Last week’s election triumph for incoming NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani got attention for a lot of reasons, among them the fact that he’s one active politician who remains openly supportive of trans communities—as opposed to demonizing them for conservative brownie points, or avoiding the subject whenever possible like most mainstream Dems now. It was a rare piece of good news in that sphere these days, after years of transpersons being the target of choice for gratuitous, paranoid attacks by public personalities from the GOP in general to J.K. Rowling.
Which makes this current Transgender Awareness Week a moment more upbeat than embattled (though of course it’s still both) for the return of the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. At nearly 30 years old now—having launched as Tranny Fest in 1997—it’s the world’s longest-running such event. The 2025 edition takes place in person Thurs/13 through Sat/15 at the Roxie Theater (KN95 masks are required for attendance, and will be provided for those who arrive without), then Sun/16-Sun/23 online. The four on-site programs are themed: Opening night brings eight works of Bay Area origin and/or interest; on Friday there’s a bill of music and animation shorts, followed by another of documentaries. Sunday’s “Trangeneity” provides a global gamut encompassing contributions from Wales, Greece, Nigeria and beyond.
Each show features a great deal of representational, stylistic and genre diversity—even within the documentary bill, there’s room for something like Syra McCarthy’s After What Happened at the Library, which freely dramatizes an actual incident of Proud Boy types invading a Drag Queen Storytelling Hour, terrorizing performer Kyle Casey Chu, staff, and children alike. There are fanciful mini-narratives such as Paul X. Sanchez IV’s sleepover horror Babyteeth, in which the “monster under the bed” proves all too real, and Ana Colato and Guadalupe Sanz’s Argentine Buena vida y poca verguenza (Live large no shame), in which a housesitting gig takes a surprise turn.
Melding elements including poetry recitation, animation, and dance is A New Creation Story, adapted from co-director Dane Figueroa Edidi’s text in The Black Trans Girl Prayer Book. Among other expressions through music and movement are J Triangular’s Taiwanese The Martial Forest, a wushu-action-cinema-style phantasmagoria of fighting trans invincibility, and Tom Goss & Ryan Cassata’s punky music vid i feel like throwing up, a Kill Rock Stars production.
The above-noted are just a fraction of 27 works in this year’s SF Trans Film Fest. Full info on the program, tickets and more info are available here.
There’s some overlap in sensibility as well as scheduling with another returning event, the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival. Co-founded in 2003 by drag luminary Peaches Christ and performer Vinsantos at the long-lost Bridge Theatre, with several gap years since, it’s now being helmed by Media Meltdown’s Piranha Psychotronica and Kafka X. It’s still a very scrappy celebration of “locally-made cinematic mayhem” highlighting “the silly, subversive, surreal and strange.” The three programs screening between 5pm and midnight this Sat/15 at the 4-Star Theater pack no less than 36 titles into that span, plus live entertainment.
Those three dozen shorts run a gamut from the relatively epic assault of Sepi Mashiahof’s 20-minute SMOOTH, a Substance-like dive into bloody body consciousness that’s dedicated to “all the hairy girls,” to a tangy miniature like Daria Lugina’s animated Onions. McGillis’ hum is a short documentary about the noise the Golden Gate Bridge makes when it’s windy—a sound everyone interviewed attempts to imitate.
There’s drag camp horror in Dave Haaz-Baroque’s Scary Stories To Tell By The Campfire: The Red Spot, and a musical courtroom drama involving both puppets and live actors in Jacob Edward Kubik’s Who Ate Cookie? Colin H. Johnson’s blackly comedic The Compatibility Index depicts a most unusual, arbitrary and invasive job interview in a corporate basement; it is not to be confused with Spencer Born and Gilles Bovon’s separate The Job Interview From Hell.
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On more serious notes, poet James Morehead provides a verbal introduction to the ‘hood amidst new and archival footage in Welcome to the Tenderloin, while Ivan’s Death from Daniel Sherwood offers an elegiac chorus of voices both disapproving and reassuring that accompany a title character’s parting hospital-bed moments. Tickets and more info on SF Underground Short Fest 2025 can be found here.
As if those two festivals didn’t strain a cinephile’s calendar enough this weekend, there’s also Colombia On Film, a showcase for that nation’s film and video arts produced by SF-based CiNEOLA that will play the Roxie Theater this Sat/15-Sun/16. Its third annual edition is dedicated to the concept of “resistia en transita” (resistance in motion), beginning with a fascinating, nearly century-old artifact: P.P. Jambrina’s 1927 Garras de Oro, also known as Golden Claws or The Dawn of Justice.
Billed as “world cinema’s first explicitly anti-imperialist film,” it opens with a long-taloned Uncle Sam creeping towards a map of 1903 Latin America, greedily reaching for Panama. The convoluted intrigue that follows fictionalizes how the forces of “Yanquilandia” schemed to have that territory secede from Colombia, enabling construction of the canal. That passageway finally reverted to Panamanian control just 25 years ago—and our current POTUS has made no secret of his desire to seize it back.
To appeal to popular audiences, the political chicanery gets couched within a story of cross-national romance, with room also for a couple splashy, decadent Jazz Age party scenes (one described rather hyperbolically as a “voluptuous and splendid orgy”). Thought lost for many decades, this provocative curio will be accompanied by a live score from Nobozos Band, and followed by a panel discussion.
The other two programs also mix old and new. Marta Rodriguez & Jorge Silva’s hour-long 1989 documentary Amores, mujeres y flores (Love, Women and Flowers), about beauty and strife within Colombia’s floriculture industry, will play with Laura Davila Argoty’s recent short Cuando ellas se fueron dolo quedo un pequeno rido en la montana (When they left, all that remained was a small noise in the mountain), which ponders the legacy of a now-shuttered textile factory.
And making this the third event of the week encompassing transgender screen imagery, Sunday afternoon brings Alma del desierto aka Soul of the Desert. Monica Taboada Tapia’s 2024 nonfiction feature follows Wayuu elder Georgina as she traverses the nation from indigenous capital Uribia to capital Bogota on a quest for identification that will acknowledge her chosen gender identity at last. For the full Colombia On Film schedule and related info, go here.
