NewFest Announces 38th Annual LGBTQ+ Film Festival Lineup: 144 Projects Across 23 Countries

New York’s premier showcase for queer cinema is returning this autumn with its most expansive and globally diverse program to date. NewFest has officially revealed the complete lineup for its 38th annual New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival, featuring 144 projects representing 23 countries.

Running from October 15 to 25, 2025, the festival will occupy theaters across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Screenings and high-profile premieres will take place at major cultural venues including the SVA Theatre, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), MoMI (Museum of the Moving Image), Nitehawk Prospect Park, and the NYC LGBT Community Center. Additionally, a curated selection of films will be available to stream virtually through NewFest’s on-demand platform from October 15 through October 30.

This year’s slate bridges the gap between celebrated international festival heavyweights—including breakout titles from Cannes, the Berlinale, Telluride, and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)—and audacious, boundary-pushing independent works from emerging voices around the globe.

Festival Leadership and Vision

The sheer scale of this year’s programming reflects a cultural landscape where LGBTQ+ narratives are no longer confined to the artistic margins.

“NewFest’s 38th edition underscores the festival’s unique role as a vital platform for the best in queer cinema—bringing together acclaimed work from leading studios and distributors with bold discoveries and emerging voices that define the medium’s future,” said Lesli Klainberg, NewFest’s interim executive director. “This year’s lineup shows that LGBTQ+ stories are not on the margins of culture; they are among the most ambitious, artistically vital, and anticipated films of the moment.”

Director of programming Nick McCarthy echoed these sentiments, highlighting the global sweep of the 2025 selection. “From the USA to Mexico to Nigeria to Nepal to Australia, NewFest38 honors the best in LGBTQIA+ film from around the world,” McCarthy said. “Queer cinema is fully alive—and it’s thriving.”

NewFest Lineup Showcases ‘La Bola Negra’ NYC Premiere, Plus ‘Elsinore,’ ‘Club Kid,’ and More

Chronology and Key Screenings

Opening Night: October 15

The 38th edition kicks off with the New York City premiere of La Bola Negra, directed by the acclaimed Spanish filmmaking duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. Fresh off a massive, highly receptive screening at TIFF and a Best Director win at Cannes, the film spans nearly a century of Spanish history, tracing three generations of men connected through desire, pain, and love. The opening night screening will be followed by a celebratory gala party.

Mid-Festival Centerpieces

NewFest38’s centerpiece events highlight some of the most anticipated prestige titles of the fall festival circuit:

U.S. Centerpiece: Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s tender coming-of-age drama Mouse, which premiered at the 2026 Berlinale and features a standout performance by Sophie Okonedo.
Spotlight Centerpiece: Simon Stone’s British biographical drama Elsinore, starring Oscar contender Andrew Scott as gifted stage actor Ian Charleson.
International Centerpiece: Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa, a transcontinental reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway set against the backdrop of contemporary Nigeria.
New York Centerpiece: Jordan Firstman’s Cannes sensation Club Kid, following an NYC club promoter whose life is upended by the sudden arrival of the young son he never knew he had.
Documentary Centerpiece: Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos’s What Will I Become?, exploring trans boyhood and community healing.

Closing Night: October 25

The festival wraps up with a high-profile screening and closing party for Ira Sachs’s 1980s-set romantic drama The Man I Love. Anchored by a music-driven narrative, the film stars Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, and Luther Ford as characters navigating a fragile window of mortality, beauty, and connection.

Supporting Data, Tributes, and Retrospectives

In addition to contemporary narrative and documentary features, NewFest38 will honor prominent cultural figures and celebrate cinematic milestones:

Voice and Visibility Tribute: Emmy-, Grammy-, and Tony-winner Cynthia Nixon will receive the 2026 Voice and Visibility Award. Nixon will attend in person for a career-spanning conversation, which will also touch upon her work in HBO’s The Gilded Age.
Aubin Pictures 30th Anniversary: The festival will celebrate three decades of social justice storytelling by Aubin Pictures, featuring retrospective shorts by Catherine Gund alongside the New York premiere of And Again I Dream (co-directed by Gund and Mariah Norman).
Legacy Screenings: The festival will host special 35mm and anniversary prints, including a "Dolly Double" block featuring Colin Higgins’s 9 to 5 and Herbert Ross’s Steel Magnolias in honor of the late Dolly Parton, alongside a 60th-anniversary screening of Ingmar Bergman’s psychological masterpiece Persona.
Episodic Showcase: Starz’s Southern Gothic melodrama P-Valley will screen an exclusive presentation of its third and final season, followed by a live conversation with showrunner Katori Hall and star Nicco Annan.

Comprehensive Lineup Overview

The festival’s sprawling roster is organized into distinct competitive and non-competitive blocks:

Narrative Features

The global narrative slate highlights complex character studies, historical dramas, and stylistic swings:

Before I Do (dir. Gary Jaffe, USA) – A chaotic bachelor party weekend.
Black Burns Fast (dir. Sandulela Asanda, South Africa) – A studious boarding school scholarship student confronts suppressed desires.
Corpus (dir. Corrin Evans, USA) – A 1997 NYC nightlife photographer’s weekend getaway turns into erotic terror.
Coward (dir. Lukas Dhont, Belgium/France/Netherlands) – Soldiers find solace in a theatrical troupe during WWI.
Elephants in the Fog (dir. Abinash Bikram Shah, Nepal/Germany/Brazil/France/Norway) – A Kinnar community matriarch searches for a missing daughter.
Gugu’s World (dir. Allan Deberton, Brazil) – A young boy navigates football, identity, and displacement.
I Am Going to Miss You (dir. Daniel Ribeiro, Brazil) – A seven-year relationship is tested by shifting desires.
Indigo Elsewhere (dir. Willow Skye-Biggs, USA) – A reality-shifting journey of two trans lesbians (World Premiere).
Iván and Hadoum (dir. Ian de la Rosa, Spain/Germany/Belgium) – Workplace romance in a southern Spanish greenhouse.
La Gradiva (dir. Marine Atlan, France) – High school students in Pompeii surrender to desire and anger.
Madfabulous (dir. Celyn Jones, UK) – A riotous celebration of an eccentric British aristocrat.
Masc (dir. Bertil Nilsson, UK) – An autistic young man tries on different archetypes of masculinity.
Montreal, My Beautiful (dir. Xiaodan He, Canada) – A 53-year-old Chinese immigrant confronts repressed desires.
On the Road (dir. David Pablos, Mexico) – Freight-hauling freight across northern Mexico.
Out of the Woods (dir. Sal Bardo, USA) – A woman with memory loss chooses between past love and present duty.
Perfect (dir. Millicent Hailes, USA) – A heartbroken drifter finds refuge in a lakeside commune.
The Riverbank (dir. Enock Carvalho and Matheus Farias, Brazil/Germany) – Seduction and violence in Recife’s mangroves.
Sinner Supper Club (dir. Nora Kaye and Daisy Rosato, USA) – A gay mumblegore ghost story set during an NYC heatwave.
Something You Should Know About Me (dir. Andy Fidoten, USA) – A trans cartoonist caught in an artist-retreat love triangle.
Sweet Milk Lake (dir. Harvey Zielinski, Australia) – Twin brothers confront familial estrangement and mistaken identity.
Tangles (dir. Leah Nelson, USA/Canada) – An adult animated drama fresh out of Cannes.
Test (dir. Sam McConnell, USA) – An amateur bodybuilder navigates rural Ohio and emerging sexuality.
Tiger (dir. Anshul Chauhan, Japan) – A property dispute pushes a gay masseuse to the edge.

Documentary Features

Non-fiction offerings focus heavily on political resistance, personal archives, and global marginalized histories:

Gays Against Gun Violence (dir. Paul Rowley, USA/Ireland) – Tracking modern American gun violence activism.
The Hidden Face of the Earth (dir. Arnaud Alain, France) – Portrait of a photographer losing his sight.
Hunky Jesus (dir. Jennifer M. Kroot, USA) – Examining the 45-year legacy of San Francisco’s Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Karen Williams: I Had to Laugh (dir. Andrea Meyerson, USA) – Honoring the pioneering Black lesbian stand-up comedian.
Mickey (dir. Dano Garcia, Mexico) – A decade-long portrait of a trans woman from Sinaloa.
No Money No Honey (dir. Nicole Costa, Chile/USA) – An aging Argentine sex worker revisits her past via VHS archives.
Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest (dir. Viv Li, Germany/Netherlands/China) – Cultural whiplash between Berlin and Beijing.
Uncle Roy (dir. Keri Pickett, USA) – Preserving the legacy of 93-year-old gay photographer Roy Blakey.

Shorts Programs and Episodics

The festival’s celebrated shorts programming returns with thematic blocks including Black Queer Pride NY, Dream It, Be It (animation), Dyke Nyte Returns!, Get Some Laughs!, Getting to Know Him, Having a Great Time Being Trans Lately, Heartlands, USA, Kill Your Darlings, New Voices Filmmaker Grant Showcase (in partnership with Netflix), Queer Teen Spirit (curated for LGBTQ+ teens with NYC Public Schools and GLAAD), Sound and Scene Showcase (supported by Concord Originals), and Transmissions. Additionally, the Binge the Rainbow episodic showcase highlights digital-native series, drag-queen witchcraft, and supernatural romps.

Virtual Exclusives

Extending its partnership with Aubin Pictures, NewFest will stream a robust digital slate of legacy features and archival shorts, including Catherine Gund’s Chavela, Dispatches from Cleveland, Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance, and foundational tapes from the radical video activist collective DIVA TV (Target City Hall, Pride ’69-89, and Like a Prayer).

Implications and Ticketing

As autumn film festivals position themselves heavily in the Academy Awards conversation, NewFest38 demonstrates that queer cinema commands both critical prestige and mainstream cultural gravity. By pairing major studio acquisitions with grassroots indie breakthroughs and historical retrospectives, the festival continues to cement New York City as the global capital for LGBTQ+ cinematic expression.

Complete ticketing details, venue schedules, and pass options are now available through the official festival website at www.newfest.org.