The 6 Queer Short Films at Sundance 2026
Of the 28 total films I watched, just six of them were queer or featured queer characters in some way.

Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places. As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic.
Of the 28 total films I watched, just six of them were queer or featured queer characters in some way.
Director Dana Ziyasheva made her directorial debut, 'Defenders of Life' which focuses on the Ngäbe community, and the hardships Ngäbe girls faced in Costa Rica.
'The Lost Daughter' doesn't paint over the choices Leda and Nina make as mothers as right or wrong but examines the messy in-between.
Horse racing is a very difficult sport and challenge, especially for a young woman like Michelle Payne.
If you mix religious rituals with dark mythology, the result will be effective, and the story powerful in 90% of the cases. That is exactly what happens at the beginning of The Vigil.
Its predictability shouldn’t distract from the enjoyment that the pure cinematic imagination behind the camera elicits. It is a movie of crises both moral and mortal, oozing with CGI, and thoroughly enjoyable.