Here’s Everything Latino Playing at Outfest, Los Angeles’ LGBT Film Festival

This is a tale of twisted adolescence, free love, and reprehensible crime that takes place on the streets of Mexico City. The feature follows a middle-class teen skateboard fanatic who carries on an illicit affair with the son of his family’s maid, who simultaneously carries on an affair with a young woman named Adri. In the tense shadow of this uncomfortable love triangle, the two spend their days skating, making love, doing drugs, and selling their blood on the black market, until the promise of easy cash finds them caught up in a shady scheme that goes way deeper than they could have ever expected.

This uplifting and rollicking documentary follows the Ovarian Psycos Cycle Brigade, a new generation of women of color in East Los Angeles who are building a queer and trans inclusive community together by putting their feminist ideals in motion with raucous, irreverent activism, fighting the violence they’ve lived with all their lives, and hoping to make a difference. Through the personal stories of the crew’s rabble-rousing founder, Xela de la X, activist, poet M.C., and single mother; street artist and original Ovarian Psyco, Andi Xoch, and a bright-eyed young woman from the neighborhood, Evelyn (Evie), the film traces how the “Ovas” emerged from the diverse, youthful, Latino, working class, immigrant neighborhoods of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, a community situated within the historic legacy of the Chicano/a Civil Rights Movement that emerged from L.A. in the late 1960s.

Maya Goded’s documentary is twenty years in the making. That’s how long she’s known the five women that make up her tender portrait of ageing prostitutes in Mexico City’s neighborhood of La Merced. It’s a topic the photographer-turned-filmmaker is intimately familiar with as it was the subject of her 2006 photography book by the same name. Imbuing these women with the same humanity that she brought out in her photos, Plaza de la soledad paints a lively if wistful look at these women’s lives all the while asking necessary questions about female sexuality, friendship, and the emotional inner lives of these oft-forgotten women.

In this beautifully shot love story, Yoli is a seductive queer xicana artist who finds great passion with Daña, an alluring Puerto Rican nurse. But their growing intimacy stirs up their own troubled histories. Can Yoli break the cycle, face the past, and create something new for herself?

Picking up where the short-lived HBO show left off, this feature-film serves as the conclusion to the story of Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and his fellow San Francisco friends (Murray Bartlett, Frankie J. Alvarez), and gives closure to his his relationships with Richie (Raul Castillo) and Kevin (Russell Tovey).

The New York City ballroom scene, iconically captured on screen in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris is Burning, gets a much needed update in Sara Jordenö ebullient documentary. The film focuses on the “kiki” scene, the youth-led and socially conscious subculture of the ball scene (where LGBT* individuals walk the runway and vogue in fabulous dance battles) and really highlights the African-American and Latino youth that are blending their creativity with a welcome dose of activism.

This must-watch doc for Madonna fans features the familiar faces of José Gutierrez and Luis Camacho, the two Latino dancers from New York City who introduced the Queen of Pop to the practice of vogueing and who would later join her in the Blonde Ambition tour. Alongside Kevin, Oliver, Luis, Carlton, Jose, Gabriel and Salim, José and Luis are a diverse, impressionable group of young dancers whose lives were forever changed by Madonna’s iconic blonde ambition tour and its accompanying documentary, Truth or Dare. No longer swept up in the thrill of Madonna’s inarguable power, some found life – away from her influence – emotionally devastating and near impossible to navigate. Strike a Pose movingly revisits the men after years apart and provides us with a chance to learn about the emotional truth behind the glamorous facade.

Exploring the intersection of gender identity, immigration, and health, Afuera finds an undocumented transgender woman making sacrifices to live as the woman she always was.

Paying homage to the French New Wave, director Daniel Armando’s black and white feature film weaves the stories of several men in New York City who navigate a world of interlocking intimacies in a city that never sleeps.

When Mac, a young butch Latina dies, her novia, Hope, must overcome personal grief in order to respectfully send Mac off into the afterlife as she would’ve wanted, in the ride-or-die inspired Vámonos.

A Chicana poet struggling with identity issues falls in love with a functioning alcoholic, propelling her toward tragedy and rebirth.

A nightmarish vision of a lonely woman who travels through time to connect with herself, scored by Flying Lotus.

When Moises Serrano was a baby, his parents risked everything to flee Mexico in search of the American Dream. Growing up in the rural South as an undocumented gay man, forbidden to live and love in the country he calls home, Serrano sees only one option — to fight for justice and equality. Driven by a deep love for his family, who have come to accept being treated as invisible, Moises seeks to change the world.

Childhood friends Matías and Jerónimo reunite in their hometown of Paso de los Libres, Argentina, on the banks of the Uruguay River. The summer before high school, the teens’ close friendship transformed into something deeper, but their mutual attraction never came to fruition. More than a decade later they meet again, and the chemistry between them is palpable, but now Matías has a girlfriend who has traveled to his hometown for Carnival. Seeing his old friend, now so comfortable and confident in his skin, reawakens Matías’ feelings.

El Canto del Colibrí is the intimate testimonial of a group of Latino immigrant fathers who, in the face of personal hardship, faith, and the expectations of machismo culture, find acceptance and love for their LGBTQ children. Marco Castro-Bojorquez’s film, simple in style but vital in content, is an important contribution to fighting stigma and isolation in the Latino/a immigrant LGBTQ community.

In the lugubrious future (a breezy 2040), Earth is abandoned for interplanetary colonization and only the disaffected remain. Too bored to travel and immunized from the need to sleep, they lounge languidly in ornate interiors, whiling away the hours with hookups. This confident first feature brims with vibrant ambiance and lush cinematography, taking its time to reveal the namesake cult and its rituals, which run just this side of Kenneth Anger. It’s Kubrick by way of Coppola (Sofia, that is) with a dash of Ozon to keep things queer.

Sergio and Octavio celebrate their relationship’s milestone by playing games on a rooftop.

Alfa, a Cuban gay porn actor, returns to a film set years after the loss of his boyfriend and acting partner; despite a young, hot stud in the wings, he realizes it’s no easy task.

On leave from the military, handsome twenty-something soldier Bruno travels to Porto Alegre determined to find his estranged older brother Leo. What he finds instead is a vibrant queer community that happily embraces him, inviting him into their alt social scene. Through these unconventional new friends, Bruno discovers a new space where he is free to explore his sexuality. Away from home, he’s found a new family and found himself, and his lost brother feels closer than ever.

Set in late-90s Colombia, the curious and introverted Amalia unknowingly begins the universal experience toward self-awareness. Bored with her girlfriends and dying to know exactly what boys talk about, when girls aren’t around, she’s determined to have Carlos help her.

A loss of cultural identity examined through three generations of a Cuban-American family.

Raising Zoey depicts an eventful year in the life of transgender 13 year old girl, Zoey Luna, her mom, Ofelia and her older sister, Letty.