Sapph-O-Rama Is the Lesbian Film Festival Sapphic Cinema Buffs Deserve

Thanks to the popularity of TV shows and movies like The L Word, Euphoria, Happiest Season, and Sex Education, the lesbian experience has, of late, enjoyed (fairly) robust representation onscreen. Yet that wasn’t always so; for far too long, lesbians (and other members of the LGBTQ+ community) saw their identities and relationships either ignored or played for cheap sitcom laughs. That context makes Film Forum’s new Sapph-O-Rama festival—a 30-film series that describes itself as “exploring the eccentric, enduring, and genre-encompassing history of the lesbian image in cinema”—feel not only timely but deeply necessary.

Sapph-O-Rama, which runs at Film Forum from February 2 to 13, is spotlighting lesbian classics, including Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996), Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle (1974), and Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004), along with many, many more films that even this self-identified queer film stan hadn’t heard of. 

Vogue recently spoke to Sapph-O-Rama co-curators Andrea Torres and Emily Greenberg about reviving an aughts-era idea in a distinctly 2024-appropriate way, sorting through the lesbian film canon in order to make their programming selections, and the future of queer cinema in New York City and beyond.

Vogue: What sparked the idea for Sapph-O-Rama?

Andrea Torres: Emily and I have the great pleasure of working together at Film Forum. She manages print traffic for the theater, and I lead publicity efforts for our programming. Because of that, we’ve had the unique privilege of access to the cinema’s archival material and, essentially, 50 years’ worth of historical records—records that include everything from printouts of disgruntled patron emails demanding butter at concessions, stacks of photos from Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I Film Forum premiere party 24 years ago, press binders with reviews of every film to ever open at the theater, original production notes, deadstock merch, and, most enticing, all of Film Forum’s program calendars dating back to Karen Cooper’s first show in 1974. One afternoon, we were rifling through repertory calendars and found one from the year 2000 with a series called Sapph-O-Rama on it.