The short film I like girls will be followed by the feature presentation of ASTRO.

I like girls
Diane Obomsawin • 8 min • Canada • 2016

Whimsical and youthful, Quebec cartoonist and animator Diane Obomsawin, a.k.a. Obom, adapts her latest graphic novel for the screen, using endearing anthropomorphic figures to tell poignant real-life stories of love. Charlotte, Mathilde, Marie, and Diane reveal the nitty-gritty about their first loves, sharing funny and intimate tales of one-sided infatuation, mutual attraction, erotic moments, and fumbling attempts at sexual expression. For them, sexual awakening comes hand-in-hand with discovering their desire for other women—and a joyful new self-awareness.

ASTRO
Nicky Lisa Lapierre • 80 min • Belgium • 2022

A lyrical story of loss, ASTRO meanders through urban and uncultivated landscapes offering a meditation on the open secret of heartbreak. First-time filmmaker Nicky Lisa Lapierre’s confessional docu-fiction style embraces the aesthetic of grainy home movies and early 2000s videos, creating a deeply personal, yet highly political trans-sapphic meditation on love, loss, and gender evocative of both the French New Wave and New Queer Cinema. The film’s central relationship between Baby and Charlie, whose relationship ended seven years prior to the confessional we watch, is reflected on seven years later by Lisa, now called Nicky, trying to make sense of the transformation in themselves heralded by the breakup.

The confessional narrative that anchors the film is an intertextual one that reflects on the difficulty of grieving the loss of the self in heartbreak, an effort that frequently resembles fiction more than memory in the rear view mirror of time. The film’s name comes from Nicky’s musing to give an account of oneself in loss is to attempt something rather like capturing a star in the sky, to try to reach an object whose light burns fiercely, but whose essence is untouchable. At times, the film’s intermixing of confessional voiceover with its central love story between Baby and Charlie feels as if an early career Agnes Varda has been reborn, picking up a digital camera instead of 16mm. A reflexive meditation on lost sapphic love after transition, ASTRO refuses to give the audience a conventional story of transition, eschewing the epistemology of the closet and pausing deliberately at the threshold.