Boston Women's Film Festival

We are over the moon to be sharing Kelly Walker's new dramedy with our WQ audience.

We are excited to present a new restoration print of Patricia Rozema's 1987 classic film I've heard the Mermaids Singing. Available for the first time in 20 years.

We are pleased to be partnering with the ArtsEmerson Shared Stories screening series, a collaboration of BAAFF, BLIFF and RoxFilm, to bring Stéphanie Lamorré's documentary Being Thunder.

We are so honored to present Debra Chasnoff and Kate Stilley Steiner's moving documentary Prognosis-Notes on Living.

We are pleased to present the award winning documentary about the first crowned winner of RuPaul's Drag Race, Bebe Zahara Benet, direct by Emily Branham.

We are excited to present Catherine Corsini's gripping dark comedy The Divide (La Fracture) to our WQ audience.

Lesbians didn't always get to see themselves on screen. But between Stonewall, the feminist movement, and the experimental cinema of the 1970s, they built visibility, and transformed the social imagination about queerness. Filmmakers Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Rose Troche, Cheryl Dunye, Yoruba Richen, Desiree Akhavan, Vicky Du, film critic B. Ruby Rich, Jenni Olson, and others share moving and often hilarious stories from their lives and discuss how they've expressed queer identity through film.

Emilia is a 30-something bisexual woman who refuses to grow up as her female friends already did. Angélica, one of Emilia’s friends, is getting married. Her other friends, Clara and Renata, seem to have all their lives figured out: amazing jobs, family, kids… While Emilia is still living with her mother and trying to define her relationship with Mariana. She is also trying to survive as an actress and she teaches acting classes in a cheap school. She feels more comfortable with her students than with people of her same age. Her life will be even messier when she is fired from her job and she is forced to live a ‘standard’ life. Angélica’s bachelorette party would reveal that not only Emilia is unhappy with her life. We are all hiding what we really are.

The star of a team of teenage crime fighters falls for the alluring villainess she must bring to justice.

Birds of The Borderlands follows four Arab queers as they risk their place in their families, communities and even countries to be themselves. Hiba is a Bedouin trans-girl fleeing her tribe before they discover her secret transition; Youssef is a gay Iraqi refugee murder-witness, waiting in hiding for UNHCR to hand him his fate; Khalaf is a gay Imam turned LGBT activist forced to seek asylum abroad after a vicious assault from his family; Rasha is a young Jordanian feminist who finds herself in a relationship with Jordan, the Australian filmmaker who is determined to help the film’s characters but doesn’t understand the price paid for freedom in a country where honor can still be thicker than blood.

Dr Jean Markham (Anna Paquin) returns to the town she left as a teenager to take over her late father's medical practice. When a school-yard scuffle lands Charlie (Gregor Selkirk) in her surgery, she invites him to visit the hives in her garden and tell his secrets to the bees, as she once did. The new friendship between the boy and the bee keeper brings his mother Lydia (Holliday Grainger) into Jean's world. In the sanctuary of the doctor's house the two women find themselves drawn to one another in a way that Jean recognises and fears, and Lydia could never have expected. But, in 1950's small-town Britain, their new secret can't stay hidden forever.

The Coming Back Out Ball Movie is an observational feature documentary that follows a group of older LGBTIQ+ people, who have been invited to attend a Ball celebrating their gender and sexual identity. Faced with the complexities of ageing and isolation, these extraordinary people seize each day with determination and humour. In a time that is rapidly changing for the LGBTIQ+ community around the world, we witness some of our cast experiencing acceptance and love for the very first time in their lives.

From its start in 1990, Curve magazine was a visionary and unapologetic celebration of lesbian life from cover to cover. Facing the magazine’s possible demise in 2019, director Jen Rainin and Curve founder Franco Stevens explore questions of lesbian visibility, legacy, and current day issues through interviews with contemporary LGBTQ+ tastemakers, “celesbians” including Melissa Etheridge, Jewelle Gomez, Denise Frohman, Kate Kendell, and Lea DeLaria, along with rich archival footage recounting the formation of a lesbian cultural institution.

Emilia is a 30-something bisexual woman who refuses to grow up as her female friends already did. Angélica, one of Emilia’s friends, is getting married. Her other friends, Clara and Renata, seem to have all their lives figured out: amazing jobs, family, kids… While Emilia is still living with her mother and trying to define her relationship with Mariana. She is also trying to survive as an actress and she teaches acting classes in a cheap school. She feels more comfortable with her students than with people of her same age. Her life will be even messier when she is fired from her job and she is forced to live a ‘standard’ life. Angélica’s bachelorette party would reveal that not only Emilia is unhappy with her life. We are all hiding what we really are.

Molly Shannon plays Emily Dickinson in the dramatic comedy WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY. The poet’s persona, popularized since her death, has been that of a reclusive spinster – a delicate wallflower, too sensitive for this world. This film, however, explores her vivacious, irreverent side that was covered up for years – most notably Emily’s lifelong romantic relationship with another woman (Ziegler). The film is told from the perspective of Mabel Loomis Todd (Seimetz) who published Emily’s poetry after her death along with editor T.W. Higginson (Gelman). Todd used this volume as an opportunity to posthumously force Dickinson to conform to a repressive status quo. Irreverent and surreal – and reminiscent of an extended Drunk History episode without the drinking – WILD NIGHTS reminds us that the persona of an artist is as much a creation as the artwork itself and that history is often more story, than fact. You will never look at Emily Dickinson the same way again.

EVA AND CANDELA is a portrait of two strong, independent women drawn together by a powerful attraction and their shared desire to take on the movie world. As the years pass, their relationship changes from one of passion to logistics. EVA AND CANDELA, director Ruth Caudeli’s first feature film, is adept at balancing the hope and bitterness that pulls at the edges of a struggling relationship. The film jumps back and forth between Eva and Candela falling in love to their future relationship, all within the timeline of the making and release of the film that they have made together.