This year’s festival looks set to be 30% bigger than last year, with 53 features and 67 shorts.

The 26th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (LLGFF) will open with Thom Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst starring Olympia Dukanis and Brenda Fricker as a pair of 70 something lesbians.

Bavo Defume’s debut feature North Sea Texas about a boy who falls in love with the boy next door, will close the festival, which runs March 23-April 1.

Centrepiece presentations include Marco Berger’s Absent about a pupil who schemes to get close to a teacher and Maryam Keshavarz’s US/Iran/Lebanon drama Circumstance, about a lesbian love set in Teheran.

The programme also features controversial documentary Love Free or Die about the only openly gay bishop in the world, the revealing true story of the “American Bowie” Jobriath A.D. and The Perfect Family starring Kathleen Turner as a woman struggling with her own religious beliefs and belief in her lesbian daughter.

British filmmaker Pratibha Parmar will present a special work-in-progress screening of her project on author and activist Alice Walker, Beauty in Truth.

With 53 features and 67 shorts, this year’s Festival, which takes place at the BFI Southbank, looks set to be 30% bigger than last year.

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