New Queer Cinema is the name given to a wave of queer films that gained critical acclaim on the festival circuit in the early 1990s. The concept itself wasn’t explicitly adopted by filmmakers but was instead defined through the writing of critic B. Ruby Rich. Historically, New Queer Cinema was inextricably tied to the AIDS crisis and the activism and community that formed out of it; it’s filmmaking made by and for people who were on the margins. This movement is described as stylistically experimental, rich, and above all, defiant. Before the movement, the main trend of depicting the LGBT characters is to make them into negative images as vicious villains or humiliating clownish figures.
Films of the New Queer Cinema movement typically share certain themes, such as the rejection of heteronormativity and the lives of LGBT protagonists living on the fringe of society.
Film critic B. Ruby Rich describe the films in her book New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut as “intensely political and aesthetically innovative, and made possible by the debut of the camcorder, and driven initially by outrage over the unchecked spread of AIDS”.
While it`s great that queer-positive storylines are now common and central to mainstream blockbuster hits, many NQC films have been forgotten, and that`s not acceptable.
List of NQC movies: Click here
