A Queer Review of the Austin Film Festival (2023)
Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.

Akbar lives with his widowed mother in a small shanty hut. One day, his mother finds two young orphans, Ram and Laxman, and brings them home. Years later, Akbar, Ram and Laxman have grown up. While Ram has fallen in love with Radha, Laxman's sweetheart is Jenny, a pickpocket and petty thief. One day they come across a blind woman, and come to her assistance. They find out that she is their long-lost mother, who was blinded by a man named Ajit Singh, who also killed their father. Ram and Laxman decide to seek vengeance against Ajit Singh, but before they could do so, Akbar's mother and their mother are abducted, and it looks like Ajit is all set to send the rest of the family to their deaths.
Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.
Zoe Saldaña is a CIA operative who leads a special program that recruits women to infiltrate and dismantle international criminal enterprises, with a QRT(Quick Response Team) providing operational security that shoots people and blows things up on a weekly basis.
In Deaf, the Spanish director Eva Libertad explores pregnancy and motherhood from the perspective of a deaf woman. Her movie examines how the world imposes the notion of disability on her main character while she actually does not feel disabled herself.
A successful author’s life is upended when she finds herself on a plantation straight out of the antebellum south.
It surely isn't for everybody and could certainly offend some folks, but Troll Hunter takes a different approach to representing religion in a film.
The Cycle refuses to lean into the same old, same old monster-movie tropes and builds the entire premise around the intellect and the history of a capable, smart female protagonist.