Desert Hearts” was the first lesbian movie that didn’t involve a love triangle with a man, or end in tragedy. It’s all there in this exclusive clip: The sensuality, the magnetic connection, thepoetic pillow talkabout how many breaths onetakes in a minute and how to drive home without getting lost. There is little data, and there has been no large-scale collection of testimony, so it is almost impossible to get an accurate picture of their lives. The setting is a damp and nearly empty manor house on an island in Brittany, the part of France that bears the closest resemblance to England. Stepping lightly into fraught territory, they must contend with small-town busybodies and the judgment of their conservative society.

Difficult and mysterious, Lucy is Syd’s window into her glamorous world of eccentric bohemian artists. There, to stave off the advances of one of the boys attending, Courtney makes a show of kissing Amy right in front of everyone.If you’re in Bujumbura, you’re lucky, because you have the internet and you can try to look for others like you out in the world. What she discovered was that there is a shorthand, a secret code, that local lesbian women use to reach out to each other. The star-crossed romance follows two teens, Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) and Ziki (Sheila Munyiva), who fall in love despite their families’ political rivalry. There is not a single film that captures a more universal queer childhood experience than Céline Sciamma’s “Tomboy,” a quietly gorgeous portrait of a 10-year-old named Laure who moves to a new town and introduces herself as Mikael.

That makes it a rare window into this iconic directing duo, andone that LGBT viewers have proudly embraced into the fold. Shut out by a home country that stubbornly refuses to honor its great women filmmakers, the film itself stands ablaze in defiance of — and in glaring contradiction to — the dominance of men. They could protect her while she was in the family home, but they could not guarantee her safety outside if the wrong people found out. Which is exactly why when Cheryl Dunye cast herself as a documentarian in her feature debut, this clever meta-theatrical device added another layer to what still would have been a charming micro-budget love story.When it came out in 1999, it was the final gasp of the New Queer Cinema, a bridge between the indies that brought the first wave of gay stories to the screen and the post-Ellen era that paved the way for more commercial fare like “The L Word. When she talks to Tina about it, her roommate decides to cheer Kelly up…with a scorching first lesbian sex experience! Gay people become self-reflective early; you become acutely aware of the world around you by observing your place outside of it. With sweeping visuals and multiple complex female characters, thestaying power of this historic film cannot be denied.