Violin (2012)

Everyone deserves a great love story, but for 17-year-old Simon Spier, it's a little more complicated. He hasn't told his family or friends that he's gay, and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate that he's fallen for online. Resolving both issues proves hilarious, terrifying and life-changing.

On the outskirts of Brooklyn, Frankie, an aimless teenager, suffocates under the oppressive glare cast by his family and a toxic group of delinquent friends. Struggling with his own identity, Frankie begins to scour hookup sites for older men.

1984, Sandusky, Ohio. A naive 17-year-old navigates heartbreak and self-expression as he explores his sexuality.

Forced to give up his dreams of art school, Zach works dead-end jobs to support his sister and her son. Questioning his life, he paints, surfs and hangs out with his best friend, Gabe. When Gabe's older brother returns home for the summer, Zach suddenly finds himself drawn into a relationship he didn't expect.

A group of New Yorkers caught up in their romantic/sexual milieu converge at Shortbus, an underground Brooklyn salon infamous for its blend of art, music, politics, and carnality, and loosely inspired by various underground NYC gatherings that took place in the early 2000s. Here, gay couple Jamie and James meet Ceth, a young ex-model and aspiring singer.

The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.

Singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and bass guitarist John Deacon take the music world by storm when they form the rock 'n' roll band Queen in 1970. Hit songs become instant classics. When Mercury's increasingly wild lifestyle starts to spiral out of control, Queen soon faces its greatest challenge yet – finding a way to keep the band together amid the success and excess.

The story of Nathan, a young teenager who tries to flourish in a romantic relationship with neighbour Roy. The two young men will have to face the brutal reality of the rural south of the United States in the late 1970s.

Set during a long, hot summer on the Thamesmead Estate in Southeast London, three teenagers edge towards adulthood.

Gabriel rents a room in Juan’s House. They work together in a Woodwork place. Gabriel is a very quiet guy and has a little daughter. Juan is a party boy who has a lots of girls around. Inadvertently the sexual tension starts to grow between them. It opens a new hidden forbidden world they have to deal with.

It's 1992. Martin is 17 and he films his daily life with his Hi8 camera. He films anything and everything—his room, the world around him... But never his father, the thought doesn't occur to him. One day he meets Dominique. He's 23 and works as a student monitor at Martin's high school.

Bobby Griffith was his mother's favorite son, the perfect all-American boy growing up under deeply religious influences in Walnut Creek, California. Bobby was also gay. Struggling with a conflict no one knew of, much less understood, Bobby finally came out to his family.

As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.

The holidays get overly festive as Olaf "Gunn" Gunnunderson, an out-and-proud gay college student, crawls back into the closet to survive the holidays with his parents. But when his boyfriend, Nathan, shows up at their doorstep unannounced, Gunn must put on a charade to keep the relationship a secret. With pressure mounting from all sides, will Gunn come out before the truth does?

Sean is taken to a motel and is given a prostitute for his 18th birthday by his father. He must sleep with her to "fix" his questionable homosexuality. "Pretty Boy" is a coming of age story of a young bullied teen, Sean, struggling with his sexuality and the hardships of high school. After his father finds some questionable magazines in his room, this devout Christian will go to any lengths to get his son to find the light and "perform" the way a man should. Sean is introduced to Katie, a prostitute that understands the stigmas of modern society and helps him see the true light that is within him.

On Manhattan's gilded Upper East Side, a young gay painter is torn between an obsession with his infamous best friend and a promising new romance with an older foreign pianist.

The true story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man ever elected to public office. In San Francisco in the late 1970s, Harvey Milk becomes an activist for gay rights and inspires others to join him in his fight for equal rights that should be available to all Americans.

If you had a love-potion, who would you make fall madly in love with you? Timothy, prone to escaping his dismal high school reality through dazzling musical daydreams, gets to answer that question in a very real way. After his eccentric teacher casts him as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he stumbles upon a recipe hidden within the script to create the play's magical, purple love-pansy.

The story of the onset of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 1980s, taking an unflinching look at the nation's sexual politics as gay activists and their allies in the medical community fight to expose the truth about the burgeoning epidemic to a city and nation in denial.

Four interwoven stories about love and self-acceptance: An eleven year-old boy struggles to keep secret the attraction he feels towards his male cousin. Two former childhood friends reunite and start a relationship that gets complicated due to one of them’s fear of getting caught. A gay long lasting relationship is in jeopardy when a third man comes along. An old family man is obsessed with a young male prostitute and tries to raise the money to afford the experience.

Major Bill Cage is an officer who has never seen a day of combat when he is unceremoniously demoted and dropped into combat. Cage is killed within minutes, managing to take an alpha alien down with him. He awakens back at the beginning of the same day and is forced to fight and die again... and again - as physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop.

When a nonverbal autistic teen's family is falling apart, he must find his voice to keep them together.

Three teen students growing and maturing together in Bangkok, Thailand as they deal with family, peer pressure, and coming to terms with their own sexuality.

Sonny and Dub once shared a cell. Now Sonny is a free man, but Dub is on death row and sentenced to be executed in a matter of days. As Sonny comes to visit Dub one last time, Dub has one last dying request for Sonny.

Xiao An and Mao Cai live in the same dormitory and meet one another because of their accidentally swapped bedsheets. They grow closer by meeting frequently, to the point that Mao Cai asks Xiao An to be his little brother. Although what Xiao An feels is way more than brotherly love, he accepts Mao Cai's request. While both of them are trying to figure out their feelings, Lao Si (Xiao An's rommate) is getting into the picture too, making everything even more complicated.

Wolfgang (13) lives on the street. One night, by chance, he finds the head of a statue for which a large reward is being offered. To collect the reward, he goes to the specified address - a beautiful, old house on the outskirts of the city - and meets with an elderly woman. Because of the unexpected beauty and tranquillity of his surroundings, Wolfgang keeps quiet about the statue head, and stays. But things soon start to change, because the old woman, although mute and tied to a wheelchair as a result of a stroke, suddenly begins to behave strangely, she wants something from him ...

The story is told through the eyes of a boy, how he wanders between reality and dream. His daily life is transformed to a surreal world through the unique sensitivity of boyhood.

Zhang Zhe, a genius student, and Zhang Nan, a handsome swimmer, couldn't understand each other. They did not expect to meet each other at the same university. Zhe is a mathematical genius, but has a social phobia; Nan is an athlete, but he hates being used as a racing machine by his father. The two men help each other by the means of mutual encouragement. Nan helps Zhe overcome his social fears while Zhe helps Nan find the real meaning of being an athlete. Prequel to "The Ambiguous Focus".

In order to free her boyfriend Zhou Junchi from a thousand-year-old curse, a psychic named Shao Tang decides to seek help from a girl who communicates with the “God of Bed”. Unexpectedly, she uncovers a conspiracy, as an unwelcomed guest who happens to be Zhou Junchi’s “ex-girlfriend” returns despite thought to be terminally ill. Bewildered, Zhou Junchi and Shao Tang smell danger…

Earth is a high school boy who working on a path that is chaotic and confusing and so silently holds grievances in his heart. But when a young boy moves next to Earth's house, Earth's life slowly begins to change. This is a story of how the two boys get closer and help each other grow, showing that the soft changes in life can be found in the location that's just next to each other's house.

Korean short film about a schoolboy, Hye Sung Won, who struggles with his feelings of inadequacy and tries to rationalize his guilt over a betrayal to his cherished and seemingly perfect friend, Jeong Hyuk Moon.

Ah Nam is a transfer student who has a strange nightmare, which bothers him from almost one year. For some reasons, he meets Chang Ru Hao, who then tries helping him fight with his nightmare. However, Ru Hao’s family conceal the secret which is combined with Ah Nam’s nightmare and tragedy of his little brother.

Ye Yuwei is a transfer student who encounters his desk-mate, He Chenghan, in the new class. Under the handsome look of He Chenghan is a girly heart. He is interested in cartoons of young girls and keeping cats. In the eyes of He Chenghan, Ye Yuwei seems to be a cat and a sentimental teenager who gradually becomes aware of his own emotions that are completely different.

Than, who is trying to have a relationship with Palm while texting his neighbor, who helps him with his problems and deals with his mother...

Gu Si Jun, an elderly man who often dreamed about a boy who was his past romantic interest and his failed sexually passive marriage with a woman called Cui Fang. Gu Jun lived at a nursery home with a group of old men. They tease him about Wei Meng Yun, an old woman who seemingly has a romantic interest in him. After moving in with his brother's family, he decided to help his nephew, Gu Jia in achieving his wish to attend an opening reception hosted by Ma Ming Jin, a popular designer Gu Jia greatly admires. Upon reaching the office of Ma Ming Jin's company, Si Jun was stunned to see that Ming Jin looked exactly like the boy he knew during his younger times.

Hand-drawn charcoal drawings movingly depict the loneliness and bewilderment of a child seeking safety in a war zone, in this timely very short animation that uses found sound to explore the powerlessness of the refugee experience. Produced as part of the 11th edition of the NFB’s Hothouse apprenticeship.