural history. 

Megan Rapinoe has never separated who she is from what she stands for. A two-time World Cup champion, Olympic gold medalist, proud queer icon and former University of Portland Pilot, she transformed women’s soccer while becoming one of the most fearless voices of her generation. In this intimate, refreshingly unconventional portrait, BEBA director Rebeca Huntt meets Rapinoe at the end of her playing career, looking beyond the public figure to the family, relationships, convictions, victories and failures that shaped her. From coming out and finding freedom in living openly to fighting for equal pay and racial justice, Rapinoe’s story is one of refusing to make herself smaller. Funny, candid and unexpectedly vulnerable, RAPINOE asks what remains when a champion stops competing and begins reckoning with herself.

n 1979, William Friedkin descended on New York’s West Village to make Cruising, his controversial thriller starring Al Pacino as a cop hunting a serial killer in the city’s gay leather bars. The production ignited fierce protests from queer activists who feared the film would turn gay men into predators and victims at a moment when the community was fighting for visibility and dignity. But behind the Hollywood controversy was a real-life tragedy. Jeffrey Schwarz (VITO, TAB HUNTER CONFIDENTIAL) traces the story of Addison Verrill, a young Variety reporter murdered in 1977 after a night at the Mineshaft, while revisiting the vanished world of pre-AIDS New York that surrounded him. Part true crime, part queer cultural history, Mineshaft asks what gets remembered when Hollywood turns real lives into fiction.