After an implosion, Outfest is back — in a new form — spreading queer joy through film

For more than 40 years, the queer film festival Outfest has been a fixture in Los Angeles.

What began as a weekend-long media conference put on by UCLA students in 1982, grew to become a nonprofit and an annual, multi-day international film festival.

But after the 2023 festival, amid a host of challenges — including rising costs, a rollback of corporate support for LGBTQ causes, labor issues and conflict within the organization over mounting debt — Outfest was put on pause.

This year it’s back, in a new form — fittingly titled OutfestNEXT. And it’s not the same film festival you may remember, with more than 10 days of screenings in several theaters across L.A., though there are hopes to build back up to that.

“It is not the Outfest Los Angeles Film Festival [of the past], the big glitzy, almost overwhelming festival,” Outfest interim executive director Christopher Racster said. “This is an intimate, four-day screening series.”

The organization now has a new board, some staff members have been rehired and they’ve since formed a union that the nonprofit has recognized. Racster, who headed up Outfest from 2015 to 2019, was brought back on, and HBO Max, one of Outfest’s longtime sponsors, stepped up to sponsor a new, scaled-back iteration of Outfest this year.

“And what that does is sort of gives us a homecoming,” Racster said. “It really harkens back to our beginning, this intimate moment where people had a safe space to come together when they were facing opposition and persecution outside.”

The festival’s origins trace back to the early 1980s and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Today, the LGBTQ community, and transgender people in particular, are facing both new and familiar challenges — including the several executive orders issued by the Trump Administration this year that target trans people.

“Many of the films you'll see as a part of OutfestNEXT depict these issues that we are bucking up against, but it's not about trauma. It's: We can get through this and we can find and have joy,” Racster said.

One clear example of that from the screening series is the documentary We Are Pat. It reexamines “Pat,” the androgynous Saturday Night Live character, created and played by comedian and actress Julia Sweeney in the 1990s.

The documentary, directed by trans filmmaker Rowan Haber, features interviews with Sweeney herself, and several queer and trans comedians who explain what “Pat” means to them — whether they see the character as problematic or empowering — and engage in an experiment, to see if they can reimagine “Pat” for today.

“It did feel like a really kind of a fun task to try to reclaim Pat,” Haber said. “But do it in this humorous way. Because I think right now I think we all could use a dose of humor.”

The documentary’s inclusion in OutfestNEXT is a full circle moment for Haber, whose connection with the festival began with his participation in their screenwriting lab more than a decade ago.

“The fact that Outfest is coming back is really filling this hole that was left when it left,” Haber said. “I think that it's really important for us to have L.A.-based [festivals]. I mean, we're literally the capital of filmmaking [...] I'm excited for this version of it.”

Some highlights of what to expect from OutfestNEXT:

• A dramedy from filmmaker Yen Tan called All That We Love, starring Margaret Cho and Jesse Tyler Ferguson
• Bryan Fuller, who is known in the TV world for shows like Pushing Daisies and Hannibal is showing the first feature film he’s directed, called Dust Bunny, a sort of horror thriller starring Sigourney Weaver and Mads Mikkelsen
• There will also be a screening of Greg Berlanti’s The Broken Hearts Club, a romantic comedy that came out 25 years ago about a group of gay men in Hollywood

For the full slate of films and details about tickets for OutfestNEXT, click here.