San Junipero: Queer Heaven on Earth
Battles will come and go and queer people do die for their identity and fights for rights, but that doesn’t mean the gays don’t deserve their happy endings in stories.

This small, personal, honest experiment on a minimalist budget is edited from 12 years of nostalgic archival footage and ironical pranks. Mostly it is Manfred behind the camera. He follows Kristjan’s encounters and drunken conversations with the self-proclaimed cinema pioneer Eedi. Chess master Eedi can barely walk and can’t hear, but bitterly scorns Kristjan for filmmaking. Unstoppable dreamer, Kristjan continues to imagine a long-postponed film about the painter Jüri Arrak with never-ending hope to leave a mark in Estonian culture.
Battles will come and go and queer people do die for their identity and fights for rights, but that doesn’t mean the gays don’t deserve their happy endings in stories.
This film is a splendid mix of mediums, but its strength lies in its simplicity and beautiful message of closeness.
Lee Daniels’s Billie Holiday biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday was released on February 26th, 2021, and my immediate reaction to it was one of discomfort.
Love, Simon (2018) based on the book “Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda” (by Becky Albertalli) is a teen LGBTQ+ rom-com with themes of longing to find others with similar struggles, and ultimately is a story of acceptance of identity from those around you, and most importantly, from yourself.
'Young Royals' is a great example of positive gay representation in its two main protagonists, but the supporting characters are often frustratingly selfish.