Noe appears in “Jaripeo” by Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
The Sundance Film Festival has long supported bold, independent films from artists who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Groundbreaking work like Desert Hearts found its home here in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, the Festival premiered the ferocious, original films of directors like Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, and Jennie Livingston that birthed the New Queer Cinema movement. The Festival has continued to debut great works by LGBTQ+ artists into the 21st century, with premieres of movies like Love Lies Bleeding, Call Me by Your Name, and Pariah. Across the years, these works have centered lives often lived on the margins and radically reimagined the world.
The Festival’s legacy of lifting up independent art from LGBTQ+ filmmakers carries on into 2026. This year, we’re spotlighting personal features, intimate shorts, tense horror films, and powerful documentaries, as well as the first new film in over 10 years from returning legend Gregg Araki (I Want Your Sex). From the streets of Lagos (LADY) to a golf course in the Philippines (Filipiñana), a rodeo in Mexico (Jaripeo) to a small town in New Zealand (Big Girls Don’t Cry), these films take us around the world, exploring class, childhood, identity, family, survival, and more.
FEATURES
Director: Sinéad O’Shea
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
A son of one of America’s wealthiest families creates a communist revolutionary base in rural Massachusetts as a means of disrupting the capitalist system he grew up in, but has now come to despise. It’s the starting point of an astonishing journey.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez
Director: David Alvarado
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Against political resistance and industry skepticism, Luis Valdez pushes Chicano storytelling from the fields to the film screen with Zoot Suit and La Bamba, crafting iconic works that challenge, celebrate, and expand America’s story.
Director: Brydie O’Connor
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Director: Paloma Schneideman
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Over one transformative summer in rural New Zealand in 2006, 14-year-old Sid Bookman discovers desire, identity, and the internet as she imitates the people she longs to be loved by.
Director: Josephine Decker
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person and online
After losing both her job and boyfriend, Jamie retreats to her small Texas hometown, where friends and flings from a fateful high school summer turn her life upside down.
Director: Rafael Manuel
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Tee girl Isabel feels strangely drawn to Dr. Palanca, the president of the country club where she works. However, after piecing together a violent picture of what lies beneath the club’s pristine surface, she realizes that what began as an innocent infatuation is actually rooted in a sinister shared history.
Director: Petra Biondina Volpe
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
Frank, serving a life sentence, takes a prison job caring for aging inmates with Alzheimer’s and dementia. What begins as a self-interested bid for parole becomes a profound, transformative bond with fellow inmate Louis, offering Frank a glimpse of redemption in an unforgiving place.
Director: Mohammed Ali Naqvi
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
A routine school commute turns terrifying when a cable car’s wire snaps, leaving eight passengers — including six schoolboys — dangling 900 feet above a ravine in the remote Himalayan foothills. With 10 hours before the remaining cable is expected to fail, a group of rescuers races to save them.
Director: Suzanne Andrews Correa
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
In the border city of Juárez, Mexico, where violence against women is perpetrated with impunity, an unlikely defender emerges with a desperate call for change. Inspired by true events.
Director: Gregg Araki
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
When fresh-faced Elliot lands a job with artist and provocateur Erika Tracy, his fantasies come true as she taps him to become her sexual muse. But Elliot finds himself out of his depth as Erika takes him on a journey into a world of sex, obsession, power, betrayal, and murder.
Director: Olive Nwosu
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
In the sprawling African metropolis of Lagos, a fiercely independent young cab driver meets a band of radiantly reckless sex workers whose sisterhood pulls her into danger and joy, setting her on a journey toward her own transformation.
Directors: THUNDERLIPS
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person
When a messy millennial underachiever accidentally gets alien-pregnant, she must overcome skeptical doctors, a useless baby daddy, and her oversharing mum in order to survive and reclaim her life.
Director: Gregg Araki
Section: Park City Legacy
Available to watch in person
Two preadolescent boys both experienced a strange event and later it affects their lives in different ways. One becomes a reckless, adventurous sex worker, while the other retreats into a reclusive fantasy of alien abduction.
Director: David Shadrack Smith
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
An unprecedented look inside one of the greatest media experiments to hijack American screens. Rare archives from New York’s underground capture a world of creators who shattered rules, defied censors, and transformed our televisions into a free-speech battleground where anyone could be a star.
Director: Vera Miao
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person and online
After the death of her father, a grieving young girl moves to an isolated house in a new town with her mother and grandmother, only to discover there is something monstrous hidden in the town’s history and the woods behind their new home.
Director: NB Mager
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
A teenage girl stages an elaborate musical about the one day her high school wishes it could forget.
Director: Natalie Erika James
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person
Hana, a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.
Director: Moshe Rosenthal
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Amid the late ’80s pop craze and rising HIV epidemic, 12-year-old Boaz uncovers a devastating secret about the father he idolizes that threatens to tear his family apart. Across a yearslong journey, Boaz seeks to heal the wound and reclaim the father-son bond he never stopped yearning for.
Director: William David Caballero
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
After 20 years of chronicling his Puerto Rican family, a director and his mother face devastating losses. Through tears and laughter, they craft animations that bring their loved ones back to life, discovering that every act of creation is also an act of letting go.
SHORT FILMS
Director: Matthew Puccini
Section: Short Film Program 5
Available to watch in person and online
Max arrives home to find that his boyfriend has booked a callback. All hell breaks loose.
Director: Jamie Kiernan O’Brien
Section: Short Film Program 2
Available to watch in person and online
When a trans college student learns the girl she idolizes is sleeping with their teaching assistant, she takes drastic steps to emulate her.
