#coming-of-age

#coming-of-age

For queer people, this tends to be a bittersweet experience. While we all develop our first serious crushes around the same time in adolescence, society has made it harder for us to openly lean into them, or even express them out loud. Without a supportive environment, teen crushes can become more confusing, painful, and filled with shame; sometimes even dangerous.

The bildungsroman is the coming-of-age novel; it is also the coming-to-terms novel. The protagonist, usually a young man, undergoes a series of adventures that eventually spit him out wiser, stronger, set up for life's journey.

Camille becomes morbidly obsessed with the purely psychosomatic pain in his arm that prevents him from boxing properly, to the rage of his coach and teammates.

"Why did you do that, sweetheart?" encapsulates the central theme of Blue Heron, as Sasha's actions prompt her parents to question the unpredictable behavior of her half-brother Jeremy.

In the spring of 1945, word of the Second World War's impending end has reached the residents of Amrum, an island off the coast of Germany.

In 2015, Life Is Strange stood out for its female protagonists and unique millennial cringe, capturing the essence of coming-of-age stories through character relationships.

The new Spanish language series Dear Killer Nannies manages to find a new and unexpected way into the life of an archetypal villain, focusing very little on the bloodshed that has made his life so ripe for movies and television.

The Sonoma Film Festival will offer a dozen queer features, documentaries, and shorts, showcasing diverse narratives and perspectives within the LGBTQ+ community.

After members of the St. Cassian High School chamber choir perish while riding The Cyclone, they awake in limbo. Their spirit guide (a mechanical fortune teller automaton named The Amazing Karnak) invites each one to tell their life story in an effort to win the greatest prize of all, a chance to return.

Nineteen-year-old Mabel Tanaka has always used nature as a means of calming her volatile emotions, decompressing in the silence of the placid pond near her house with her beloved grandmother by her side. But as Mabel grows from a sullen teen to a young adult, her coping mechanisms fall away one by one. Her parents move away, her grandmother dies, and the pond, the last stable place in her life, is deserted by the wildlife that once gave her so much comfort, and scheduled to be paved over for a new highway.

After spotting that Eli's rash guard conceals a red, flaky skin disorder, the boys have concluded that he has the titular plague, a contagious disease that affects social standing as much as it does dermatological well-being. If anyone ever touches him, they must thoroughly wash themselves before they're considered full-blown infected. Even something as innocent as Eli sitting at the same lunch table sends his teammates running and screaming.

For as much as gays love their horror, and as many examples there are of the genre finding its haunting power through queer metaphor (from the scary subtleties of Psycho to the screamingly obvious A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge), there are relatively few mainstream horror films that actually tackle LGBTQ+ themes head-on. However, after a rapturous reception at the Sundance Film Festival, Australian supernatural fright flick Leviticus was quickly picked up for theatrical release by Neon and might just be the " queer horror masterpiece " we've been waiting for.

There's a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station 's Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she's recently moved to a place simply called "the City" from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she's an avid writer. But these biographical details aren't the important thing; it's the way she's painted by the game's incredibly sharp writing where I start to feel uncomfortably seen.

What do you get when you cross an all-women dance troupe with a rebellion against Catholicism and erotic '90s thrillers? Something supremely queer, I hope. In the words of Ayo Edebri: I'm simply too seated. This is The Body, a new Netflix psychodrama from queer writer-director and Blame actress Quinn Shephard, starring none other than The Traitors ' sapphic supreme, Gabby Windey (plus a host of other very talented stars) Announced back in October, the eight-part show is set to further the fascination with "raunchy" coming-of-age, sports-ish series when it's released later this year, and with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge approach to religion, too.

It's hard to ignore a film's message when the main character is addressing you directly down the barrel of the camera. Granted, the first time I watched the 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller's Day Off, I was the impressionable age of 11 and Look people in the eyes when they're talking to you was on constant rotation in my household. So my green eyes met Ferris's brown ones and I took it all in.

It was his aside that spoiled the secret identity of Santa Claus; he who laughingly revealed the mechanics of sex; he who gave me my first sip of beer. Yet, when he found out I was sneaking cigarettes from my dad's stale dinner party supply, he chastised me before either of my parents could, and when my mum was diagnosed with cancer and I was just 15, he was already a 22-year-old medical student.

Bouncing through the year 1987 under a cloud of weed and Lou Reed, wannabe travel essayist James suffers a reality check when his dad's demotion means that the family can no longer fund a planned European jolly with his best mate, Eric. Faced with an empty summer before studying at Columbia University, the Charles Darwin acolyte manages to bag himself a job at the titular theme park, where amusement stations are inexplicably slapped with names like the Flighing Dutchman.

With only a knife, some food, water, and a sleeping roll, Kat Pringle headed into Nevada's rugged White Mountains alone. She was barely a teenager, but it was her turn to spend the night - to survive - on her own, as part of a coming-of-age initiation dreamed up by her father, who ruled over his family with a mix of ideology and impossible expectations.

After a tragic loss, college dropout Emily (Zola Grimmer) is desperate for some distance in , the sophomore feature from 22-year-old writer-director Avalon Fast. While her father (Michael Tan) is patient and supportive, the comfort of returning home only seems to make Emily regress into a volatile depression. On a lark of sorts, he suggests that she apply to work as a counselor at a summer camp deep in the Canadian wilderness.

Earlier this month, I kept picking up and putting down Lily King's new novel, Heart the Lover. I love King's writing but the opening section was hard for me to take not in a grisly Cormac McCarthy or scary Stephen King kind of way but in an "Ugh, I remember being that girl, that age" kind of way. Heart the Lover opens in a college class of the 1980s.

The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it's all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone's university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.

LUNA's music resonates deeply as it explores the journey of coming of age in one's early twenties. She navigates self-discovery, queer identity, and mental health, all while reflecting on the places that have significantly influenced her life. Her ability to encapsulate the bittersweet essence of formative moments, those experiences that exist in the delicate balance between euphoria and pain, makes her an artist unlike any other.

Out of Words is made from clay, fabric, and glue: a love story literally crafted by hand that even caught the attention of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima (The biggest praise we could imagine, game director Johan Oettinger says.) Oettinger dreamed of making a stop-motion video game since he was 12, when he first played 90s point-and-click claymation game The Neverhood.