The 2023 Tribeca Festival is coinciding with Pride month, and as L.G.B.T.Q. rights come under renewed attack, the festival includes a handful of films that show the resilience of the community.
This year’s event, which runs Wednesday through June 18, will show 109 features, including 93 world premieres. (For more information, go to tribecafilm.com.)
From that robust list, these five films are worth a closer look.
‘Chasing Chasing Amy’
Director: Sav Rodgers
The documentarian Sav Rodgers examines the significance of the writer-director Kevin Smith’s 1997 comedy through a number of lenses. Rodgers grapples with the film — about a young comic-book artist who finds himself attracted to a lesbian — as a career turning point for Smith, and as the inspiration for a debate about sexual identity. Most important, Rodgers wrestles with the role the film had in his own self-discovery.
In this documentary about the screen idol known for Douglas Sirk melodramas and Doris Day sex comedies, all the facets of Rock Hudson’s fame are put under the microscope. The filmmaker Stephen Kijak peels back Hudson’s private life to contrast the version of the star known to moviegoers with the gay man he was offscreen, and his struggle to reconcile the two versions of himself.
‘The Lesson’
Director: Alice Troughton
An ambitious aspiring novelist (Daryl McCormack) starts tutoring the son of an acclaimed writer (Richard E. Grant), as the elder gatekeeper struggles to finish his book in this taut psychological drama. A cocktail of ego and generational resentment makes this story of authorship, homoerotic rivalry and power sting with bitter familiarity.
Exploring the lives of three intersex individuals, “Every Body” seeks to educate audiences about a group that seldom gets its due. The film’s charming and engaging subjects demystify questions of intersex identity while arguing against medical interventions that have caused intersex people harm.
‘Transition’
Directors: Jordan Bryon and Monica Villamizar
After Kabul fell to the Taliban, the filmmaker and journalist Jordan Bryon was invited to shoot footage in Afghanistan for The New York Times, juggling the intensity of troubling global affairs with his own gender transition. Crafted with a sense of immediacy, and placing the state of geopolitics and gender in conversation with one another, “Transition” is a captivating document of identity — national and personal — in flux.
