Programmers' Picks: Marcus Gorman on SIFF 2025
Fucktoys
True outsider art, as writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram treks through Trashtown, USA in the hopes of lifting a curse. Don’t Google this movie’s title if you don’t want weird results, unless maybe you do…?
Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers
Trans actress and Warhol Factory icon Holly Woodlawn slays in this defiantly queer, newly restored 1972 camp cult classic about a small-town girl just trying to make it big in New York City.
By Design
The most confident film yet from absolute weirdo Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please, Give Me Pity!), synthesizing her obsessions with kink, class, performance, and womanhood into this for-acquired-tastes-only deadpan satire about a woman who becomes a chair.
Color Book
A perfect fusion of indie cinema knowhow that will break you apart and put you back together. Winner of the Directors to Watch Award at the 2025 Palm Springs International Film Festival.
Familiar Touch
Kathleen Chalfant—whose performances in the original stage casts of “Angels in America” and “Wit” are the stuff of legend—stuns in this wise, unshowy, Venice- and Independent Spirit Award-winning drama about aging with grace.
Baby Doe
More true crime documentaries and miniseries should take pointers from this gutting, emotionally centered, and journalistically sound exploration about the never-ending ripples of our past.
The Balconettes
Noémie Merlant reunites with her Portrait of a Lady on Fire collaborator Céline Sciamma in her second time in the director’s chair, concocting this irresistible, sunbaked comic thriller about three Marseille women raging against toxic masculinity.
Dead Lover
SXSW award-winner Grace Glowicki marches to the beat of her own drum. Enjoy her latest, a lo-fi combination of German Expressionism, performance art, and community theatre as she gender-bends the fuck out of this Frankenstein comedy.
She's The He
A “classic” high school comedy made by a majority trans/queer cast and crew that takes the piss out of anti-trans sentiment, this intentionally thorny, bawdy ’80s/’90s-style teen farce is quietly revolutionary.
Billy & Viktor & Chain Reactions
Three striking docs about people who use art to make sense of their lives: a schizophrenic, imprisoned filmmaker in Québec; a Deaf war photographer in Ukraine; and five horror fans whose lives were forever changed by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
The Gloria of your Imagination & Suburban Fury
Two experimental docs about the substantial cultural shifts of 1960s/1970s America as seen through the eyes of two fascinating women: a divorced, outspoken waitress over three therapy sessions; and the disgruntled housewife who tried to assassinate Gerald Ford.
