Queer Cinema, A Blueprint For Community

June 22, 2026

I’ve spent most of my life frustrated. I think most queer people have. It’s a frustration that’s only evolved with adulthood. “You don’t get me,” I’d mutter under my breath while leaving a function. I understand that frustration, this late in life, can read as bitterness if it isn’t leveraged into motivation. But I was bitter, and frankly, at times still am.

I’m tired of existing in the subtext. Media either reduces our experiences to crumbs or oversensationalizes them, and that representation trickles down into every facet of life: family, education, work, and, unfortunately, the sharpest and sometimes deepest cut — social life. That escape, that connection, that potential fun night out is often hijacked by warped understanding, or a lack thereof. Spaces become segregated by false perceptions, exacerbating othering and exclusivity, and it’s felt. Sometimes I just want to watch a film or attend a party among a mosaic of identities and, hopefully, a community that understands me. Fortunately, that frustration became the driving force behind Cine Apartamento, a Los Angeles–based cinema collective turned nonprofit where queer narratives are the canon rather than “fringe” stories.

Words by Michael Anthony Hall
Photography by Ciara Mendez, Azha Ayanna Luckman, and Michael Anthony Hall

I’m tired of existing in the subtext. Media either reduces our experiences to crumbs or oversensationalizes them.

In late spring 2023, my partner, Ryan Luis Fuller, and I longed for a space where friends — and friends of friends — could watch queer independent and avant-garde films, followed by an open discussion. Think of a salon. It just happened to be our apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles, which could fit only 10 to 15 people. And so the programming began.

Guerrilla in spirit, we forwent screening rights and licenses in favor of bottles of wine — and then more bottles of wine (thank you Gia Coppola) — and sometimes tequila, lots of it. It wasn’t until Halloween 2024 that we brought Cine outside our apartment and secured proper screening rights. The film was Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult classic Ganja & Hess. The venue was Los Angeles designer Kwame Adusei’s showroom. That night confirmed what we had suspected: the budding community we’d been slowly building desired a space like this as much as we did. And that desire speaks to a much larger cultural conversation.

Over the last several years, as algorithms have replaced discernment and digital life has become the default, there’s been a collective yearning for community — real-life community. Cue the resurgence of the third space, or at least the ambition of one. “It’s nice to have something to do outside of the club, a place where we can gather as Black and Brown and queer folk,” Azha Ayanna Luckman shares with me over one of our standing matcha meetups.

Supper clubs, film collectives, chess nights, and the gamut of community gatherings have proven that in-person connection remains vital, not only for connection itself, but for being seen, truly seen. Craving an intimate evening of curated bites? Asia White’s Suppa Club has you covered. Want to nerd out while stargazing, maybe with jazz playing in the background? Bobby Cabbagestalk’s Star Party Silverlake is the perfect place. Interested in discovering underseen Latino cinema? Mariana Silva’s El Cine is cultivating a vibrant community of moviegoers. And the list goes on.

There’s a hunger for connection. The challenge is being of service to your community, which requires resilience, care, and genuine passion, qualities that must undercut aesthetics, self-service, and optics.

There’s a hunger for connection.

After Cine Apartamento’s Ganja & Hess screening in the fall of 2024, our then-burgeoning cinema collective reached a turning point. In May 2025, Cine once again emerged from our apartment living room, this time for a curated evening of experimental short films by emerging queer filmmakers at Human Resources Los Angeles. It became a pivotal moment in how we would show up for our community, creating monthly nomadic programming, never compromising our vision of showcasing queer cinema.

And the journey ensued. In September 2025, we partnered with the art and architecture nonprofit Materials & Applications to present Glances in Plain Sight, a short film program and archival video loop showcased alongside Strat Coffman and Adam Barrett Miller’s installation Trade Safe Chastity Box, an interactive architectural device that reimagines architectures of surveillance. In December, we premiered a restoration of Isao Fujisawa’s 1974 film Bye Bye Love at Now Instant. The new year brought us to Eastwood PAC for a rare screening of Patrik-Ian Polk’s hilariously relatable and deeply underseen 2000 debut feature, Punks. An instant audience favorite, it also cemented its place in my Letterboxd top four.

Among the more traditional short film programs, art activations, and film screenings, we’ve been able to create programs rooted in community care and education. At the end of February, we fundraised for vendors impacted by ICE in collaboration with Koreatown's Rapid Response Network and the film collective Apparatus, screening Lizzie Borden’s 1983 feature Born in Flames. Another program that expanded the imagination of what we could create was Traces Between, a beautiful poetry night at Plot, where seven artists and writers responded to Shuli Huang’s short film Will You Look at Me, winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2022. And these are only some of the programs, to name a few.

As we come off of celebrating our third anniversary, where scenes of friends dancing and watching Julián Hernández’s Young Man at the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve, stay imprinted on my mind, I sit back and reflect not only on what we’ve been able to cultivate, but also on how the importance of community sits at the core for so many. Something AI can’t replicate or reproduce.

It’s a feeling I return to often when thinking about queer cinema and the spaces it makes possible. For as long as queer people have sought one another out in darkened theaters, community has been woven into the experience of watching and sharing these stories. Creating space for queer voices has always felt inseparable from creating space for one another, especially when the frontlines of so many social and cultural movements have been shaped by the legacies of queer people across generations.

For as long as queer people have sought one another out in darkened theaters, community has been woven into the experience of watching and sharing these stories.

As I write this, our most recent program, which happened to coincide with Pride — a screening of the 1983 documentary Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts, followed by a conversation with curator, filmmaker, and archivist Semaj Peltier, founder of Films for Horses, and myself — has one central idea resting at the forefront of my mind: reclaiming the queer narrative. In an effort to become the authors of their own lived experiences, a collective of filmmakers came together to create a kaleidoscopic collage of interviews with straight bystanders on sexuality, accounts of queer life, and political imagery that juxtaposed their material realities with the rise of fascism under Margaret Thatcher. In the face of oppression, community prevailed. It’s a sentiment that echoes through every effort to forge a connection.

When you don’t feel seen or understood, the desire for community can become insatiable. While the internet has connected the world and given everyone access to one another, genuine, real-life interaction continues to become harder to find. Amid the noise and countless attempts to establish a connection online, showing up, even when it inconveniences you, remains one of the most powerful tools we have. Sometimes it can be as simple as discovering a queer film alongside friends and soon-to-be friends at Cine Apartamento.

Culture

Luca Pronzato Launches Casa Ideale

June 10, 2026

Luca Pronzato and WE ARE ONA launch Casa Ideale, a new hospitality project that brings together talent from the worlds of art, gastronomy, and design. Based in Arles' Villa Bank, a historic property originally designed by Émile Sala in the 1970s, the residence is the first iteration of the project, which has been conceived as a series of high-end guest houses functioning as cultural living spaces. After years of collaboration with chefs and designers, Pronzato envisioned Casa Ideale as a way of living where culture becomes an intrinsic part of everyday life. The space is a distinctive blend of minimalist staging and uniquely designed pieces.

The property will officially open in July during the first week of the "Rencontres de la Photographie" festival with an inaugural exhibition titled "Prologue", which has been curated in partnership with Fondazione Sozzani. It will feature 67 photographs from Carla Sozzani's personal collection.

Text by JohnOswald Crichton
Photography by Laurent Giannesini

Culture

Iconic New York Corners on Prada Mode

June 09, 2026

Danish film director, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Japanese video game creator, Hideo Kojima, are worlds away, but their friendship transcends distance, language barriers, and even time. Building off of last year’s exhibition of the same title, Satellites II expands on human connection and communication. As a project of Prada Mode, — a contemporary cultural series bridging diverse audiences and luminaries — the city’s historic hot spots transform into immersive, engaging galleries.

During the initial private days, Prada Mode welcomes its members-club to talks, workshops, performances, parties, screenings hosted in The Hotel Chelsea. The following days open to the public, with four additional iconic New York corners acting as site-specific installations. As an immersive cosmic voyage about communication and connection, Satellites II bridges culture to foreign spaces.

The Hotel Chelsea makes a perfect location to narrate a reflection on public, domestic, and intimate environments, balancing private spaces and collective accessibility. Perhaps Refn and Kojima could have been strangers in a shared lobby space, but as fate would have it, the two share a friendship that isn’t deterred by cultural nuances, foreign dialects, or tens of thousands of miles. Their collaboration is one rooted in pure creativity, not bound by technicalities such as language but encouraged by raw feeling. Together, their dialogue explores the shared fundamental need to create and the failure encoded in the process of creation, experiences that define humanity and our approach to art.

As the city’s beacon for the aspiring creative community and symbol of cultural intersection, the hotel hosts the two day series of exclusive programming. Programming features the Prada Mode Channel, a bespoke broadcast in the vein of a cable station. In collaboration with journalist and TV-host, Mikael Bertelsen, the variety of programs invoke analog television troupes from talk shows to horoscopes to music performances. The channel acts as a portal to Satellites II, reiterating the 1970s-80s as a potent element to American culture. As a similar homage, a screening curated by the two will display three cult classics Japanese anime films at the Angelika Film Center during one of the following days open for the public.

Satellites II continued on-site for public view at The Hotel Chelsea, Prada Broadway, and Kat’z Delicatessen. Two futuristic television stands depict Refn and Kojima, who are in conversation. A huge chrome Prada vending machine glows white light and gifts guests exclusive Prada Mode merchandise. At Kat'z Deli, guests also receive a treat from Juno the Bakery, a Copenhagen delicacy (Refn's home country). During the exclusive first night, Kat'z Deli flipped over the tables to reveal a dancefloor lit by the restaurant's neon signs. The multiday event blended public spaces with private exclusivity, not hindering the flow of the space’s intended market but honoring human entanglement. The creative installations bypass origin and intention, place and time, such as the historic spaces they were held in.

Hideo Kojima, Sophie Thatcher, Nicolas Winding Refn

Culture

Berlin Night After Glow Documents The Rawness of Post-Nightlife Faces

Berlin nightlife is less about places and parties than about the human beings who create them. I wanted to capture not just who these people are, but who nightlife allows them to be.

Noltekuhlmann’s photography book, Berlin Night After Glow, is all about capturing hedonism in its rawest form. His aim is never to pose his subjects, but to allow the liminality of such an experience to expose itself in the shape of facial expression and body language. The Los Angeles and Berlin-based photographer pictured more than 350 people immediately after raving and clubbing in Berlin. Some were overcome with emotion or exhaustion, and others were overcome with euphoria or vulnerability. The states of mind pictured in these images are residual signs of nights fully lived.

Brought forth by Kehrer Verlag, Berlin Night After Glow is a book that shows us just how ritualistic and how sacred acts like dancing and partying can be. They are experiences that heighten emotions, blood flow, and connection with the self all at once. They prompt fashion choices that are “fetish-inspired” and disrupt traditional gender norms. These byproducts are all inevitable ones, because to surrunder your body to the art of the party is also to let go of the inhibitions that stump the emergence of our true selves in our day-to-day lives.