“Queer Voices NYC Film Festival” Convenes LGBTQ Filmmakers of Color with GLAAD on Sharing Their Stories with Entertainment & News Media | GLAAD

During the third annual Queer Voices NYC (QVNYC) Film Festival, filmmakers joined the GLAAD Media Institute – GLAAD’s research, consulting, and training sector of the organization – for a media training to learn the most up-to-date messaging and media tools to speak about their projects to entertainment journalists and news media at-large. In the process, creators were able to further realize the potential of their films by weaving in the impact of being able to tell their story through a journalistic lens.

Filmmakers of all backgrounds who joined the GLAAD Media Institute coaching session – now GLAAD Media Institute alumni – told us their stories against the backdrop of the QVNYC Film Festival at-large. The mission of the QVNYC Film Festival – founded by Brandon C. Smith and Ronald Hinton – is to empower LGBTQ filmmakers of color by providing a platform to showcase their talent, shape their own stories, and connect them to professional development opportunities in the entertainment industry.

“I just wanted to say thank you to all you folks coming in here supporting filmmakers because this is what matters,” Smith said to the crowd of film watchers. For Hinton and Smith, the film festival is about building equity for filmmakers.

On of those filmmakers is Edrian Pangilinan, the creator of Ang Huling Sayaw (The Late Checkout). Pangilinan stopped by all the way from San Diego to talk to GLAAD about media and to better understand the growing need to speak to journalists as he embarks on the film festival circuit. 

“You know, this may sound cheesy, but it’s a miracle that I’m here,” Pangilinan told GLAAD. 

Pangilinan’s film follows a young queer, Filipino man in his thirties looking for love and connection with a middle-aged widow who hasn’t dated in five years. While the film doesn’t follow the course of the pandemic, it reflects on a certain distance, self-discovery, and introspection brought on by lockdown. The film is inspired by Pangilinan’s journey to meet new people in hotels for hookups at the time. Pangilinan took it upon himself to broadcast how love and life changed for the two lead characters. They both had a serious need to be seen by the people in their life, however transient or new the connections were. 

The story takes place in 2021. A time that would allow for Pangilinan to face himself. 

“I’ve always struggled with what I call deep loneliness, and I personally thought that I was okay, but I was in the night,” Pangilinan reveals. “Certain things in my life had happened that caused me to be houseless.

This rendered the need for the filmmaker to use hotels for housing and socializing. Pangilinan says in the script there is a line that reads ‘loosely based on real life experiences.’ He says this is a retelling of his experience, a reckoning and acknowledgement about the need for finding connection, self-love, and healing. 

The San Diego native was joined by San Francisco-based director, producer, and editor of the short film Break My Heart, Ginger Yifan Chen. Their film was also selection by the QVNYC.

“I’m really honored to be a part of their selection,” Chen told GLAAD. The writer and actors of the film are Brooklyn-based. They are thrilled to bring San Francisco’s Mission District, Chen’s neighborhood, to New York City. 

Chen’s film follows two nonbinary bookstore clerks’ intimate relationship, which is interrupted by a new “beau” in a co-op bookstore that Chen is a part of. Chen and others collectively run the bookstore, and make decisions from finance to filmmaking. 

“I said, we need to make something here,” Chen told the Break My Heart’s writer Giovanna Zavala. “Eventually we developed this story together, and they were the main writer, and it ended up being a love story with no particular genders involved. After that we specifically cast a nonbinary cast.”

Both Chen and Zavala are nonbinary. Chen wanted to create a movie that went against the grain of the average mainstream love movie. The short showcases the deterioration of binaries within the dating-world, and instead, builds a love story “defined by literature.”

For instance in GLAAD’s 2024 Studio Responsibility Index, of the 256 films released by the ten distributors counted in this study in 2023, 70 feature LGBTQ characters (27.3%). This is a 1.2% decrease from the record high of 28.5% in the previous study. With that said, of the 178 LGBTQ characters counted eight are nonbinary characters (not explicitly identified as transgender on screen – 5%). 

This is something Chen has set out to change. 

The story opens with the lead character reading a love poem to their love interest, the other bookstore clerk. There is discussion here about who the poem is for, but the reader, sort of shrugs off the questions, clearly smitten with their co-worker. 

In the end, hundreds of films were submitted for selection, and enjoyed by more than 300 film festival goers. 

“We are building the table,” Smith said to the audience before a short film block on the first night. 

Festival films like Red Envelope, a Taiwanese fantasy short, directed by Tami Xu and written by C.K. Hugo Chung, won “Best Experimental Film,” and Pedaling with Purpose by Alfredo Trejo III, won “Best Documentary.” Others like Boy Mode directed by Dev Thompson won “Best Narrative,” Keenelan directed by Cami Thomas and NATIVES by Brittany Franklin being named Jury Selections.