Seventeen-year-old Sangaile is fascinated by stunt planes. Afraid of heights, she has never dared to even enter one of the cockpits. At a summer aeronautical show near her parents’ lakeside villa, she meets Auste—a local girl who, unlike Sangaile, lives her life to the fullest with creativity and bravery. As the two girls grow closer, Sangaile allows Auste to discover her most intimate secret, and finds in her teenage love the only person who truly encourages her to fly. The Summer of Sangaile is a rare film that takes you by surprise with the honesty of its performances, the poetry of its narrative, and the crispness of its cinematography, which captures the beauty of the girls and the unique Lithuanian scenery equally well. Writer/director Alante Kavaite uses transfixing imagery and exquisite casting to bring to life her distinctly layered story of young love and big dreams. The end result is a rapturous film experience. Description courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival.

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Liz has known several things since she was a child: that she is gay, that beauty is power, and that she would never be a victim. Determined to enjoy the time she still has left on earth, she hides her terminal disease from her friends. Eva lost her son to cancer. The pain and guilt she feels has tarnished the relationship with her husband, sinking both into isolation. Heading alone on her vacation, Eva’s car breaks down leaving her stranded on the road. She ends up at Margot’s Inn where she meets Liz and her group of all gay friends. Liz makes a bet that she can seduce the straight newcomer. Against all odds, the encounter between these two opposite women changes their lives, setting new perspectives where love, life, and death, away from any morals, play as simple steps of nature.

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If you’ve ever found yourself on the outside looking in, then you are probably familiar with the coping strategy of acquiring the identity of a movie character in order to gain legibility within the situation. The central character of Jenni Olson’s mesmerizing essay film is a gender dysphoric, Midwestern tomboy who is drawn to borrowing masculine personas from Hollywood characters as a mode of understanding how to deal with being drawn to unavailable women. A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

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