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Celebrating 35 years as New York City’s premiere destination for LGBTQ+ filmmakers, indie cinephiles and the industry who’s who alike, NewFest kicked off one week ago, Oct. 12, at Chelsea’s Sva Theatre with the New York premiere of screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s latest biopic, “Rustin.”

The days that followed included New York premieres and special screenings for anticipated festival darlings like “Eileen” with Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie, “Nyad” with Annette Bening and Jodie Foster and the world premiere of “Beyond the Aggressives,” the documentary centerpiece and follow-up to 2005’s groundbreaking “The Aggressives.” And the days ahead promise even more – among them “May December” from director Todd Haynes and starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, Cannes award winner “Monster” from Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda and the closing night feature presentation of Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers,” starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell.

When the 2023 edition of NewFest kicks off on Thursday in New York, the LGBTQ film festival will proudly mark a historic milestone: 35 years of serving LGBTQ audiences and filmmakers.

That anniversary will begin with the Oct. 12 opening night premiere featuring Netflix’s Rustin, followed by 14 days of virtual and in-person programming across various venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn that concludes with a screening of All of Us Strangers.

Other star-studded award-winners and festival darlings like Monster, May December, Eileen, Nyad and National Anthem will screen, alongside special premieres for TV series Fellow Travelers and Our Flag Means Death; 4K restorations of Young Soul Rebels and Chocolate Babies; and the long-awaited follow-up, Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later.

It’s a lineup that embraces the connection between the past and present of the queer experience, particularly pointed in a year when numerous industry challenges have affected filmmaking, LGBTQ audiences and the film festival circuit.

New York-based LGBTQ+ film festival NewFest has debuted the lineup for its 35th festival, which is set to run from Oct. 12 to Oct. 24.

A slew of the festival’s centerpiece films include Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s “Nyad,” which will tell the story of Diana Nyad, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes award-winner “Monster” will receive its New York City premiere while the world premiere of “The Aggressives’s” follow-up “Beyond The Aggressives: 25 Years Later” will be sported.

Emma Fidel’s documentary “Queen of New York” will spotlight Marti Cummings’ journey to become the first non-binary candidate elected to New York City Council, serving as the New York centerpiece, as narrated by Billy Porter.

As previously announced, George C. Wolfe’s “Rustin” will open the festival while Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers” will close.

Additionally, the festival will hold advanced screenings of...

Leading New York City LGBTQ+ film festival NewFest has unveiled its 2023 lineup featuring a slew of highly anticipated fall releases for films and TV.

The festival, which runs October 12 to 22 in-person and virtually until October 24, boasts over 130 films from 26 countries. The New York premiere of Netflix’s historical film “Rustin” will open the 35th edition of the festival, with Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers” closing out the lineup. The U.S. Centerpiece film is confirmed to be “Nyad,” featuring the true story of Diana Nyad who swam from Cuba to Florida. The festival’s International Centerpiece film is the New York City premiere of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Monster,” which won Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

“May December” director Todd Haynes will receive the 2023 NewFest Queer Visionary Award on October 19, followed by a special screening of the latest drama starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman,...

(Welcome to Movies Are Gay, a Pride Month series where we explore the intentional [or accidental] ways Lgbtqia+ themes, characters, and creatives have shaped cinema.)

Isaac Julien might not be a household name to even the most vocally self-professed cinephiles, but he certainly should be. As an installation artist and one of the founders of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Julien is a pillar of Black cinema history. His breakthrough feature is the docu-drama "Looking for Langston," which focused on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. But it was in 1991 that Julien debuted the masterful, Semaine de la Critique prize for Best Film at the Cannes Film Festival-winning "Young Soul Rebels" which helped bring him to a wider audience.

Set during the 1977's Silver Jubilee for Queen Elizabeth, "Young Soul Rebels" is a beautiful, poetic, at times devastating coming-of-age romantic dramedy, and also a thriller about a horrific homophobic hate crime.

From trans lives to celebrations of drag, queer film pulled no punches as it hit screens in the 90s with a DIY bravura that transformed the movie industry

Queer film exploded like a glitter cannon in the 1990s, sending sparkling product raining down in every direction. Trans lives hit the screen in Orlando and Boys Don’t Cry, alongside dynamic bulletins from the Black queer experience. We had jubilant celebrations of drag with Paris Is Burning and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, provocations from New Queer Cinema in the shape of Poison, Swoon and Edward II; there were auteurist masterpieces and timeless coming-out stories. The Wachowski sisters, Lisa Cholodenko, François Ozon and Bruce Labruce all made their debuts; Pedro Almodóvar and Gus Van Sant went stratospheric. Benefiting from a surge in the fortunes of independent cinema, and a defined focus for anger brought about by Aids activism, queer...

Ealing Studios has acquired a significant stake in TV and film company GreenAcre Films and forged a new creative partnership with the company that will see Ealing Studios expand its TV division.

Having already announced earlier this year the ITV commission of Maigret for two stand-alone films starring Rowan Atkinson, Ealing Studios’ stake in GreenAcre will see them develop a TV slate for both UK and international broadcasters.

It marks the first partnership at the newly restructured Ealing Studios headed by Ben Latham-Jones.

Co-founded by Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Amanda Jenks in 2010, GreenAcre Films became a division of Wall to Wall in 2012. It will continue to co-produce its current drama slate, which includes projects for HBO, BBC and ITV.

As well as developing new TV projects, GreenAcre will also expand its feature film roster which already has a number of titles in development with the BFI.

In a joint statement, GreenAcre co-founders Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Amanda Jenks said:...

If you're not at all familiar with the work of black British artist (including filmmaker) Isaac Julien, here's your chance to get familiar (if you live in New York anyway). We've highlighted some of his films here on S&A - notably his allegorical snapshot of late 1970s London, 1991's Young Soul Rebels, which co-starred a young Sophie Okonedo, and was awarded the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival the same year. And there was the poetic 1989 documentary Looking For Langston - an exploration of the life and times of late African American poet Langston Hughes, delving into the world in which he...

The film-maker and installation artist on bridging the gap between art and cinema, and what he learned from the Baader-Meinhof gang

What first drew you to making art?

Punk. When I was about 15, I made friends with some hippies who lived close to the estate where I grew up. One of them turned out to be Astrid Proll (1), although I didn't know it at the time as she had a pseudonym. They taught me about art and photography. I discovered punk, situationism (2), and the connection between art and politics. I never looked back.

What was your big breakthrough?

Attending Central St Martin's, then a sort of Oxbridge of art schools. Also, being funded by Channel 4 to create the Sankofa Film and Video Collective (3), and making the film Looking for Langston (4).

Have you considered becoming a more mainstream film director?

I viewed myself as that when I made Young Soul Rebels...

If you're not at all familiar with the work of black British artist (including filmmaker) Isaac Julien, here's your chance to get familiar (if you live in New York anyway). We've highlighted some of his films here on S&A - notably his allegorical snapshot of late 1970s London, 1991's Young Soul Rebels, which co-starred a young Sophie Okonedo, and was awarded the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival the same year. And there was the poetic 1989 documentary Looking For Langston - an exploration of the life and times of late African American poet Langston Hughes, delving into the world in which he...

If you're not at all familiar with the work of black British artist (including filmmaker) Isaac Julien, here's your chance to get familiar (if you live in New York anyway). We've highlighted some of his films here on S&A - notably his allegorical snapshot of late 1970s London, 1991's Young Soul Rebels, which co-starred a young Sophie Okonedo, and was awarded the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival the same year. And there was the poetic 1989 documentary Looking For Langston - an exploration of the life and times of late African American poet Langston Hughes, delving into the world in which he...

Catch up with the last seven days in the world of film

The big story

The blockbuster juggernaut rolls ever onward: Breaking Dawn Part 2 is so two weeks ago, now it's the turn of those funny little creature, the hobbits. The first chunk of Peter Jackson's long-awaited trilogy, adapted from Jrr Tolkien's admittedly rather slim novel about Bilbo Baggins and his chums, premiered in Jackson's home country of New Zealand, with predictable amounts of fans turning up in costume. Once the red-carpeting was done, the instant reaction, via Twitter, was predictably fulsome.

What was less predictable, perhaps, was the kerfuffle that preceded the event, with anti-animal cruelty activists Peta accusing the production of maltreating its livestock. Studio Warner Bros backed its star director, but the row still hasn't quite gone away.

In the news

Is Matthew Vaughn directing the new Star Wars film?

Will be Joseph Gordon-Levitt be playing Batman in Justice League?...

The Guardian's season of British cult classics continues with a double helping of youth pop culture set in London in the 60s and 70s

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This week is pop culture week in our British cult classics series – well, sort of. Our double bill is a pair of films that turn fresh eyes on two different London youth tribes of the 60s and 70s: the black street soul of Notting Hill is celebrated in Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels, while the white working class suedehead world of Stratford is the focus of Barney Platts-Mills's Bronco Bullfrog. The former was a flagship production of the BFI Production Board, costing around £1.7m in 1990; Bronco was a rough-and-ready £18,000 shoot in 1970, taking off from Joan Littlewood's youth theatre workshops. But both show equal affection for their subjects, and from this distance are each a fantastically revealing...

Our season of British cult classics gets off to an arty start with a duo of films about Francis Bacon and Caravaggio

Love Is the Devil, the 1998 film directed by John Maybury, is many things: the first serious cinematic study of the life and art of painter Francis Bacon, a tour de force performance by Derek Jacobi, an unholy convocation of YBAs (including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst) filling in as background extras; and perhaps, most remarkably in hindsight, an early sighting of 007 himself, Daniel Craig. Craig is rather brilliant in Love Is the Devil, playing the troubled George Dyer, Bacon's petty-criminal lover, who met the artist after crashing through his roof while attempting a break-in, and who killed himself in 1971. You can't say Craig doesn't go all the way for his art: the film includes a jaw-dropping scene of him in the bath, entirely in the altogether.

If you're not at all familiar with the work of black British filmmaker Isaac Julien, here's your chance to get familiar. We've highlighted some of his films here on S&A - notably his allegorical snapshot of late 1970s London, 1991's Young Soul Rebels, which co-starred a young Sophie Okonedo, and was awarded the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival the same year; and the poetic 1989 documentary Looking For Langston, which I just learned is available online, embedded in its full 45-minute running time below. Julien’s films relate experiences of black and gay identity, combining both...

It plays more like a letter to, or a snapshot of a time and place, instead of your conventional narrative. But I don’t think it’s striving for the latter anyway. That specific time and place is London in the late 1970s. I certainly wasn’t there, but black British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s allegorical tale helped capture it for me.

Sure, there’s the plot involving the murder of an interracial couple, but that’s not the story’s heartbeat. The film is as much about the crime, as is the killing in Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blowup.

Parliament’s P-Funk Wants To Get Funked Up erupts over the opening of Young Soul Rebels, as an interracial sex act in the bushes turns into a murder, setting off a police investigation and waves of controversy in London’s black community. The year is 1977, and while some people are busy...

Cheryl Cole's solo debut has become the fastest-selling single of the year. 'Fight For This Love' sold more than 290,000 copies in its first week on release to beat 2009's previous seven-day best - set by Alexandra Burke's 'Bad Boys' last week - by over 100,000 units. "I'm just getting over the fact I have recorded my solo record and now it's number one," Cole told the Official Chart Company. "I can't take this all in. It's hard for me to put into words how I feel. I have this permanent smile on my face." Behind Cole, Burke's 'Bad Boys' slips to two, while Chipmunk's 'Oopsy Daisy' holds steady at three. Meanwhile, Whitney Houston climbs from 14 to five with 'Million Dollar Bill' following her performance on The X Factor last week. Young Soul Rebels - a collective (more)...

N-Dubz singer Tulisa has expressed concerns that sales of the charity single she is involved with will suffer from illegal filesharing. The group are just one of the acts who collaborated on upcoming War Child song 'I Got Soul'. Under the name Young Soul Rebels, N-Dubz appear alongside artists including Tinchy Stryder, Pixie Lott, Frankmusik and Chipmunk. Tulisa told the Daily (more)...

N-Dubz singer Tulisa has revealed that she is worried illegal downloads may limit the success of new charity song 'I Got Soul' with Young Soul Rebels. The singer, who joined up with artists including Pixie Lott, Tinchy Stryder and Frankmusik for the War Child track, claimed that young music fans are more likely to access music illegally. "We are aiming for a younger audience and they tend (more)...

Frankmusik has admitted that he didn't realise the new War Child single was for charity when he signed up for the Young Soul Rebels project. The 23-year-old, who joined acts including Pixie Lott, N-Dubz, Tinchy Stryder and Vv Brown to record 'I Got Soul', claimed that he initially only agreed to take part because he is friends with the producer. "I'll be completely honest - it was great (more)...