Category: Award Winner

Short Film Spotlight: One Day This Kid

As told by filmmaker Alexander Farah through a deftly composed array of small yet pivotal moments, the 17-minute short One Day This Kid follows a first-generation Afghan-Canadian man as he struggles to come to terms with being gay against the disapproval of his immigrant parents and takes steps toward establishing an identity of his own under his father’s shadow.

Inspired by the work of renowned artist David Wojnarowicz, the film uses gorgeous cinematography and emotional precision to tell the story of one gay boy growing up in a society that rejects him at all costs.

Delicate and poised, yet deeply powerful, this is the kind of heart-wrenching storytelling that should not be missed. Marking Farah as a filmmaker to watch, the film won the Narrative Short Competition at the 2025 South by Southwest Film Festival and has earned great acclaim at some of the world’s most prestigious cinema forums, including TIFF, the AFI Fest, Slamdance, Festival du Nouveau Cinema and many more.

Watch a teaser trailer for One Day This Kid below. The short film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

‘Fashion Victims,’ a 2007 comedy crowd-pleaser from Germany, makes its debut on Dekkoo!

Wolfgang (Edgar Selge) is a middle-aged traveling ladies’ fashion salesman. Persnickety, humorless and self-absorbed, he’s alternately inattentive and insensitive toward wife Erika (Franziska Walser) and their teenage son Karsten (Florian Bartholomäi).

At the start of Fashion Victims, a 2007 comedy from German co-writer and director Ingo Rasper, Wolfgang finds himself in dire straits. His rival is threatening to steal his best customers and he’s also lost his driver’s license.

Desperate to stay one step ahead of his young enemy salesman, he cancels his son’s vacation plans and employs him as an unwilling chauffeur. Things soon go from bad to worse – the bank is after him, the taxman catches up with him, he’s on the outs with his wife, and, perhaps most surprisingly, his son announces that he’s gay… and has fallen in love with his father’s dreaded rival!

Both bullets and misunderstandings start flying once family and foe collide in this sexy screwball comedy.

Watch a short clip from Fashion Victims below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

An all-star cast brings Martin Sherman’s award-winning stage play ‘Bent’ to the screen

Clive Owen, Mick Jagger, Ian McKellen, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Paul Bettany star in Bent, a gut-wrenching adaptation of the award-winning stage play by Martin Sherman.

Originally released in 1997, the film is set in 1930s Berlin. We follow Max (Owen), a promiscuous gay man who sleeps with a German SA officer, only to see him killed by his fellow Nazis the next morning.

Refusing an offer of new papers for fear of leaving his boyfriend behind, he’s found by the Gestapo and soon bound for Dachau. Once there, Max makes friends with a fellow gay man, who shows him that dignity lies in acknowledging one’s true nature. As the pair become lovers through dialog and the power of their imagination, they reckon with identity and struggle to maintain their dignity in the face of unspeakable persecution.

The original play, which premiered in London in 1979 before opening on Broadway the following year, was revived many times, most significantly by Sean Mathias, who directed this film adaptation as well.

Though much time had passed between the play’s debut and this film’s release, much was still not known about the experiences of LGBTQ+ victims of the Nazi regime. By the time of the film’s release in 1997, it was the first feature to tackle the subject head on. Today, Bent remains a riveting and important record of our understanding of this terrible history, a valuable preservation of a significant work of theater and a deeply moving cinematic work in its own right.

Watch the trailer for Bent below. The film is now available on Dekkoo.

Alan Cumming is exceptional in the thought-provoking generational drama ‘After Louie’

An award-winning gay drama featuring a knockout lead performance by Alan Cumming, After Louie explores the contradictions of modern gay life and history through Sam, a man desperate to understand how he and his community got to where they are today.

As an AIDS activist and member of ACT UP in the ’80s and ’90s, Sam witnessed the deaths of far too many close friends and lovers. Battle-wounded and struggling with survivor’s guilt, Sam now resents the complacency of his former comrades and derides what he sees as the younger generation’s indifference to the politics of sex and death.

When he meets Braeden, a seductive young man played by Zachary Booth, during a late-night outing at the bar, he quickly is able to lower Sam’s guard. As the pair become increasingly intimate, an intergenerational relationship blossoms between them – one capable of reawakening Sam’s artistic soul and reviving his wilted heart.

Through this unconventional romance, Sam is finally forced to deal with the trauma that informs his past, his present and the pair’s unknown future.

Watch the trailer for After Louie below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

‘20,000 Species of Bees’ tells a heart-wrenching story about gender, sexuality and identity

In a small, sleepy village in the Basque Country, a sculptor named Ane and her three children arrive at her mother Lita’s home for summer vacation. Lita disapproves of her daughter’s frayed marriage, career as an artist and the way she parents her obstinate and mischievous children.

Chief among them is eight-year-old Aitor, nicknamed Coco, after it becomes clear that being referred to by the name Aitor elicits feelings of distress in the child. Born biologically male, neither birth name nor the genderless nickname feel quite right, and Ane’s concern for her child grows as Coco becomes more withdrawn.

The child’s only respite lies in the Basque hills, where Ane’s aunt Lourdes tends to the family’s beekeeping farm. Among the peaceful humming of bees and Lourdes’ open-minded guardianship, Coco slowly begins to confide in family and friends her discomfort in her body, eventually voicing a desire to be treated as a girl.

As Coco explores her own developing identity over the summer, Ane and the rest of her family in turn must learn to accept the child as she is.

From Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, this assured debut feature is a wonderfully sensitive work carried by the Berlinale Silver Bear-winning lead performance of newcomer Sofía Otero.

An authentic and heart-wrenching story of transition, 20,000 Species of Bees is a landmark in the cinematic discussion of gender, sexuality and identity.

Watch the trailer for 20,000 Species of Bees below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Mismatched roommates become unexpected allies in the sly British dramedy ‘Makeup’

When two people are brought together from completely different walks of life, it can make for awkward circumstances, especially when they both have their secrets.

Making his feature debut, writer-director Hugo Andre also stars in the film Makeup as Sacha, an introverted French food critic who travels to London. Moving into a rented room in a house belonging to Dan (Will Masheter), a well-respected stockbroker, they fall into a classic “Odd Couple” dynamic.

As time goes on, Dan attempts to hide his aspirations of becoming a burlesque dancer from those who perceive him as an alpha male. Despite their differences, Sacha and Dan soon become pillars of support in each other’s lives.

A winner of 15 different awards at film festivals around the globe – including ‘Directorial Debut by a Young Film Maker’ at the London International Film Festival – Makeup is a stirring drama about the unlikely friendship that forms between the hidden personalities of two distinct characters.

Watch the trailer for Makeup below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

Check out the short works of filmmaker Tristan Scott-Behrends this month on Dekkoo!

This month, we’re shining a much-deserved spotlight on the short film work of auteur writer/director Tristan Scott-Behrends.

His films – funny, eclectic and packed with bold visual style – have been making a splash on the queer film festival circuit since the debut of Curtain Down in 2017. A 25-minute short, he wrote, produced and stars alongside Margaret Cho in this love story from director Emett Casey. The film takes a surreal but tender look at gender, identity and aging as our lead character is forced to choose between art and love.

Only Trumpets, his directorial debut, following an outsider navigating love and sex in the digital age, made it’s world premiere at the 2018 Outfest Film Festival, where it was selected as ‘Best of the Fest.’

Our four-film collection also includes The Man of My Dreams, which follows two gorgeous, magnetic male lovers as they traipse around the streets of New York City enmeshed in a dreamy romance.

Finally, Lilac Lips, Dutchess County, a reimagining of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, stars Joey Hardy Gray as nymph-like protagonist, navigating the complexities of relationships in a maze of his own making.

Exploring themes of identity, gender, isolation and sexuality in the most delicious ways possible, Tristan Scott-Behrends is a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on. While he’s currently hard at work developing a script for a feature film version of Only Trumpets, you can now enjoy some of his most stylish and provocative shorts right here on Dekkoo.

Short Film Spotlight: Never Too Old

Directed by Morgan Martini and written by Rolando Zee, the 17-minute short Never Too Old is a life affirming testament to love

Florio and Jesse (Gregory Niebel and screenwriter Rolando Zee) have lived together as lovers for over 45 years. Florio had expressed a desire to get married once same-sex marriage had been legalized, but Jesse held firm to his decision never to tie the knot.

Jesse’s mind starts to change when the law does, however, and he proposes. A small, intimate wedding follows. In their married life they will, of course, face the challenges that come with old age, but they will do so as a committed couple.

Entering marriage in their eighties, the two men offer up a testament to hope and a statement of courage and love.

Watch the trailer for Never Too Old below. The short film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

‘Hearstone’ is a beautiful and affecting drama about two boys coming-of-age in Iceland

The years-long friendship between two pre-teen boys is threatened when they strike up romantic relationships with a pair of local girls in this in the affecting and beautifully crafted coming-of-age drama from Icelandic director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson.

Set in a small village in rural Iceland, Heartstone follows Thor and Christian (Baldur Einarsson and Blaer Hinriksson), best friends whose home lives are unsatisfactory, to say the least.

Thor is ruthlessly mocked by his elder sisters, while his mother can’t be bothered to hide her frustration at having to sacrifice her pleasure for the sake of her children. While Thor suffers from absentee parenting, Christian’s drunken and abusive father is, unfortunately for him, all too present. The events that follow threaten to destroy the longest and most meaningful connection of their young lives.

Evincing a real feeling for how kids relate to one another, Heartstone is a piercingly honest portrait of adolescent sexuality that effortlessly and evocatively portrays small-town life in Iceland.

Watch the trailer for Heartstone below. The film is now streaming on Dekkoo.

A Halloween party takes some wild turns in the gay romance ‘Love Bites’ – a Dekkoo Exclusive!

Just out of their teens, Liam and Anatole (Lyad Smain and Roman Freud) were in the throes of an exciting new relationship… until they had a small fight and Anatole ended all contact.

With Anatole having almost completely disappeared, Liam finds himself confused and heartbroken. He simply can’t accept the breakup. And, since his boyfriend doesn’t reply to his calls or text messages, he decides to sneak into a Halloween party organized by one of Anatole’s friends to try and patch things up.

The wild night that ensues will test the true feelings of both young men while forcing them to confront some hard inner truths once and for all.

Winner of the Memorial Award for ‘Best Love Story’ at the ReelOut Film Festival, Love Bites – originally titled Dracula is in Love – is a winning comedy-drama from French director Lameo Flores. It’s also one of the rare Halloween-set movies that delivers tons of seasonal fun and aesthetics without all those pesky scares.

Watch the trailer for Love Bites below. The film is now streaming exclusively on Dekkoo.