Preview Night: Selected shorts with free reception
Thursday September 24 at 7:00PM | WFU Byrum Welcome Center
Join our festival’s kick off with a free event showcasing four short films that explore what it means to find a space of your own. Featuring regional and local filmmakers for an artist talk-back, with complimentary food/beer/wine reception to follow.
Opening Night:
In This Moment
Friday, September 25 at 7:15PM | UNCSA ACE Theatre Complex
Directed by Mike Talplacido | USA | 2026 | English | 82 mins | Narrative Feature
After a betrayal shatters their marriage, a Filipino American writer and his husband must navigate guilt, grief, and the quiet labor of care as they face the long road back to one another, one fractured moment at a time.
Q+A to follow.
Saturday Screenings (9/25)
Workshop: From Rough Cut to Finish Line
12:00PM | A/PERTURE CINEMA
This session picks up where most filmmaking advice drops off, covering the stretch between a rough assembly and a festival-ready film: cutting with clear eyes, finishing sound and color on a shoestring, knowing when to stop, and getting deliverables right so your work doesn’t stall at the submission window.
Maspalomas
12:00PM | A/PERTURE CINEMA
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY AITOR ARREGI AND JOSE MARI GOENAGA | 2025 | BASQUE | 116 MINS
Vicente, a gay man, enjoys a carefree retirement in Maspalomas. When he has to move into a nursing home after a stroke, he decides to hide his sexual orientation and must confront his own fears.
Contains nudity and explicit sexual situations.
Love Letters
12:15PM | A/PERTURE CINEMA
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY ALICE DOUARD | 2025 | FRENCH | 97 MINS
Paris 2014. Lesbian DJ Céline eagerly awaits the arrival of her first child–though it’s her wife, Nadia, who is 6 months pregnant. Under French law, Céline must collect letters of testimony to adopt their child once she’s born. As she navigates this arduous process and reconnects with her eccentric mother, Céline is forced to confront her own ideas of what makes a good parent…
Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders
2:15PM | A/PERTURE CINEMA
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE | DIRECTED BY JEFFREY SCHWARZ | 2026 | ENGLISH | 84 MINS
This film peels back the layers of controversy surrounding the making of the 1980 thriller, “Cruising.” Directed by William Friedkin, CRUISING triggered fierce protests from the LGBTQ+ community for its portrayal of a serial killer targeting gay men in New York’s leather bars. Friedkin drew inspiration from the brutal murder of “Variety” reporter Addison Verrill, blurring the boundaries between cinematic fiction and real-life tragedy…
Scream Queens Only: Horror Shorts Program
2:15PM | A/PERTURE CINEMA
NARRATIVE SHORTS | 88 MINS
Don’t fear the queer, come and get spooked on these fabulously haunting journeys.
Free Beer Tomorrow
4:00PM | A/PERTURE CINEMA
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE | DIRECTED BY JULIA MARGARET APPLEGATE AND LUSTER P. SINGLETON | 2025 | ENGLISH | 77 MINS
Free Beer Tomorrow is a documentary film project that tells the story of Jack’s/Summit Station, Ohio’s longest running lesbian owned and operated bar. With interviews from Peter Brown-a classically trained musician turned bar owner- to pioneering LGBTQ+ lawyer and legal scholar, Rhonda R. Rivera, and former patrons running the gamut of tap dancers, professional women’s football players, feminist activists, bartenders and drag kings, the film explores lesbian culture in an era where bars were one of the few safe-havens from an oppressive and homophobic world.
Q+A to follow.
Camping OUT: Shorts Program
4:15PM | A/PERTURE CINEMA
NARRATIVE SHORTS | 65 MINS
From surreal settings to a Missouri diner. These films have never heard of “doing too much,” centering over-the-top characters and out-of-the-box film styles.
Q+A to follow.
Time Warp
7:00PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE | DIRECTED BY ALLISON BERG | 2026 | ENGLISH | 112 MINS
50 years after The Rocky Horror Picture Show electrified audiences, a drag theatre company in Rock Springs, Wyoming stages a shadow cast. Led by 25-year-old Kenny Starling, they fight for visibility in their community.
Before I Do
7:15PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY GARY JAFFE | 2026 | ENGLISH | 85 MINS
A lakeside bachelor party weekend devolves into chaos when the groom and his best man’s past romantic feelings reunite, entangling the wedding party in pre-wedding drama.
Q+A to follow.
SUNDAY SCREENINGS (9/26)
On The Sea
12:30PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY HELEN WALSH | 2025 | ENGLISH | 111 MINS
Rugged romance that finds two salty fishermen falling in love and facing the elements.
Kin / Unkin: Shorts Program
1:00PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE SHORTS | 93 MINS
Families, biological and chosen, shape how we connect to the world.
The 50th Invasion of the Pines
1:15PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE | DIRECTED BY MICHAEL FISHER | 2026 | ENGLISH | 56 MINS
Each summer, a flotilla of drag queens crosses the bay from Cherry Grove to the Pines in a ritual known as the Invasion. What began as an act of protest in the 1970s has become one of the most iconic LGBTQ+ traditions in the country. At its 50th anniversary, The 50th Invasion of the Pines captures the spectacle, history, and deeply personal stories behind the event.
*Preceded by the narrative short Only Bears.
My Brother’s Killer
2:45PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE | DIRECTED BY RACHEL MASON | 2026 | ENGLISH | 95 MINS
Recalling an early 90s Los Angeles dominated by the aesthetics of Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper, street prostitution, and seedy porn shops, My Brother’s Killer expands upon the world of documentarian Rachel Mason’s Circus of Books to tell the gay true crime story of Billy London, a gay adult film performer brutally killed in West Hollywood that became an urban legend for 33 years.
Q+A to follow.
Under Construction: Shorts Program
3:00PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
DOCUMENTARY AND NARRATIVE SHORTS | 85 MINS
Searching, striving, and persevering as they live their truth.
Exit Interviews
3:15PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY GARRETT ABDO | 2025 | ENGLISH | 90 MINS
Robert (Tuc Watkins) launches a personal documentary to unpack his long trail of failed relationships by interviewing six ex-boyfriends. With sister, Deborah’s support, he seeks answers and growth – if he is truly ready for the truth.
Whistle Down Wind
4:45PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY ANDIE MORGENLANDER | 2026 | ENGLISH | 87 MINS
When a drunken teenage kiss propels Janie and Alex’s quirky friendship into a hidden love affair, the conservative ideologies of their hometown force them to confront the truth about their sexualities, and the bitter future of their relationship.
Q+A to follow.
Summer Lost
5:00PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE SHORTS | DIRECTED BY TIMOTHY HALL | 2026 | ENGLISH | 88 MINS
A man attempts to keep his terminal illness a secret while attending a wedding, but an unexpected romance reshapes his future as well as his past.
Q+A to follow.
We’ll Find Happiness
5:15 PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY LÉA POOL | 2025 | FRENCH/ENGLISH/ARAB/PERSIAN | 101 MINS
A passionate and sexually-charged romance between two immigrants, juxtaposing their past journey to the West with the fraught realities of their present in a new country. Moroccan refugee Saad lives in Canada with his lover Reza, an Iranian asylum-seeker, but their bliss is short-lived: Reza suddenly faces deportation back to Iran.
Love Loaded
7:00PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY JAN MILLER CORRAN | 2026 | ENGLISH | 99 MINS
A sultry 1958 Los Angeles nightclub becomes a powder keg of secrets when famed torch singer Didi Scanlon is drawn into a web of betrayal and murder-where every lover, every rival – and everyone in the room is armed. Someone attempts to murder Dr. Jack Scanlon just as former singing partner of Didi Scanlon returns.
Q+A to follow.
Bookends
7:15PM | UNCSA ACE THEATRE COMPLEX
NARRATIVE FEATURE | DIRECTED BY MIKE DOYLE | 2026 | ENGLISH | 98 MINS
Unceremoniously dumped by his boyfriend and forced to flee his fabulous city life, Nate is mortified to find himself living with his meddlesome grandparents in a suburban retirement community. He initially resolves to escape, but when his Holocaust-surviving grandfather shows signs of cognitive decline and his grandmother refuses to acknowledge her husband’s early dementia, Nate finds himself torn between family responsibilities, regaining his independence, and an unexpected romance with his grandparents’ handsome doctor.
Q+A to follow.