The Great Queer Filmmakers of the 21st Century

Ahead of The Skinny's screening of Matthias & Maxime at GFT as part of Queer Cinema Sundays, we asked our writers: "Who are the great LGBTQ+ auteurs of the 21st Century?"

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 06 Jan 2025
  • Great Queer Films of the 21st Century

Last April, Glasgow Film Theatre began its monthly Queer Cinema Sundays and it’s quickly become one of Scotland’s essential cinema seasons. Its aim is 'to explore the rich history of LGBTQ+ films on the big screen with a shared audience' and The Skinny will be getting in on the act when the team from our film podcast, The CineSkinny, presents Xavier Dolan’s 2019 film Matthias & Maxime at the first Queer Cinema Sunday of 2025 on 26 January.

After the screening, The CineSkinny team will take part in a live podcast discussion about Dolan and the other key voices in queer cinema to have emerged this century. Ahead of the screening, we polled our film writers to compile a list of those key voices. Take a look at who we've chosen, presented in alphabetical order, in the list below and join us on 26 January to hear more.

Desiree Akhavan

Desiree Akhavan’s films are fresh and funny, cut through with a bittersweet tang. Her debut Appropriate Behaviour was an achingly personal story of a young bisexual Iranian-American woman (played by Akhavan) being simultaneously wrecked and enriched by her turbulent love life in Brooklyn. Her next feature, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, about gay teens resisting conversion therapy with sass and smarts, was more mature in its examination of the agony and angst of young queer lives, but no less jubilant. 

Key work: The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

Levan Akin

Life, in all its complexities and messiness, is captured beautifully in the vibrant, sensuous and thrillingly alive films of Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin. His extraordinary debut, And Then We Danced, told the story of a young man exploring his sexuality amid the hyper-masculine world of traditional Georgian dance, while his second film, Crossing, was a bittersweet road movie following a retired teacher trying to reconnect with her estranged transgender niece. Empathy and warmth spilled off the screen in both. 

Key work: And Then We Danced (2019)

Robin Campillo


BPM

In the films of Robin Campillo, sex is a political act. Eastern Boys, a thorny tale of the complex relationship that forms between a Ukrainian teenage immigrant and a middle-aged Parisian, announced Campillo’s talents for colliding queer desire with urgent social issues, and this only increased with the brilliant BPM, an electrifying celebration of queer activism and love set within the bolshy Paris chapter of ACT UP in the early 90s. 

Key work: BPM (2017)

Xavier Dolan

This wunderkind from Montreal arrived on the scene as a bratty 21-year-old prodigy with his directorial debut I Killed My Mother, which he also wrote, produced and starred in. Seven features on, his significance to queer cinema in the 21st century is undeniable. His films are brash, in your face, filled with shouting matches and flamboyant music video-esque flourishes, but the best of them – Mommy, Matthias & Maxime, Tom at the Farm – linger thanks to their bruising moments of heart-on-sleeve vulnerability. 

Key work: Matthias & Maxime (2019)

Rose Glass

British writer-director Rose Glass impressed us deeply with her debut Saint Maude, a dreamy character study that slipped into horror as it told the story of a pious care nurse with a messiah complex. But she knocked our socks off with her violent and sexy follow-up Love Lies Bleeding. A delirious, steroid-fuelled lesbian love story set against an 80s neo-noir backdrop, it's an atmospheric adrenalin rush dripping with sweat and malevolence that confirmed Glass as a major filmmaking talent. 

Key work: Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Andrew Haigh


Weekend

We had Andrew Haigh pegged as queer cinema’s great realist director. His breakthrough Weekend was a delicate two-hander about a one-night stand that blossoms into a life-altering weekend love affair; it was characterised visually by its naturalism and intimacy, suggesting Before Sunset gone gay. Follow-ups like Lean on Pete and 45 Years took a similar approach. But last year’s stunning All of Us Strangers, a magic realist queer romance crossed with a benevolent ghost story, opened Haigh's filmmaking up to glorious new possibilities.

Key work: Weekend (2011)

Céline Sciamma

A master of coming-of-age, identity and untapped desires, French writer-director Céline Sciamma has amassed one of the most exciting and empathetic bodies of work in modern cinema. Her films are often quiet and minimalist, like Tomboy, her delicate story of a gender-nonconforming adolescent reinventing themselves one summer, or Petite Maman, a timewarp fairytale in which an eight-year-old-girl meets her mother at the same age, but she’s equally at home amid the white-hot passion of love story Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Key work: Tomboy (2011)

Jane Schoenbrun

Jane Schoenbrun was still working on coming out as trans when she wrote her first feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. By her second feature, I Saw the TV Glow, about two teens who become obsessed with a Buffy-like TV show reflecting back their nascent queerness, she’s created one of the great films about figuring out you’re trans. 

Key work: I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul


Tropical Malady

Watching one of the sensuous films from this Thai master is like stepping into a dream world. His only explicitly queer film is the luxuriously beautiful Tropical Malady, a beguiling diptych which begins with an achingly tender gay romance between a soldier and a farmer before taking desire into a metaphysical (and metaphorical) realm in its second half. A queer lens colours all his films, though, from the hallucinatory Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives to the woozy and meditative Cemetery of Splendour

Key work: Tropical Malady (2004)

Emma Seligman

With the jagged Shiva Baby and the unhinged Bottoms, Emma Seligman has proven herself the chaotic queen of queer comedies. The former film, about a college student having a stressful time after running into her sugar daddy at a family shiva, is the sharper work but the cult classic status that was instantly bestowed on Bottoms suggests it’s the film destined for the longer afterlife. 

Key work: Shiva Baby (2021)


An introduction to Matthias & Maxime

Xavier Dolan superfan Anahit Behrooz introduces the talented Quebecois filmmaker's complex and super-sexy eighth feature

Ever since he burst onto the scene at the precocious age of 21 with his Cannes-premiered debut, Xavier Dolan has been making films that speak to a particular facet of the queer experience: soft, angsty, and stricken with mummy issues. His most recent entry into the genre is 2019’s Matthias & Maxime, which follows the long-buried yearnings and tensions that arise between two best friends after they kiss for a student film.

Directed by and starring Dolan, Matthias & Maxime dispenses with many of the milestones of the traditional queer narrative – coming out, disclosure, identity markers – to explore a more fluid kind of sexuality rooted in the blurriness of friendship and the rigidity of masculine codes. It’s romantic, it’s sexy, and it features Britney Spears’ Work Bitch on the soundtrack. That’s queer culture, baby. 


Matthias & Maxime screens at GFT on 26 Jan as part of Queer Cinema Sundays followed by a panel discussion with The CineSkinny podcast team