Inside NewFest 37’s Celebration of Queer Rebellion

Copyright The Hollywood Reporter

In a packed theater at Nitehawk Prospect Park, MG Evangelista — one of four recipients of Netflix and NewFest’s 2025 New Voices Filmmakers Grants — took a moment to share a message from the co-writer of their film, Anino: “Long live the outsiders, the misfits and the beautiful monsters.” Now in its fourth year, the program offers $25,000 in unrestricted funds, plus mentorships with creatives like Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), Charlotte Wells (Aftersun), Aitch Alberto (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe) and Shatara Michelle Ford (Test Pattern). Winners Evangelista, Farah Jabir, Shuli Huang, and Kevin Xian Ming Yu were selected by Academy Award nominee and director Yance Ford, director Isabel Sandoval, and director Roshan Sethi, and their films screened for free. The program is one of the ways NewFest turns Hollywood’s queer filmmakers and audience from outsiders into insiders, while still fully embracing the community’s proud nonconformist, rebellious spirit. “We invite allies in to be our guests and stand beside us, but I do think that there is something different about how this was made for you — the queer person is who the entire thing was designed to serve — and everyone else is optional,” says David Hatkoff, executive director of NewFest. That narrative runs along and through the fest’s screening line-up (130 U.S. and international films shown at five venues across two boroughs), including its opener Blue Moon, the biographical comedy-drama about songwriter Lorenz Hart starring Ethan Hawke, and the closing night selection Christy, a sports drama about boxer Christy Martin, led by Sydney Sweeney. “Richard Linklater said this in his remarks that we read before the screening: Blue Moon takes place during a moment of celebration, but for that human being, they are not feeling celebrated. They are feeling apart from and feeling quite self-hating for things having to do with their identity and sexuality, among their artistic accomplishments. For Christy, queer folks are such a fundamental part of the history of sports, but we don’t actually have a lot of representation of queer women in sports,” says Hatkoff. “What both Christy Martin and Lorenz Heart were doing was fighting for their lives to survive in their chosen fields, and also in the worlds that they occupy.” Beyond the fest’s tentpoles, numerous programs and events also carried the thread — Film Feast, Black Filmmakers Initiative, a filmmakers summit, a queer media mixer, YA programming blocks screened for New York high schoolers, the Dyke Night Party and the sold-out All About the Tea shorts program and accompanying Trans 4 Trans mixer. “Our community this year has been under attack, and we’ve been under attack forever, but it means being an outsider and an insider is especially interesting for trans people right now, even in how we inhabit the queer community. In order for us to exist, we have to create our own existence,” says fest programmer Anton Astudillo. “It’s a transcendent quality that also manifests in the artist and the filmmaker, and was a huge theme organically, whether it’s a drag artist and activist like Peppermint in A Deeper Love: The Story of Miss Peppermint, a lyricist like Blue Moon’s lyricist Lorenz Hart, or a poet like Andrea Gibson in Come See Me in a Good Light.” “At the last minute, Anton and I put together a shorts program called the Queer Rebellion, showing the past, present and future of what queer rebellion is. Queer folks have always led the charge, not just in activism, but in art. So the vital role of the artist in society and their critical lens is always front and center within queer community,” says Nick McCarthy, the fest’s director of programming. “And we are seeing a fecundity of queer projects still being made. It’s alive, well and even thriving.” The festival directly supported that ecosystem that makes that possible during the Industry + Filmmakers Day, with conversations about how queer artists can navigate their careers and creative work in this moment. The day-long gathering featured speakers like Andrew Ahn (Fire Island) and Elegance Bratton (The Inspection), alongside CAA and Untitled agents and entertainment lawyers from Del Shaw. Fellow festival organizers ReelAbilities Film Festival were also on hand to discuss the intersection of disability access and queer storytelling as part of a larger effort at NewFest to provide access like ASL interpreters across their two-week experience. “There are so many others, like Andrew and Elegance, who just need the opportunity, need the support, need the confidence,” says Hatkoff. “We’re our best hope. There’s not some angel that’s going to descend from on high to fix everything that’s broken. We have to rely on ourselves and each other to succeed.” That illustration of how queer storytellers and their storytelling has continued to thrive, even or especially during times when it wasn’t so accessible or acceptable, was highlighted during NewFest’s 2025 Film Feast, which featured the 40th anniversary screening of My Beautiful Laundrette. Star Rita Wolf made a surprise appearance, in which she celebrated the Oscar-nominated romantic drama centered on London’s Pakistani community and a gay Brown lead portrayed by Gordon Warnecke in a film meant initially to be just a TV movie, and operating on a shoe-string budget while filming “under Thatcher.” It’s a political regime that in some ways harkens to the present for the American LGBTQ+ community. Rollbacks on rights under the Trump administration as well as workforce and storytelling investments by Hollywood itself sees the community once again grappling with its place and acceptance within the industry and larger society. Hatkoff notes that as a result, various organizations, including NewFest, are making different choices around how to address society’s, but also the industry’s, retreat “in terms of funding and corporate sponsorship.” That’s in addition to ongoing efforts to address studios and distributors needing to make “their queer films at queer festivals more a priority in their launch plans,” says Hatkoff. “There are incredibly large festivals like South by Southwest and Sundance, and the awards game is real. Everyone has a business objective, and I respect that. But we are at an inflection point in which anyone in a decision-making role — whether you’re at a studio or a distributor, a corporate sponsor, an artist, part of the community or an ally — needs to decide. You can’t straddle anymore. The stakes are too high.” As the industry contracts, the year has “caused us to really reconnect with our values around who we are as an organization, and what role we serve. We are in some ways more political than we have been in the past, even though we emerged in the midst of the AIDS crisis. The moment has called for that,” says its executive director. Below, creatives behind three separate TV and film projects featured at the fest — Queens of the Dead, Come See Me in the Good Light, and Boots discuss how they and their projects related to and embody the queer outsider and insider. Other highlights of NewFest: Come See Me in the Good Light With Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile among its EPs, this Sundance Festival Favorite Award-winning documentary centers on poet-activist Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley as they navigate love and mortality following Gibson’s diagnosis of terminal ovarian cancer. Says director Ryan White: “Andrea [Gibson], a lot of their early poetry was about resistance and the rebel and being the outsider. But Andrea really blew up after their cancer diagnosis, and it was COVID, so they were talking about it a lot on Instagram. So part of all that was the accessibility of their poetry. It’s not your grandma’s poetry; it’s not your English Ph.D poetry.” Queens of the Dead This glittered-fueled zombie apocalypse horror-comedy follows a group of drag queens, club kids, and frenemies at a warehouse party as they navigate their personal dramas and a horde of flesh-eating undead. Director Tina Romero says, “Night of Living Dead was terrifying for a lot of people, but as my dad [director George Romero] went on, I think he really glommed onto how the zombie is a little bit silly and fun — it has personality, and there’s empathy, and humanity. That was something that I really wanted to take over. My dad would say it’s the most democratic blue collar of all the monsters. There’s no elitist choosing that happens, like with the vampire. It could be your neighbor, it could be your kid, it could be your mother.” She continues, “I was a DJ for many, many years in the queer night life scene. There was a bit of a promoter drama, and one of the promoters posted a manifesto online saying, ‘When will the queer community stop devouring its own?’ It hit me right then and there. I want to do zombies through the lens of queer nightlife, because it’s such a magical, mystical, underground world filled with scrappy, creative people who know how to get through shit, know how to make it work. But it’s also not without drama. It can be bumpy.” Boots