The strictures of family and class stand between two young men and their humble dreams of happiness in an assured directorial debut from Rohan Kanawade

Here is a really impressive directorial debut from Mumbai film-maker Rohan Kanawade: tender, subtle, candid, scrupulously observed. It is a story of forbidden and unacknowledged love, or maybe semi-forbidden and semi-unacknowledged, and an emotional flowering that reveals the oppressive importance of family, status and class.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) is a 30-year-old Mumbai call-centre worker who must return to his remote home village when his father dies, where he is expected to stay for the full 10-day mourning period, an absence for which he must grovellingly apologise to his boss over the phone. His dad’s final words, incidentally, were that he wanted his wife Suman (Jayshri Jagtap) to cook him a really nice meal, and the poignancy of that request is cleverly revealed by Kanawade in the later scene in which Anand’s elderly, blind grandfather reminisces about why he agreed to marry the lowly and uneducated Suman in the first place.

A trio of actors play one woman from high school to her mid-30s in Tracy Choi’s thoughtful romantic drama

It can stretch credibility a little when an actor plays the same character over a long time span in one film. Richard Linklater solved the problem in Boyhood by shooting scenes over succeeding years; AI and de-ageing effects are now an option. With this intimate queer coming-of-age drama, film-maker Tracy Choi instead casts a trio of actors to play one woman from high school to her mid-30s. The three don’t look particularly alike; their temperaments overlap but are by no means identical. The point is perhaps to show how intense the transitions into adulthood are, how unrecognisable are the people we used to be.

Working backwards, Girlfriends begins in Hong Kong, where 34-year-old film director Lok (Fish Liew) lives with her actor girlfriend Bei (Jennifer Yu). Five years earlier, Choi released a feature film, but her career has stalled. She is directionless and restless. Bei is also applying pressure to buy a flat and have a baby. The film then rewinds 12 years, to Taiwan, when Lok was a student with spiky orange hair, known as Choi (played by Elizabeth Tang). Some of the best scenes in the film come when her parents visit from Macau; Choi and her girlfriend Qing (Han Ning) have been pretending to be flatmates. Then, as the four of them eat dinner one night, unwilling to keep up the charade, Choi grabs Qing’s hand fiercely over the dinner table. She is coming out to her parents; they understand but say nothing. Another film might give us a big showdown, but this is probably how it would have happened in real life.

From gymnasts in kitten heels to lovers stalked by a devil, Pieter Henket’s dazzling portrait series, Birds of Mexico City, can feel like being in ‘a museum where the art comes alive’

Federal judge says ex-ranger, who sued US government over free speech, must follow process in Civil Service Reform Act

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a former Yosemite national park ranger who was fired after flying a giant transgender pride flag from a rock wall that looms over the California park’s main thoroughfare.

US district judge Jennifer Thurston found on Friday that Shannon “SJ” Joslin, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, must follow the process set out by the Civil Service Reform Act. Since Joslin was still a probationary employee at the time of their firing last year, that means they must file a complaint with the office of special counsel, which they have done.

Rochford LGBTQ+ community say Reform council’s ban on flying pride flags or holding events states they’re not welcome

Before Reform gained control of Essex county council in the May elections, Chris Taylor and members of the Rochford LGBTQ+ community already felt they were witnessing a growing tide of political rhetoric around identity.

But they were still shocked when the county’s new leadership moved to ban Pride events in 74 libraries, scaling back events of “any particular groups or themes”, a decision they said was “straight out of Trumpland”.

He challenged homophobia not through sexualised imagery but by reshaping ideas of beauty, intimacy and desire. The result? From posters to cushion covers, A Bigger Splash has become an essential presence in countless gay households

• ‘He changed the world just by looking at it’

• Obituary: David Hockney

Six decades after David Hockney painted A Bigger Splash, his most famous painting, reproductions have become a visual motif in gay domestic life. I’ve seen framed posters, prints and postcards of the work – which captures the moment after a person jumps off a diving board into an otherwise still cyan blue swimming pool – in countless gay households. In my flat, it appears on a cushion cover that I bought after seeing the real thing at Hockney’s 2017 Tate Britain retrospective.

It’s fitting that A Bigger Splash is now emblematic of this pioneer. As an out gay artist who depicted same-sex desire in his work long before male homosexuality was partly decriminalised in England and Wales, Hockney and his paintings challenged the homophobia within the artistic establishment and beyond. And he did so not through the use of highly sexualised imagery, like the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, or with the activist themes of painter Keith Haring, but by reshaping our ideas of beauty, intimacy and desire. That’s how he made the biggest splash.

Be Seen is an archival photographic project by Anna Hay and Sophie Willison exploring how LGBTQIA+ lives are shaped through memory, identity and relationship to place. The series celebrates the diversity and lived experiences of queer people connected to the North Sydney council LGA on the lands of the Cammeraygal people

• Commissioned by North Sydney council as part of Pride Month 2026, the exhibition of portraits runs from 15–30 June at In Transit gallery, North Sydney, NSW

‘This is the one time of year people feel they can truly show who they are,’ says one festival attendee

Tens of thousands of people have poured into central Seoul to celebrate the city’s annual queer culture festival, filling the streets with rainbow flags and drumming troupes in one of Asia’s largest Pride gatherings.

“I only tell friends who I think can accept it,” said Lee Seo-hee, a university student from Seoul who identifies as bisexual. “It doesn’t feel like a completely safe society.”

In today’s newsletter: With violent crime declining but hate crime increasing, a look at what we can all do to make our shared spaces safer

Good morning. Who is safe on Britain’s streets? Two acts of gross violence – the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton and the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast – have been ruthlessly exploited by the far-right and now the spaces we all share are contested.

It is an entirely human response to feel unsafe when we watch a clip of an assailant wielding a knife over his victim, or police officers handcuffing a distressed, dying young man. Much as it is when we see ethnic minority families fleeing burning homes in Belfast, or a menacing crowd in Glasgow setting about black people as they pass.

Middle East | The US launched new strikes against targets in Iran for the second consecutive day after Donald Trump promised to “hit them hard again” as a two-month-old ceasefire appears close to collapse.

UK politics | Keir Starmer’s closest aides are “war-gaming” how to win a leadership contest ahead of Andy Burnham’s much-anticipated return to Westminster if he wins the Makerfield byelection, the Guardian understands.

Belfast | Elon Musk’s X will face no action to remove a mass of posts inciting violence in Northern Ireland for at least two months, despite widespread condemnation of the platform and its billionaire owner.

Environment | Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown.

UK news | One of the government’s key contractors has launched an investigation into allegations of racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate speech among staff working in immigration removal centres, the Guardian has learned.

James Bidgood’s experimental DIY movie, first released in 1971, starred Bobby Kendall and was shot mostly in Bidgood’s own apartment

James Bidgood’s experimental homoerotic reverie is now reissued in restored form. The film was shot mostly in Bidgood’s own New York apartment throughout the 1960s; it was finally released in 1971 with Bidgood’s name removed from the credits after an opaque dispute with his backers and his authorship only revealed 20 years later.

Pink Narcissus is a movie of garish colour, mute melodrama and dreamlike imagery which mimics early cinema, perhaps simply because the resources for recording lip-sync dialogue were not available. (The director says that Powell and Pressburger’s Red Shoes was an inspiration although the title alludes more to their nun melodrama Black Narcissus.) It interestingly merges its rather pastoral fantasies with the urban circumstances where these would be consumed – the city’s movie theatres, outside which poverty and alienation were commonplace. Some of the most interesting and successful parts of the piece are the radio soundscapes and the modelled neon skylines.