beyondasiaphilia

Ballroom Blitz, Frameline 50 festival review

July 10, 2026 at 5:09 am Leave a comment

The Frameline Film Festival always is the lead-up to Pride Weekend in San Francisco and as such it’s a cinematic expression of all things queer on screen. I caught a few shows this year that demonstrated the breadth and depth of the LGBTQ+ in the 21st century.

Barbara Forever (2026) is an energetic look at the life and times of iconic lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer that vividly captures Barbara’s irrepressible personality. Hammer prolifically documented her life, both public and private, and director Birdie O’Connor draws on that vast well of imagery, along with audio recordings of Hammer that clearly demonstrate Hammer’s own understanding of the significance of her work and her legacy. A queen of lesbian cinema, Hammer also broke barriers in the mostly male-dominated experimental film scene with her unabashedly female-centric work. 

In Rock Out (2025),  director Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar for his screenplay for MILK) deconstructs the queer aesthetic that shaped rock and roll, from its earliest days of Elvis to the present day. The film spends a lot of time on the 60s and 70s classic rock era, and makes a strong case for the argument that gay male managers such as Brian Epstein, Robert Stigwood, and John Reid (who was also Elton John’s significant other for many years), played a massive part in imparting a queer sensibility into rock music. As one observer notes, the 1970s rock scene was a whole bunch of straight people trying to look gay, which is in ironic contrast to the many closeted queer performers who were trying to pass for straight. Woven through the extensive archival footage of rock royalty such as Dusty Springfield, David Bowie and Queen is the story of Black searching for answers about his brother Marcus, a rocker dude who had a fraught relationship with his own gay identity. The film sticks exclusively with Western rock music and looks at mostly white male subjects, although it does touch briefly on Little Richard and Ma Rainey, so it doesn’t necessarily break a lot of new ground. But Black does a good job connecting a lot of different dots and bringing together a vast amount of archival footage, so it’s a fun and enjoyable timepass. Rock Out will stream on revry.com as a 4-part docuseries starting on August 30^th.

I also caught Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s documentary Jaripeo (2026), which looks at the experiences of gay rodeo cowboys in Michoacan Mexico. The film is beautiful, imaginative, and sexy, and presents a multilayered, thoughtful look at its subject matter. Mojica and Zweig create an impressionistic mood, combining a non-linear storytelling style with atmospheric imagery that reflects Mojica’s background as a visual artist and Zweig’s as a poet.

One of my favorite films about the queer experience that was inexplicably not included in Frameline was Kim Anno’s Quba! (2025), which I saw at the Elmwood Theater as part of a series sponsored by the Berkeley Film Foundation. Anno celebrates the LGBTQ community in Cuba as it pushes back against macho culture, the Church, and other oppressively retrograde attitudes. The film vividly captures the exuberant spirit of its various subjects as they celebrate their lives and their communities through music, dance, art and living.

Entry filed under: film festivals, movies. Tags: film festival, film festivals, frameline 2026, lgbtq+.