new queer cinema

B. Ruby Rich coined the phrase in a 1992 Sight and Sound piece, describing a run of Sundance and Toronto debuts with no interest in playing the noble victim. Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki, Gus Van Sant, Derek Jarman, Tom Kalin and Jennie Livingston built the wave out over the six years that followed. The films came out of the AIDS crisis, independently financed with no studio behind them, made while the same administration spent most of the epidemic refusing to respond to it. Araki put two HIV-positive men on a cross-country crime spree in The Living End, refusing them the deathbed the disease was supposed to hand them. Kalin shot Swoon in black and white with a noir's cold lighting, so the crime-picture look announced itself before the story did. Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho sends a narcoleptic hustler looking for his mother, alongside a rich friend who is only visiting the street he lives on. Paris Is Burning spent seven years inside Harlem's Black and Latinx drag-ball houses, filming the fashion contests and the house mothers, in a world the film itself calls rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS and poverty. The films are unembarrassed, and that is still what they feel like.

Distinguish from Not all films with LGBTQ characters belong to the movement — mainstream productions like Film Noir or prestige biopics that happen to feature queer subjects sit outside NQC's independent, formally adventurous lineage. Overlaps with Mumblecore through shared directors (Sean Baker, Andrew Haigh) and low-budget naturalism, but NQC is defined by queer subject matter, not production method.