For our fourth birthday, we wanted to share what recharges our creative energy, and for most of the studio that is film. These are sixteen the team keeps going back to, from eight countries and thirty-six years of cinema.
Queer cinema has always held a lot of what we felt growing up, an unease that comes from not fitting neatly into the cultural layout handed to us. Graedance began as a way to celebrate the grey areas we fall into. These films don't always end with a soft release. What they do is stay in the in-between with the people in them, which is where so many of us grew up.
queer film has mostly travelled hand to hand, one small community passing it to the next
Why the in-between
Liminal comes from the Latin limen, the stone sill at the bottom of a doorway. A liminal space is the one you stand in after leaving one room and before entering the next. Most of these films are set there, and they stay there longer than is comfortable.
Ten of the sixteen were made outside the US and UK, many in places where the law, the family or the language left little room for the people on screen. So the films say it some other way. A love note passed on a friend's behalf. A lamp with a waterfall printed on it. A portrait painted from memory. A spider lily tattoo.
Five are from Taiwan, which in 2019 became the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. Four of those five were made more than a decade before that vote.
The sixteen
01 º Taiwan, 2020
Your Name Engraved Herein
Directed by Patrick Kuang-Hui Liu
Two boys at a Catholic boarding school fall for each other in the months martial law ends in Taiwan, and spend the next thirty years working out what it cost.
Set in 1987, as martial law lifts. The country is changing what it allows faster than the two of them can.
02 º Taiwan, 2006
Eternal Summer
Directed by Leste Chen
A friendship between two boys and the girl between them turns into something none of the three will say out loud.
Three teenagers in the years between school and adulthood, when nobody has to name anything yet, and so nobody does.
03 º Taiwan / Hong Kong, 2008
Miao Miao
Directed by Cheng Hsiao-tse
A Japanese exchange student and her Taiwanese classmate fall for the same withdrawn record-shop owner, and one of them is falling for the other.
A Japanese girl new to Taipei, still learning the city when she starts learning this.
04 º Taiwan, 2002
Blue Gate Crossing
Directed by Yee Chih-yen
A schoolgirl is sent to pass a love note to a boy on her best friend's behalf, and works out she wants the friend.
The last summer of school, when who you will be in three years is still an open question.
05 º Taiwan, 2007
Spider Lilies
Directed by Zero Chou
A webcam girl asks a tattoo artist for the spider lily on her arm, the one design the artist has sworn never to ink again.
A tattoo carries what neither woman can say, back to a childhood they partly share.
06 º Hong Kong, 1997
Happy Together
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
Two men from Hong Kong split and reunite over and over in Buenos Aires, chasing a waterfall printed on a lamp.
Released weeks before Hong Kong's handover, it follows two men about as far from home as a map allows, unable to stay and unable to leave.
07 º Spain / France, 2026
La Bola Negra
Directed by Javier Calvo & Javier Ambrossi
Three men across eighty-five years of Spanish history, one blackballed, one conscripted, one inheriting, tied together by a Lorca poem and everything their families refused to say.
Three men living in the gap between what happened and what got said, across most of a century.
08 º South Korea, 2016
The Handmaiden
Directed by Park Chan-wook
A pickpocket is planted as a maid to help con a Japanese heiress out of her fortune, and the con starts running the other way.
Korea under Japanese rule, a house run in two languages, and two women whose roles change from one scene to the next.
09 º France, 2019
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Directed by Céline Sciamma
A painter is hired to paint a bride's wedding portrait in secret on a Breton island, and has to memorise her by looking.
The weeks between an engagement and a wedding, on an island with almost no men on it.
10 º United States / United Kingdom, 2015
Carol
Directed by Todd Haynes
A shopgirl in 1950s Manhattan meets an older woman buying a train set for her daughter, and follows her into a road trip that costs them both.
Two women in the space a 1950s divorce opens up, on the road between the life each has and the one she wants.
11 º United States, 2016
Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
Three chapters in the life of a Black boy growing up in Liberty City, Miami, learning to hold himself in.
One person across three names, Little, Chiron and Black, each chapter a version of himself he has to leave behind.
12 º United Kingdom, 2011
Weekend
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Two men meet at a club in Nottingham and spend forty-eight hours together before one of them leaves the country.
Forty-eight hours with a departure date already set.
13 º United Kingdom, 2023
All of Us Strangers
Directed by Andrew Haigh
A screenwriter in a near-empty London tower starts seeing his neighbour, and starts visiting his parents, who died when he was twelve.
Between the living and the dead, and between the boy he was at twelve and the man he is now.
14 º United States, 2015
Tangerine
Directed by Sean Baker
Two trans sex workers cross Los Angeles on foot to track down a cheating boyfriend, shot entirely on iPhones.
Christmas Eve in Los Angeles, spent on foot and on buses, ending in a laundromat.
15 º United States, 1990
Paris Is Burning
Directed by Jennie Livingston
The Harlem ball scene of the late eighties, its houses, its categories, and the people who invented the vocabulary everyone now borrows.
On the ball floor, every category is a chance to walk as a life the city outside kept from them.
16 º Australia, 1994
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Directed by Stephan Elliott
Two drag queens and a trans woman drive a bus from Sydney to Alice Springs for a casino gig.
Nearly three thousand kilometres of desert in a bus called Priscilla, and the one film on this list made at home in Australia.
Thank you for four years of letting us make for the in-between. We hope one of these finds you this weekend.
