This year’s Wicked Queer, Boston’s LGBTQ+ film festival, boasts a feature documentary about iconic lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. an indie romance starring British singing sensation Charli xcx and a film about legendary Boston film programmer George Mansour who founded the Boston Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1984. So it’s fitting that the theme for this year’s event, which unspools April 3–12, is “Queer Audacity.”
Now in its 42nd year, Wicked Queer is one of the longest-running LGBTQ+ film festivals in the world. The features, shorts and documentaries will screen at four area venues: Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre and back this year, the Somerville Theatre.
Schedule highlights at press time include “At the Place of Ghosts,” an atmospheric horror tale from Indigenous nonbinary filmmaker Bretten Hannam, a member of Nova Scotia’s Mi’kmaw people. This is Hannam’s third feature that showcases stories of the Indigenous Canadian people, following the 2015 action movie “North Mountain” and the 2021 coming-of-age film “Wildhood,” which screened at Wicked Queer. In “At the Place of Ghosts,” two estranged brothers (Blake Alec Miranda and Forrest Goodluck) go hiking in the Canadian woods where they grapple with the ghosts of their pasts.
The supernatural is a recurring theme in this year’s Wicked Queer, says Executive Director Shawn Cotter, and it extends to the fest’s international offerings such as Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut “A Useful Ghost,” which screened in the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It’s a mash up of fantasy, horror, romance and dark comedy about a ghost that inhabits a vacuum cleaner and inspires intertwining stories.
A strong slate of women’s films is notable this year, adds Cotter. In director Tara Thorne’s romantic comedy “Lakeview,” a group of 20 and 30-something queer women gather at the waterfront home of recently divorced Darcy (Lesley Smith) for a weekend of celebrating, commiserating and confessing. The friends include Lauren (Nicole Steeves), who arrives with her much younger lover Phoebe; married couple Julien (Kathryn McCormack) and Julie Anne, who announce their pregnancy; Lucy, who is reeling from a dramatic breakup and not coping well; and the missing, mysterious Dax, who still looms larger in everyone’s past.
Singing star and queer ally Charli xcx may be getting attention for her mockumentary “The Moment,” but she’s also starring in the low-budget indie “Erupcja” (the Polish word for “eruption”) that Cotter praises for its “new wave sensibility.”
“Erupcja,” which premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, is a freewheeling romantic dramedy directed by American filmmaker Pete Ohs, who also shot on location and edited the film. Charli xcx plays the British Bethany, who grows restless after arriving in Poland with her doting boyfriend Rob (Will Madden). She soon ditches him to seek out old friend Nel (Lena Góra), a florist that Bethany met during past visits to Warsaw. Over the next few days, the two women rekindle their nonsexual but emotionally passionate relationship and realize that each time they’re together, a volcano erupts—a representation of their combustible ardor.
“Thirteen Buttons to Heaven,” from Canadian filmmakers Andrzej Dec-Williams and Greg Kruszewski, is a 50-minute film about Boston’s own George Mansour, who founded the Boston Gay Film Festival in 1984 and programmed the event into the ’90s as it evolved into what is now Wicked Queer. The irrepressible Mansour began his booking career in the 1960s at Paramount and then Warner Brothers in Boston back when the big Hollywood studios maintained offices in all the major markets. In the ensuing decades, Mansour introduced art house, international films and LGBTQ+ titles to local audiences at the legendary Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge and the Nickelodeon Theaters in Boston, among others, playing a key role in establishing Boston as a hub for adventurous cinephiles.
Younger audiences will also see representations of audacity in “Forever Barbara,” filmmaker Brydie O’Connor’s look at the late, great pioneer of queer, feminist and experimental cinema Barbara Hammer. Often cited as the first films made by a lesbian about lesbian life, the prolific Hammer created some 100 experimental films from the 1970s up to her death from cancer in 2019. “Forever Barbara” unspools entirely through Hammer’s singular images, voice and vision, becoming what Filmmaker magazine calls, “an intricately crafted portrait of perhaps the first woman to put lesbian sex on screen.”
One of Wicked Queer’s signature programs are its shorts. This year, there are 12 different shorts categories, all with multiple films, including men’s, women’s, trans, Middle Eastern and North African, Asian, South American and comedy shorts, especially popular, says Katie Shannon, Wicked Queer’s director of programming. There’s also the “GTFO” program of shorts that defy categorization but are too good not to program, says Shannon. It fits with Wicked Queer’s mission to center queer joy and resistance as it provides an inclusive showcase for emerging filmmakers. n
More: queer.film/wickedqueer
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