If you’ve ever found yourself on the outside looking in, then you are probably familiar with the coping strategy of acquiring the identity of a movie character in order to gain legibility within the situation. The central character of Jenni Olson’s mesmerizing essay film is a gender dysphoric, Midwestern tomboy who is drawn to borrowing masculine personas from Hollywood characters as a mode of understanding how to deal with being drawn to unavailable women. A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

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At the tender age of twelve, Roberto supported the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and fought for education and social reforms. He was to continue his political struggle fighting alongside the communist Tupamaros in Uruguay. Thirty years later he is struggling to live his life as a woman named Stephanía and striving to be accepted by both society and his family. Documentary filmmaker Aldo Garay has followed Stephanía for over twenty years. In El Hombre Nuevo he provides a personal and tender portrait of a woman who can look back on a tempestuous life in which violence, drugs, prostitution and political commitment all found its place. Scenes from her day-to-day life are interspersed with interview material that includes conversations with old friends, fellow-travellers and siblings, as well as a passionate, heated exchange with her mother. The picture of society that emerges is as diverse as it is intimate, and spans a time of great political upheaval in the 1970s to the present day.

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In an English country house, four young people from London move in together, seeking to challenge social conventions and their own tolerances by engaging in scheduled partner-swapping. The durability of their new living arrangements is tested by the arrival of an outsider who fails to get in tune with the foursome’s radical spirit. An inventive and engaging film that uses an elegant, delicate style to gently probe both the protagonists’ ideals and our own convictions about love and sex.

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