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.

American actor-director Arnold Barkus made this low-budget French film, a comedy set in New York, with scenes taking place in Chinatown, in a Franco-Greek cabaret, and on the Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn-born Max suspects his girlfriend Sophia has been cheating on him. His French pal Jean and a young woman, Vita, step in with a scheme to get back at Sophia, a character who is never seen during the entire film. Included is a parody of the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter (1978).
Of the 28 total films I watched, just six of them were queer or featured queer characters in some way.
The short documentary and second place winner of the Incluvie Short Film Festival, Gender Outlaw: A Bodysurfing Story, challenges any simplistic understanding of trans people.
Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.
Steven Spielberg's West Side Story (2021) improves on the original's terrible representation, poorly written romance, and more. --> check out reviews & film summary
'También la Iluvia' exploits Indigenous peoples' fight against the privatization of water in order to tell a story about Spanish characters.
After the untimely death of his brother by way of an ambush in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the protagonist, ‘81’(Alan Ritchson) unsuccessfully makes several attempts to become an Army Ranger. On his last mission to complete the Ranger selection process he and his squad encounter an otherworldly ‘soldier’.