Report: Our Messy People at GAZE 2025

From overprotective mums, to breaking the law and then some. Khushi Jain shares her top picks from the Our Messy People screening presented on Sunday, 3rd August 2025, at GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival at the Lighthouse Cinema.

Our Messy People was described as a ‘thorny, complicated queers and the people who love them, for better or worse. Usually worse.’ Put together by assistant programmer James Hudson for the 2025 GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival, this shorts strand was particularly well conceptualised and curated. Cinema, and many other arts, have a tendency to polarise queer people into monolithic good and bad binaries; often reducing them into types, which can, in a way, dehumanise. The messiness that this programme unabashedly brings forth is a restoration of nuance: celebrating queer characters and all their complexity, and the word ‘Our’ in the programme title explains it all.

The eight films in this strand were as tarnished, dishevelled and cluttered as the queer people in them. Even the sequence of films was suitably chaotic, with only a semblance of order. Three engaged with complex parent–child dynamics going beyond the usual coming-out stories: Zane Igbe’s Surprise, Baby! (UK), Elisa Ward’s Due to Love (Germany), and Julia Dahmen’s Somewhere Between You & Me (Germany). Two dealt with evolving friendships: Hazel Katz’s Sydney & Kim (USA) and Jasper Caverly’s Pleasure (Australia). There was also one documentary which exponentially expanded the potential of Super 8mm: Vida Behar’s Give Me the Money (USA). The strand opened and closed with two break-up films which could not have been more different from each other: Jon Arnold’s Stephen (UK) and Julia Wysocka’s Skirmish (Ireland).

Stephen

Jon Arnold (UK)

Stephen is about to leave for a rave recommended to him by his boyfriend, unaware that the night holds a surprise. Stephen is selfish, annoying, charming. Stephen is a fashion icon who wears a beanie over a baseball cap, and smokes a vape while holding a cigarette in the other hand. Arnold’s film is a grainy character study of the titular Stephen. The camera is carefully careless, creating an invisible window into him. The aesthetics are Y2K while the emotions are timeless. Stephen is someone I would love to see in a two-hour-long feature film. There is undoubtedly a little bit of Stephen in everyone.

Somewhere Between You & Me

Julia Dahmen (Germany)

Mailin is a young queer German-Chinese woman whose date night is interrupted by the unannounced visit of her recently divorced mother. The film’s strength lies in its employment of food as a quiet leitmotif, from Mailin packing pasta in a plastic container for her girlfriend (whom she has to ask to leave), to drinking tea from an ancestral teapot, shopping in the Asian grocery store, making dumplings with her mother, and finally having a hearty meal together with both the women in her life. Dahmen does not burden her script with life-altering profundity but lets the ordinary sweetness of experience waft through the story.

Sydney & Kim

Hazel Katz (USA)

This is the film with the most anti–anti-heroines of all. Shot on Super 16mm, it tells the story of two very messy queer women, a manager and a motel in southern California. Think chick flicks meets mumblecore meets cinéma vérité. Sydney and Kim are each other’s chosen family, a very toxic family. Katz creates this toxicity with a nonchalance that is endearing and dangerous at the same time. The strength of her film is her script. Katz’s elements of surreal absurdity are drawn out verbally, in what is said and unsaid. The location of the film, a motel in the desert, adds to the overall feeling of being alone together.

Pleasure

Jasper Caverly (Australia)

This was my favourite film of the festival. Thommy (Stacy Clausen) is an ‘eshay’, an antisocial, hyper-masculine teenager - or at least on the surface. One summer night, when graffitiing in Melbourne’s inner west goes wrong, Thommy’s relationship with himself and his friend Aldo is changed forever. Caverly’s film is not narrative but character-driven, showing over telling every step of the way. The camera is personal and does not shy away from the ugly side of Thommy. In the end, Pleasure is full of understanding and big, big feelings. Brilliant in every aspect, it is a masterclass in short filmmaking.

Special mention: Vida Behar’s Give Me the Money (USA), an experimental documentary about Noah, the trans non-binary lead of an electronic noise duo in the Seattle punk scene (shot on Super 8mm with hand-drawn animations).

GAZE International LGBTQIA Film Festival took place from Thursday, 31st July to Monday, 4th August 2025.