Latest news with #intersectionality
New York Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Live Updates: Senator's Treatment by Federal Agents Deepens Clash Over Trump Tactics
At a protest in St. Louis on Wednesday called 'March to Defend Immigrant Rights,' participants chanted, 'From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime!' invoking unrest in Ferguson, Mo., over police brutality in 2014 and Palestinian freedom. The scene encapsulated how the left's decades-long embrace of intersectionality — the concept that all oppressed people are linked — gives the protest movement large numbers of supporters but also can create a cacophony of messages. The forces stirring action on the streets this week have been led by labor groups. And many protests, including those in Los Angeles, have continued to focus on workplace raids. But the voices at other protests are mixed, an echo of the wide array of progressive forces that have animated every anti-Trump protest this year. Those earlier actions have been coordinated affairs, planned in advance for weeks by large groups like MoveOn and Indivisible, which have helped keep actions focused on concerns like cuts to Medicaid and Social Security, the power of billionaires and immigration policies. But in this week's spontaneous actions, the many interests from the broad base of anti-Trump activists came to the fore, including more explicit support for racial justice, Palestinian freedom and socialist politics. 'In this moment we must all stand together,' said Becky Pringle, the head of the National Education Association, the largest individual union in the country and one of the groups that sprang into action as the protests emerged in Los Angeles. Local chapters of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Communist Party offshoot of the Workers World Party, have also played a leading role, working with local leftist groups to post information about new demonstrations from California to Maine. The group's concerns are among the mélange of causes animating protests that were born out of workplace raids to round up illegal immigrants. Palestinian supporters have shown up at protests in Chicago, New York and elsewhere. When the St. Louis march ended on Wednesday, various groups took the opportunity to rally support for queer rights, Black Lives Matter and tornado relief and cleanup efforts. The St. Louis march was promoted on social media by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Voices for Palestine Network, Black Men Build St. Louis and the Ecosocialist Green Party. 'St. Louis is a small city, and a lot of the people that care about organizing for human rights tend to all work loosely with each other through an unofficial coalition,' said Kaitlyn Killgo, one of the activists. The presence of many different causes can dilute the message of any one protest — and risks appearing to general observers like a gathering of far-left activists. This issue is a familiar one for mainstream Democrats. While parsing their losses in the 2024 election, they have debated whether they diminished their appeal to the public by treating all causes as equally important. Community networks have galvanized protesters in other cities. When Laura Valdez, a civil rights activist in San Francisco, saw the video of ICE agents detaining a prominent labor leader in Los Angeles, she believed that immigrants and activists faced a new level of danger. 'This was a four-alarm fire,' said Ms. Valdez, the executive director of Mission Action, an advocacy organization for low-income and immigrant communities. 'We needed to activate.' The video of the labor leader's arrest was taken on Friday. By Monday, Ms. Valdez and Mission Action were participating in one of dozens of protests that sprang up across the country in response to the Trump administration's immigration raids. The rapid appearance of people on the streets of so many American cities was not a coincidence. Mission Action and other left-leaning organizations were able to mobilize quickly because they have spent all year protesting President Trump's policies; several gatherings attracted hundreds of thousands of participants. Their networks were primed. On Monday, the Austin, Texas, chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation posted on social media: 'Emergency protest: solidarity with LA! We'll see y'all tomorrow at the state capitol to say 'ICE out of our cities! Stop the deportations!'' That same day, the People's Forum, a New York City workers' rights organization, told supporters that there would be a protest the following day in solidarity with Los Angeles. 'We refuse to be silenced! The people of New York City demand ICE get out of our communities, stop the deportations, and stop the raids.' On June 10, the Maine chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation put out the word on social media: 'Emergency Protest. From LA to Bangor: ICE Out! June 11 — 6:30pm. Pierce Park.' Reaction to the Trump administration has brought a broad swath of progressive groups in close coordination, with leaders often speaking multiple times a day about how various policies are affecting their communities. 'Ultimately, this comes down to workers' rights,' Ms. Pringle said. Mr. Trump's desire to remove undocumented immigrants from the country has had an especially galvanizing effect among left-leaning organizations. The coalition of centrist Democratic nonprofits and far-left national and local organizations that stood together during the first Trump administration splintered over whether to support Palestinians after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. In addition to coordinating anti-Trump protests, progressive groups have been working to educate immigrant workers, students, educators and religious leaders about their rights and to connect them with mutual aid and legal assistance. When ICE agents began entering workplaces in Los Angeles late last week, that network went on high alert. 'We could see that the government had decided it would be more effective to apprehend hundreds of people through workplace enforcement rather than having several agents try to go after one person at a time,' Ms. Valdez said. Image David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California. His arrest helped catalyze the protests. Credit... Philip Cheung for The New York Times And then came the arrest of David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California, as he recorded a video of the immigration raid. The service employees union and other national and local union leaders began to talk about how to respond. They supported the idea of public opposition. Other unions reached out to the SEIU to ask how they could help. Following the SEIU's lead, they decided that the best course of action was to bring public attention to Mr. Huerta's arrest and to denounce Mr. Trump's decision to use federal force to quell protests. 'Labor is everywhere,' said Ms. Pringle, whose organization was in touch with the SEIU. 'The three million educators in the National Education Association are in every congressional district and community.' The California Teachers Association and other progressive state organizations committed to push out messaging and encourage citizens to protest, a pattern that was replicated across the country. Since Friday, and following the deployment of the National Guard, a broad coalition of organizations has called on the public to join demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles. They include Unión del Barrio, a grass roots group with volunteer membership that describes itself as revolutionary and anti-imperialist, and Local Black Lives Matter leaders. 'This is our fight. This is our fight,' Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter, said in a recent video on social media. 'For both moral and strategic reasons, this is a Black fight.' In New York City, protests have coalesced outside the federal immigration headquarters in Lower Manhattan this week. But they have typically morphed into a stew of left-wing causes, with Palestinian calls for liberation and Occupy Wall Street chants overtaking the group's message against deportations. A large rally that began at 5 p.m. on Tuesday drew hundreds of demonstrators, including immigrant New Yorkers who said they were rallying on behalf of parents, friends and relatives who were undocumented. They marched to chants of 'Abolish ICE,' and carried yellow signs, in English and Spanish, that said 'ICE out of NYC.' But by 10 p.m., as much of the protest had dissipated, a splinter group of about 100 protesters remained, some wearing tactical looking outfits and kaffiyehs, appearing more intent on taunting police officers and causing disruption with sporadic chants of Palestinian liberation. At a protest this week in Chicago, many protesters also wore kaffiyehs and carried signs supporting Palestinians. Some of the loudest chants heard downtown were targeted at U.S. policy in Gaza: 'From Palestine to Mexico these border walls have got to go!' The spontaneous protests that erupted this week are a preview of what is to come on Saturday — a long-planned, nationwide protest against the Trump administration called No Kings, scheduled to coincide with the president's birthday and military parade. Several prominent progressive coalitions planned No Kings, including MoveOn, Indivisible and 50501. There will be no event in Washington, the site of Mr. Trump's parade. Organizers want to draw attention to the president's many opponents throughout the country. In addition to the flagship march that will take place in Philadelphia, organizers said there will be No Kings marches in at least 2,000 cities and towns, in every state in the country. Miram Jordan contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Julie Bosman from Chicago.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Live Updates: Lawmakers Enraged After Senator Is Pushed to Floor and Handcuffed
At a protest in St. Louis on Wednesday called 'March to Defend Immigrant Rights,' participants chanted, 'From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime!' invoking unrest in Ferguson, Mo., over police brutality in 2014 and Palestinian freedom. The scene encapsulated how the left's decades-long embrace of intersectionality — the concept that all oppressed people are linked — gives the protest movement large numbers of supporters but also can create a cacophony of messages. The forces stirring action on the streets this week have been led by labor groups. And many protests, including those in Los Angeles, have continued to focus on workplace raids. But the voices at other protests are mixed, an echo of the wide array of progressive forces that have animated every anti-Trump protest this year. Those earlier actions have been coordinated affairs, planned in advance for weeks by large groups like MoveOn and Indivisible, which have helped keep actions focused on concerns like cuts to Medicaid and Social Security, the power of billionaires and immigration policies. But in this week's spontaneous actions, the many interests from the broad base of anti-Trump activists came to the fore, including more explicit support for racial justice, Palestinian freedom and socialist politics. 'In this moment we must all stand together,' said Becky Pringle, the head of the National Education Association, the largest individual union in the country and one of the groups that sprang into action as the protests emerged in Los Angeles. Local chapters of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Communist Party offshoot of the Workers World Party, have also played a leading role, working with local leftist groups to post information about new demonstrations from California to Maine. The group's concerns are among the mélange of causes animating protests that were born out of workplace raids to round up illegal immigrants. Palestinian supporters have shown up at protests in Chicago, New York and elsewhere. When the St. Louis march ended on Wednesday, various groups took the opportunity to rally support for queer rights, Black Lives Matter and tornado relief and cleanup efforts. The St. Louis march was promoted on social media by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Voices for Palestine Network, Black Men Build St. Louis and the Ecosocialist Green Party on Instagram. 'St. Louis is a small city, and a lot of the people that care about organizing for human rights tend to all work loosely with each other through an unofficial coalition,' said Kaitlyn Killgo, one of the activists. The presence of many different causes can dilute the message of any one protest — and risks appearing to general observers like a gathering of far-left activists. This issue is a familiar one for mainstream Democrats. While parsing their losses in the 2024 election, they have debated whether they diminished their appeal to the public by treating all causes as equally important. Community networks have galvanized protesters in other cities. When Laura Valdez, a civil rights activist in San Francisco, saw the video of ICE agents detaining a prominent labor leader in Los Angeles, she believed that immigrants and activists faced a new level of danger. 'This was a four-alarm fire,' said Ms. Valdez, the executive director of Mission Action, an advocacy organization for low-income and immigrant communities. 'We needed to activate.' The video of the labor leader's arrest was taken on Friday. By Monday, Ms. Valdez and Mission Action were participating in one of dozens of protests that sprang up across the country in response to the Trump administration's immigration raids. The rapid appearance of people on the streets of so many American cities was not a coincidence. Mission Action and other left-leaning organizations were able to mobilize quickly because they have spent all year protesting President Trump's policies; several gatherings attracted hundreds of thousands of participants. Their networks were primed. On Monday, the Austin, Texas, chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation posted on social media: 'Emergency protest: solidarity with LA! We'll see y'all tomorrow at the state capitol to say 'ICE out of our cities! Stop the deportations!'' That same day, the People's Forum, a New York City workers' rights organization, told supporters that there would be a protest the following day in solidarity with Los Angeles. 'We refuse to be silenced! The people of New York City demand ICE get out of our communities, stop the deportations, and stop the raids.' On June 10, the Maine chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation put out the word on social media: 'Emergency Protest. From LA to Bangor: ICE Out! June 11 — 6:30pm. Pierce Park.' Reaction to the Trump administration has brought a broad swath of progressive groups in close coordination, with leaders often speaking multiple times a day about how various policies are affecting their communities. 'Ultimately, this comes down to workers' rights,' Ms. Pringle said. Mr. Trump's desire to remove undocumented immigrants from the country has had an especially galvanizing effect among left-leaning organizations. The coalition of centrist Democratic nonprofits and far-left national and local organizations that stood together during the first Trump administration splintered over whether to support Palestinians after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. In addition to coordinating anti-Trump protests, progressive groups have been working to educate immigrant workers, students, educators and religious leaders about their rights and to connect them with mutual aid and legal assistance. When ICE agents began entering workplaces in Los Angeles late last week, that network went on high alert. 'We could see that the government had decided it would be more effective to apprehend hundreds of people through workplace enforcement rather than having several agents try to go after one person at a time,' Ms. Valdez said. Image David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California. His arrest helped catalyze the protests. Credit... Philip Cheung for The New York Times And then came the arrest of David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California, as he recorded a video of the immigration raid. The service employees union and other national and local union leaders began to talk about how to respond. They supported the idea of public opposition. Other unions reached out to the SEIU to ask how they could help. Following the SEIU's lead, they decided that the best course of action was to bring public attention to Mr. Huerta's arrest and to denounce Mr. Trump's decision to use federal force to quell protests. 'Labor is everywhere,' said Ms. Pringle, whose organization was in touch with the SEIU. 'The three million educators in the National Education Association are in every congressional district and community.' The California Teachers Association and other progressive state organizations committed to push out messaging and encourage citizens to protest, a pattern that was replicated across the country. Since Friday, and following the deployment of the National Guard, a broad coalition of organizations has called on the public to join demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles. They include Unión del Barrio, a grass roots group with volunteer membership that describes itself as revolutionary and anti-imperialist, and Local Black Lives Matter leaders. 'This is our fight. This is our fight,' Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter, said in a recent video on social media. 'For both moral and strategic reasons, this is a Black fight.' In New York City, protests have coalesced outside the federal immigration headquarters in Lower Manhattan this week. But they have typically morphed into a stew of left-wing causes, with Palestinian calls for liberation and Occupy Wall Street chants overtaking the group's message against deportations. A large rally that began at 5 p.m. on Tuesday drew hundreds of demonstrators, including immigrant New Yorkers who said they were rallying on behalf of parents, friends and relatives who were undocumented. They marched to chants of 'Abolish ICE,' and carried yellow signs, in English and Spanish, that said 'ICE out of NYC.' But by 10 p.m., as much of the protest had dissipated, a splinter group of about 100 protesters remained, some wearing tactical looking outfits and kaffiyehs, appearing more intent on taunting police officers and causing disruption with sporadic chants of Palestinian liberation. At a protest this week in Chicago, many protesters also wore kaffiyehs and carried signs supporting Palestinians. Some of the loudest chants heard downtown were targeted at U.S. policy in Gaza: 'From Palestine to Mexico these border walls have got to go!' The spontaneous protests that erupted this week are a preview of what is to come on Saturday — a long-planned, nationwide protest against the Trump administration called No Kings, scheduled to coincide with the president's birthday and military parade. Several prominent progressive coalitions planned No Kings, including MoveOn, Indivisible and 50501. There will be no event in Washington, the site of Mr. Trump's parade. Organizers want to draw attention to the president's many opponents throughout the country. In addition to the flagship march that will take place in Philadelphia, organizers said there will be No Kings marches in at least 2,000 cities and towns, in every state in the country. Miram Jordan contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Julie Bosman from Chicago.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Why the Pro-Palestinian Movement Features at Some Immigration Protests
At a protest in St. Louis on Wednesday called 'March to Defend Immigrant Rights,' participants chanted, 'From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime!' invoking unrest in Ferguson, Mo., over police brutality in 2014 and Palestinian freedom. The scene encapsulated how the left's decades-long embrace of intersectionality — the concept that all oppressed people are linked — gives the protest movement large numbers of supporters but also can create a cacophony of messages. The forces stirring action on the streets this week have been led by labor groups. And many protests, including those in Los Angeles, have continued to focus on workplace raids. But the voices at other protests are mixed, an echo of the wide array of progressive forces that have animated every anti-Trump protest this year. Those earlier actions have been coordinated affairs, planned in advance for weeks by large groups like MoveOn and Indivisible, which have helped keep actions focused on concerns like cuts to Medicaid and Social Security, the power of billionaires and immigration policies. But in this week's spontaneous actions, the many interests from the broad base of anti-Trump activists came to the fore, including more explicit support for racial justice, Palestinian freedom and socialist politics. 'In this moment we must all stand together,' said Becky Pringle, the head of the National Education Association, the largest individual union in the country and one of the groups that sprang into action as the protests emerged in Los Angeles. Local chapters of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Communist Party offshoot of the Workers World Party, have also played a leading role, working with local leftist groups to post information about new demonstrations from California to Maine. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Vogue
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Women by Women: A Shared Vision: Girls in Film
eWhat conversations do you feel we need to have more often when it comes to women in the creative field? It's always important to keep intersectionality at the forefront of our minds when pushing for representation in one aspect or another. Not everyone's experiences are the same and not everyone's struggles are equal. Listen to your fellow filmmakers and make space for everyone to speak. We need to continue to platform global majority artists, and put pressure on institutions to do the same. We need to continue to find ways for working class artists to access an industry that is very heavily weighted towards those from more privileged backgrounds. We need to find ways for parents to continue their roles in an industry that is very much built around the traditional male existence. Your work highlights underrepresented voices, both in front of and behind the camera. Since the beginning of your project, what challenges have persisted—and what positive changes have you seen emerge? In the years following GiF's inception, opportunities for female, trans and non-binary talent grew significantly. There was a real focus on equal opportunities & conversations about representation were loud. In recent years, with budgets shrinking across the board - both commercially and institutionally, due to factors like Brexit in the UK and the rise of TikTok and lower end social content (no shade on TikTok though), we've felt a shift back to old thinking when it comes to awarding jobs to directors & representation on commercial rosters. Change isn't a fad and needs to be upheld by the industry, even when the industry itself feels under threat, because embracing change is the only way the industry will survive.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Puppies, ghosts and euphoric snogging: the 25 best queer films of the century so far
One detractor called it 'a Shawshank Redemption for progressive millennials'. But the force of Céline Sciamma's lesbian love story about an artist and her unwitting sitter on a remote island in 18th-century Brittany is undeniable. As is the integrity of its central dynamic, stripped of power imbalances, hierarchies – and men. A low-budget, high-kitsch, torn-from-the-headlines football fantasy about a Ronaldo-esque football star who hallucinates giant pekingese puppies frolicking on the pitch whenever he scores. Throw in a cross-dressing refugee subplot, lesbian spies and a far-right cloning conspiracy and you have a goofy and irrepressible testament to intersectionality. Jane Schoenbrun became an A24 sensation with I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, but it is her previous film, a bare-bones chiller about an online horror game, that remains her most original work. Less instantly legible as a trans allegory than her follow-up, perhaps, but all the more disquieting for that. Veteran Canadian provocateur Bruce LaBruce turns Pasolini's 1968 Theorem into a radical rage against anti-immigrant rhetoric. A gooey Black alien washes up on the banks of the Thames ready to seduce the five members of a London bourgeois household from patriarch to maid. The sex scenes aren't simulated. Let's pray the coprophagy is. The marketing campaign pitched director Campbell X's punchy debut as a love story about a butch stud and her femme sex-worker girlfriend, but it is more complicated and original than that: a rallying cry for queer solidarity, a hymn to the friendship between lesbians and gay men, and a celebration of Black British queerness with walk-ons from David McAlmont, Dean Atta, Jay Bernard and Topher Campbell. Queer cinema finally got its Annie Hall with co-writer, director and star Desiree Akhavan's wise and hilarious debut. She plays a bisexual 'boner-killer' looking back on a failed lesbian relationship. Akhavan skewers everything from the banter at a Persian wedding and the competitive horror of bumping into your ex when you are both out on the arm of your latest squeeze to the very Brooklyn problem of who gets first dibs on attending a discussion group about anti-LGBTQ+ bias in the legal system. Ira Sachs used his own doomed real-life romance with the literary agent Bill Clegg as the basis for this brutally frank portrait of compulsion, addiction and heartbreak. An early sex scene, one of the most unvarnished in cinema history, proves that, sometimes, shit happens. A buddy movie with three heroes: a young Jack-the-lad, a trans lawyer working for the NGO Pink Life and a retired teacher scouring Istanbul's queer neighbourhoods searching for her trans niece. Levan Akin's richly compassionate drama uses long-lens cinematography and neorealist techniques to show both the vitality and loneliness of city life. Lyle Kash's vivid and original debut cocks a snook at the idea that trans film-makers are duty bound to represent the trans experience. When the captain of a lesbian bowling team takes her own life, the ensuing melodramatic beats – the reading of the will, the discovery of a treasure map, the emergence of a long-lost son – collide with a queer aesthetic (Almodóvar, John Waters), Kash's deadpan sensibility and one of the largest majority trans and non-binary casts in film history. Anyone craving 'queer joy' should steer clear of Oliver Hermanus's masterful character study of a self-loathing, closeted white Afrikaner obsessed with a handsome young law student. In its single-minded intensity and mounting horror, it's nothing short of a gay, South African Taxi Driver. Not merely a film that knows it's a film but an adaptation that knows it's an adaptation, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli's cool, confident second feature (after her semi-documentary Empathy) concerns a queer Brooklyn house-share in which the polyamorous inhabitants eat, sleep, protest, have sex, make art – and work on a film of Ronald M Schernikau's utopian novel So Schön. Which, in turn, is exactly what So Pretty is. João Pedro Rodrigues has been the by-appointment purveyor of transgressive cinematic phantasmagorias for more than two decades. For confrontational charge and visual eloquence, his debut – a fetishistic psychological thriller about a horny rubbish collector prowling Lisbon for sex in a Latex bodysuit – takes the cake. An 'incel', a trans sex worker and a Terf … No, not the start of a bad-taste gag but just some of the characters in Louise Weard's highly charged, handheld epic of Vancouver life in the margins. Part One clocks in at four-and-a-half hours, and there are at least another eight hours still to come. Maybe the finished article will turn out to be the greatest queer work of our time – if such binary categorisations weren't, like, totally normie. In what resembles a sexually-explicit, ketamine-dazed movie-length episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, writer-director Sebastián Silva plays himself as a prissy grouch harassed during a gay beach getaway by comic and social media star Jordan Firstman – a hyperactive attention-seeker with all the social graces of Donkey from Shrek. The film then takes a macabre and gasp-inducing turn. Abrasive and outrageous. All of Us Strangers merits a place on this list, too. But it is Andrew Haigh's breakthrough second film – about a Nottingham one-night-stand morphing into a life-changing two-day romance – which remains his most piercing work. Apparently conventional in structure, it actually takes some bold liberties, not least in the way one of the main characters rails against the ubiquity of heterosexual narratives. It's as if he is willing Weekend into existence before our very eyes. When unhappily married mother Cate Blanchett misplaces her gloves in the department store in early-1950s New York where shop assistant Rooney Mara works, it doubles as the throwing down of a gauntlet, and a provocation to the audience: do you dare reach for the life you want? Adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt, Carol isn't quite Todd Haynes's masterpiece (that would be Safe, from 1995) but it's as near as dammit. Carter Burwell's score has a snake-charmer's seductiveness, while Ed Lachman's 16mm cinematography frames the lovers behind glass, smoke and other obstacles, making the viewing experience as tantalising as hearing a tender ballad on a tin-pot transistor radio. 'You need to pop that damn cherry, yo!' Coming-out movies are 10 a penny but Dee Rees's autobiographical debut, extended from her own 2007 short, is scorchingly fresh. As the teenager tentatively emerging from the closet and into New York's lesbian club scene, the stunning Adepero Oduye nails both the breathless excitement and the cringe of being queer and horny in a world that wasn't built for you. 'They didn't have brown?' she says, aghast at the mismatch between her own skin and the colour of the strap-on acquired for her by a well-meaning friend. 'We're all born naked and the rest is drag,' sang RuPaul. Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping's challenging thriller, stymied and disowned by the queer joy mafia but adored by John Waters, Bret Easton Ellis and Bruce LaBruce, makes that point brilliantly. Weeks after being the victim of a homophobic attack, drag queen Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) spots his attacker (George MacKay) in a gay sauna, and contrives a revenge plan that plunges them both into the shark-infested waters of one another's worlds. Peter Strickland's third feature, a rapturous and devilishly funny study of a lesbian sub/dom relationship, asks how transgressive or nonconformist appetites survive in everyday life. Sidse Babbett Knudsen is the seemingly imperious dom who would sometimes rather snuggle up in her PJs than wield the whip hand over her sub partner (Chiara D'Anna). Dripping with sensuality (there is even a 'Perfume by …' credit in the opening title sequence), the specifics in Strickland's portrait of 'compromise, consent and coercion' are magically universal, applicable to any relationship. Cinema is safe – or rather, dazzlingly dangerous – in the hands of Vera Drew. Her re-imagining of Joker as a trans coming-out fable is the boldest queer debut since Superstar, Todd Haynes's Barbie-doll biopic of Karen Carpenter. Drew shot her film in five days then spent several years collaborating with umpteen animators and effects artists on different continents to create its dense visual texture. She stars as the wannabe Gotham City comic who launches a comedy club with The Penguin, falls for fellow trans standup Mr J (modelled on Jared Leto's Joker from Suicide Squad) and finally confronts Batman, billionaire groomer of teenage boys. What if the stranger you hooked up with on a brief Barcelona jaunt turned out to be a figure from your distant past? With a daring use of flashback and a plangent yet playful mood, Lucio Castro's tale of two men across two decades in one city combines the coolness of Antonioni with the ache of Before Sunrise. The dance/make-out scene to Space Age Love Song by A Flock of Seagulls is euphoric, the film's ending breathtakingly profound. Any of Tsai Ming-liang's 21st-century films could have ended up on this rundown. But Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a singularly spellbinding achievement, set on the last day of business at a cavernous Taipei picture palace. The camera is alert to each twitch and fidget of the clientele who move from seat to seat like chess pieces in the sparsely populated auditorium. The cruising vibe is at its most pronounced, and its most wickedly funny, in a long sequence in the gents' toilets. Jenni Olson proves herself the unassuming heir to Chantal Akerman in this perfectly calibrated essay film that interweaves California's bloody history with Olson's (semi-fictionalised) romantic imbroglios and the tangled roots of her cinematic obsessions – all expressed in a sanguine narration over atmospheric street-and-landscape shots. In a line that captures the essence of queer cinephilia, Olson says: 'Experiencing myself as a fictional character has been a mode of survival for me.' Silas Howard and Harry Dodge co-write, direct and star in a twitchy queer caper that celebrates trans masc identity more passionately than any film before it. Shy (Howard) sets out to help his newfound pal Valentine (Dodge) track down his biological mother; along the way, vending machines get boosted and convenience store stick-ups go awry while butch lesbian, trans masc and non-binary viewers get the empathy and representation of which they had long been starved, plus lashings of sex, wit and wildness. Val's rhapsodic monologue about Shy – 'I met a guy! He was very small! He was a little running-away guy! He was a good-guy guy! He was splendid …' – is an endlessly quotable all-timer. It's an age-old story: boy meets boy, boy seemingly turns into ravenous jungle beast and is then hunted through the balmy verdant undergrowth. Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Palme d'Or with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives but it is Tropical Malady (in which Uncle Boonmee himself is namechecked six whole years before getting his own film) that remains his masterpiece. Complete with extended sexy-funny courtship, a talking monkey and a bovine ghost, it is an enigmatic puzzle of a film, bisected by a narrative schism reminiscent of Performance or Mulholland Drive. What exactly is queer cinema? This. It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema by Ryan Gilbey is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply Ryan Gilbey will be in conversation with Guardian theatre critic Arifa Akbar at the Cinema Museum, London, on 15 June, and with director Peter Strickland after a screening of The Duke of Burgundy at the Garden Cinema, London, on 18 June
