At Venice’s 82nd Film Festival, David Pablos’ En el Camino won the Queer Lion with a tender story of love among Mexican truck drivers, reaffirming the prize’s role as cinema’s quietest but most necessary rebellion.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
The Queer Lion ceremony in Venice is never the largest or loudest event of the festival. It has no grand red carpet, no corporate sponsors dangling new perfumes or luxury watches. Instead, it is held in a modest hall at Casa I Wonder, tucked into the quieter corners of the Lido, where the Adriatic’s salt air drifts in through half-open shutters. Yet for those who care about cinema’s margins—the stories that press against mainstream narratives—this is one of the festival’s essential gatherings.
On Friday evening, when the announcement came, there was an audible intake of breath: the Mexican filmmaker David Pablos had won the Queer Lion with his new film, En el Camino. For Pablos, best known for Las elegidas (The Chosen Ones) (2015), the film is both a continuation and a departure. He has always been interested in lives defined by power and vulnerability; here, he turns his attention to the long highways of northern Mexico, where truck drivers—icons of machismo—become unlikely custodians of a fragile, hidden love.
The film’s brilliance lies not in spectacle but in restraint. In its most tender passages, silence does the heavy lifting: two men, both lonely, both weighed down by the codes of their world, share a cigarette in the cab of a lorry, the engine humming beneath them. The jury praised its “carnal, explicit, authentic, and unfiltered sexuality,” but the real triumph of En el Camino may be its ability to make desire look like a kind of grace. Pablos does not romanticise his protagonists; he simply allows them to be seen, and in that act of seeing, they achieve dignity.
The Queer Lion, created in 2007, has always walked a line between celebration and provocation. It asks Venice audiences to confront the fact that queer lives are still too often reduced to subplots or stereotypes, even as LGBTQ+ themes become more visible in the marketplace of cinema. This year’s competition was unusually rich, a patchwork of stories from across continents, each probing identity in its own register.
En el camino‘s biggest competition was arguably box-office heavyweight Luca Guadgnino’s After the Hunt, a star-studded psychological thriller (eternal it-girl Chloë Sevigny; comedic colossus Ayo Edebiri; cinematic sweetheart Julia Roberts; and heartthrob Andrew Garfield) dealing with a college sex abuse scandal. Although divisive among critics, Guadadigno’s decade-long canon of queer classics — including 2017’s Call Me By Your Name and 2024’s Challengers and Queer —, as well as his recent public appearances with new Dior director Jonathan Anderson, made him the proverbial one to beat, the Goliath that Pablos’s David defeated.
Other contenders included 35-minute-short Dark Rooms, co-directed by Mads Damsbo, Laurits Flensted Jensen, and Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup and described as an “immersive experience” rather than a film as viewers are invited to roam through invaginated spaces that muddy distinctions between the known and unknown, the interior and exterior; and, strangely, two dystopian picks.
The first, Greek director Evi Kalogiroupolou’s debut Gorgonà, explodes genre, best described as Love Lies Bleeding meets Mad Max and directed under the aegis of Kalogiroupolou’s countryman and surrealist Svengali Yorgos Lanthimos. The second, English director Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero (starring Emma Corrin and Charli XCX) is a fantastical re-rendering of The Arabian Nights, following the lives of a secret society of women who must tell stories to survive the despotism of the “Birdman.”
Other films nominated were Jaume Claret Muxart’s Strange River, Sister Sylvester and Nadah El Shazly‘s Constantinopoliad, Stergios Dinopoulos and Krysianna B. Papadakis’s Bearcave, Nicolangelo Gelormini’s La Gioia (Joy), and Gabriel Azorín’s Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes.
The diversity of these films suggests something important about queer cinema in 2025: it no longer has to argue for its legitimacy. The stories range from the intimate to the epic, the cerebral to the sentimental. And yet, as Pablos’ win demonstrates, the most radical gesture is sometimes the simplest one—to depict two men in love without apology, without metaphor, without disguise.
After the ceremony, Pablos spoke softly to a handful of reporters. “I wanted to expose how it feels to be homosexual inside this macho world of truck drivers,” he said. His words carried the modesty of someone who understands the weight of representation but refuses to treat it as a slogan. For him, cinema is less about message than about bearing witness.
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US indie director Jim Jarmusch unexpectedly won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice film festival with Father Mother Sister Brother, a three-part meditation on the uneasy tie between parents and their adult children.
Although his gentle comedy received largely positive reviews, it had not been a favourite for the top prize, with many critics instead tipping the Voice of Hind Rajab, a harrowing true-life account of the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl during the Gaza war. In the end, the film directed by Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania took the runner-up Silver Lion.
Venice, with its palaces and mirrored canals, has long been a city of masks. It feels fitting that here, in this place of illusions, a small prize for a quiet film should remind us that truth—awkward, tender, and necessary—still has a place in the grand theatre of cinema.
En el Camino will be available soon in cinemas and streaming platforms. M-Appeal, a reputable Berlin-based sales agency, has acquired international sales rights for En el camino (also referred to by its international title, On the Road).
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