April 16 is National Canadian Film Day, founded to support and uplift Canada’s vast and excellent movie scene. In a typical effort to queer the conversation, we asked Xtra staff and contributors to select their favourite LGBTQ2S+ Canadian film. Here are their choices and where you can stream them in Canada.

Lilies (1996)

Where to watch: The Criterion Channel

Released in 1996, John Greyson’s Lilies is an unusual yet stunningly beautiful adaptation of a Quebec play that came at the height of the New Queer Cinema movement. The film is a play within a play, set in a Quebec prison in 1952, with flashbacks to Roberval, Quebec, in 1912. Because it’s a play set in a prison, all of the women’s roles are played by male prisoners. It’s a tale of queer love, obsession and loss; of suffocation by the church, the cruelty of being an outsider in a small town and literal torment. There are attempted escapes, both physical and mental. The beauty in the romance transcends it all. The film was recently restored by Criterion, and is perhaps the finest example of queer Canadian film to date.

—Dale Smith, political columnist

Someone Like Me (2021)

Where to watch: National Film Board

This 2021 documentary follows the story of Drake, a young gay man who comes to Vancouver as a refugee from Uganda—and a group of LGBTQ2S+ Canadians who are sponsoring him through the organization Rainbow Refugee. What could easily turn out to be a film filled with feel-good nationalism and Western-saviour narratives handily resists those tropes. We watch as a large group of sponsors goes through the sponsorship steps, from choosing an applicant to partner with, to raising the money to bring him to Canada, to picking him up at the airport and the year-long settlement process that follows. The group of sponsors quickly dwindles as participants learn that Drake isn’t a blank canvas that others can project their assumptions and beliefs onto: when he wants to party, for example, it causes tension with some of the sponsors. The documentary grapples plainly with just how difficult it can be to settle in Canada—and how factors like the housing crisis, low wages and the country’s pandemic response affect everyone, no matter how long they’ve lived here.

—Ziya Jones, senior editor, health

Something You Said Last Night (2022)

Where to watch: Crave

I left Luis De Filippis’s Something You Said Last Night awestruck. The director’s debut feature follows Ren (Carmen Madonia), a 20-something trans woman on vacation with her family in Ontario’s cottage country. I’ve watched a lot of trans films in this line of work, but this is a different sort of trans film.

As I wrote in my review from the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, what’s so revolutionary about Something You Said Last Night is what’s not depicted. It is absent of trauma, of coming-outs or of any of the clichés found in so many depictions of trans people on screen. Instead, it is a quiet and small film about a family, their dynamics with each other and what it means to care for one another. It is a trans story that’s not a trans story, and, to be honest, it’s almost frustrating how revolutionary it felt.

Something You Said Last Night also changed Canada’s film industry for trans people behind the screen. The film was one of the first productions under the Trans Film Mentorship, co-founded by De Filippis, that works to pair emerging trans and gender-diverse filmmakers with productions. Something tells me that over the coming decade we’ll be drawing a lot of direct lines from this film and the next young generation of trans filmmakers it opened the doors for.

—Mel Woods, senior editor, audience engagement

No Ordinary Man (2020)

Where to watch: CBC Gem

When I was growing up, before I had out trans people in my life—and before there were out trans people and characters represented well in the media—trans identity was a thing of daytime talk shows and tabloids. A person would be “found out” to be “the opposite” gender at the time of a car accident, their death or some other shocking revelation.

This happens in the true story of American jazz musician Billy Tipton (1914–1989), documented in No Ordinary Man. Directed by Chase Joynt and Aisling Chin-Yee and written by Chin-Yee and Amos Mac (the only American of the group), this 2020 documentary tells the story of Tipton’s career and personal life, through archival photos, an interview with Tipton’s son Billy Tipton Jr. and interviews with trans writers, artists and scholars including Thomas Page McBee, Kate Bornstein, Susan Stryker and Zackary Drucker.

Throughout the film, transmasculine actors audition for the role of Tipton, discussing their own relationship to their shared identity through the process. Most compelling, to me, is the journey Tipton Jr. goes on, from having heard of his father referred to as a liar and a fraud, to understanding his iconic status in the lives of trans people today. We hear the refrain “Trans people have always existed” often these days—No Ordinary Man shows one example of that truth.

—Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, managing editor

Close to You (2023)

Where to watch: Crave

I watched Close to You at the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago. Toronto transit was (naturally) running late that day, so I had to sprint from the subway station to the theatre so I wouldn’t be late for the screening. I sat in the very front row because that’s all that was left and sat down just as the movie began. I craned my neck upward and watched the film and felt, as if for the first time, that I was watching myself.

Close to You follows Sam, played immaculately by Elliot Page, as he returns to his suburban hometown for the first time since transitioning. Tensions simmer, pulsate, then explode as he grapples with his family over wounds old and new. I often self-identify as a Gay Kid from the Suburbs, so I can say with confidence that Close to You masterfully captures what it feels like to be a strange person from a suffocating place.

After the screening, Page spoke about the film. He revealed that much of the movie’s sparring, intricate dialogue was improvised. I reconsidered what I had just seen through this lens and came to the following conclusion: Close to You is not a meticulously choreographed drama; it’s a poem drawn from the bones of its actors.

—KC Hoard, associate editor, culture