Palabra de Honor 

It: Welcome to Derry proves you can have rich representation, real humanity, and still fully enjoy Pennywise terrifying kids in sewers.

When a powerful church leader is found dead, Benoit Blanc enters a tight-knit community where everyone has secrets, but not everyone is fully developed.

With the theme of unemployment, it presents a family fantasy anecdote rather the a comment on social problems.

With mismatched eyes, a willingness to experiment with hair color and style, and a rail thin frame, Bowie always drew attention. But he shunned gendered attractiveness, creating his own space somewhere in between. This hallucinatory and often nonlinear 2022 documentary is a perfect salute to David Bowie’s life and career. Rather than interviewing those that knew Bowie, the standard convention for biographical portraits, director Brett Morgen mostly lets the artist’s images, performances, videos, and words speak to capture the essence of the artist. Bowie was more than just a pop star. He painted, sculpted, acted in films, and was a thoughtful and articulate person who gave sincere answers to even the most shallow interview questions.

A complex, realistic, and loving mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of this story about Black pageants and the fight for a better future.

Highlighting the many ways in which AFF 2023 illustrated that the queer experience is not a monolithic one.