Some of our favourite colours on film 🌈

Plus, update your Pride Month watchlist with our team's queer film recs...

Our Queer Film Recs 🎥

We asked the In The Mood team to share one (1) queer film rec—consider this your Pride Month watchlist…

Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (1992)

Asking a lesbian film buff for ONE queer film recommendation, while an exciting challenge, feels borderline homophobic. Do I go deep underground? Mainstream? Documentary? Fiction? What even is a “queer film”?

In the end, I decided that the only film that really speaks to my contrarian, canadian, underground queer spirit is Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives. On the surface, she is messy and scrappy, but something about listening to old lesbians speak is captivating, and charming regardless.
—cynthia cepeda

Tropical Malady (2004)

There’s the romance in a mixtape for a crush—I remember writing liner notes for one I made for my high school sort-of-girlfriend and it felt more intimate than sex. There’s the sensuality of touching in a dark still theatre, kissing knuckles outside on a windy night. Here the film cleaves, both a split and a splice. There’s the eroticism of a monster, a trail, a hunt—I shiver and swoon at the line “I give you my spirit, my flesh, and my memories.”
—Sennah Yee, Managing Editor

Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker (2020)

I’m not going to say this is a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking, but watching it recently was a welcome shot in the arm of rage, disillusionment, poverty, and how a desire to create can supercede it all. David Wojnarowicz came out of a brutal upbringing and a period as a hustler in Times Square that nearly killed him to make some of the most urgent art of the ‘70s and ‘80s. If you can get past Fran Lebowitz’s “those were the days” soundbites about the Lower East Side art scene, you may find some catharsis in Wojnarowicz’s bile towards both the Reagan-era conservatism that was indifferent to a generation of queers dying of AIDS and an art world that happily took those assholes’ money to barter a piece of the artist’s renegade genius.
—Gabrielle Marceau, Editor-in-Chief

Heavenly Creatures (1994)

The first girl I ever kissed was my best friend. It’s a tale as old as time: two young women meet in any one of the typical ways—in our case, in the high school bathrooms—they become inseparable, completely co-dependent, and at home in each other’s arms.

In Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, these girls venture to fantastical worlds devised by their imaginations, they create their own religion complete with a heavenly place called “The Fourth World,” they live for each other and they kill for each other, too.

The horrors depicted in this film go beyond the valley of the cliche that is best friends turned lesbian lovers. I was shocked, but not all that surprised when I learned it was based on a real-life crime.
—Cleo Sood, Assistant Editor

Shiva Baby (2020)

Messy, awkward, and not really romantic at all. But somehow a movie I find a lot of comfort in and find myself thinking of often.
—Kay Evans-Stocks, Creative Director

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A spring/summer gift for you 🌻

We’re offering 20% off all paid newsletter subscriptions! These go to contributor honorariums and operating costs for our magazine, which is all volunteer-run.

You’ll get unfiltered reviews from our team, seasonal recs, and more goodies right to your inbox, once a month:

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Some of our favourite colours on film 🌈

In honour of Pride Month’s rainbow emblem, our editor-in-chief, Gabrielle Marceau, explores one of art’s happiest marriages, celluloid and colour. And watch along with our Letterboxd watchlist.

Red

Out first colour is perhaps the one film does best, especially when it’s bold (and I mean burn-your-eyes-out vivid). Red is not subtle, needs no tempering, it is.

The colour of blood, roses (stereotypically), warning signs, alarms, the poisoned side of the apple (too tempting), cherry bombs, and rage. In film, it’s a primal hit in a prim world. Think of the drawing rooms made bloody in Cries and Whispers, or the shock of Divine’s dress in Pink Flamingos, the fever dreaminess of Yumeji, or a tomato-covered Tilda Swinton who doesn’t yet know that she’s pregnant with something evil.

Cries and Whispers, Pink Flamingos, Yumeji, We Need To Talk About Kevin

Orange

Vibrant, slightly unnerving, playful and rich (the colour is named for the fruit after orange trees became highly valued commodities in the 15th century).

Colour of apocalypse, sunset, dying sugar maple leaves, astronauts, saffron (another luxury), traffic cones and heat. On film it’s a bitter, burning morning in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a sky painted like fire in Gone With the Wind, or the lighting for a threesome in The Doom Generation.

Beanpole, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, James and the Giant Peach, The Doom Generation