Tijuana, still to compete for Queer Lion at Venice Film Festival

The Mexican film ‘Tijuana, still’ (Tijuana, Todavía) has been selected for the 83rd Venice Film Festival as part of the Biennale College Cinema program. The film is competing for the Queer Lion award, which recognizes films featuring LGBT+ themes and characters.

Directed by Gabriel Gutiérrez Morales and produced by Humberto Busto, the film was developed and shot within a ten-month window on a budget of approximately €200,000. The narrative is set in the border town of Tijuana and follows the connection between two men from different generations and backgrounds: Chava, a middle-aged gay man living in Mexico, and Maksim, a young queer Russian man who has fled his country to avoid military service during the war in Ukraine.

The film explores themes of migration, exile, and the challenges of displacement. Morales stated that the project aims to represent queer experiences in a way that avoids repetitive tropes or reducing characters to mere victims, using the geopolitical realities of the border to address broader social and political issues.