The best Thai queer movies of all time

Director: Pisan Akaraseranee
1985 cast: Somying Daorai, Jirawadee Isarangkul Na Ayudhaya
2006 cast: Aisawanya Amm Areyawattana, Wacharakorn Waiyasin, Nirut Sirichanya

Rare is the film so significant that the same director returns two decades later to remake it with a new transgender actress in the lead. Pleng Soodtai – The Last Song – exists in two principal versions, and both matter.

The story is the same in each. Somying is a beautiful, celebrated showgirl at Pattaya's famed Tiffani Show cabaret, a woman who has sworn off love and cannot quite keep that promise. When she falls for Bunterm, a young singer who turns out to be in love with her sister Orathai, the film does what Thai cinema of the era tended to do with queer characters: it makes the heartbreak devastating, then refuses to let her survive it.

Director Pisan Akaraseranee built the 1985 original after sitting with real transgender showgirls and listening to their lives. That the story needed telling was clear; that it cast a real transgender actress, Somying Daorai, gave mainstream Thai cinema something it had almost never offered: a queer character whose humanity the film genuinely cared about. The melodrama and the tragic ending are of their time. The tenderness underneath is something else.

By the time Akaraseranee returned to the same story in 2006 with Aisawanya Areyawattana in the lead, Thai society had shifted just enough for the remake to feel less like a conservative compromise and more like a reclamation – the same heartbreak, held differently. Aisawanya later went on to star in Patong Girl and won international recognition. Both versions are worth seeking out, read together as a before-and-after of where queer Thai cinema had been and where it was beginning to go.

Director: Youngyooth Thongkonthun
Cast: Jesdaporn Pholdee, Sahaphap Tor, Ekachai Buranapanit, Kokkorn Benjathikoon, Shiriohana Hongsopon

The one that brought Thai cinema back to life. Based on the astonishing true story of a men's volleyball team made up of gay players, kathoey performers, a cross-dressing army sergeant and a tomboy coach who won the Thai national championship in 1996, The Iron Ladies  wasn’t just a hit. It was the highest-grossing Thai release of 2000, and is widely credited with helping spark the revival of the entire Thai film industry.

Mon and Jung are talented players who have spent years being turned away from teams for being queer. When Coach Bee opens tryouts to everyone, they build a squad that includes Nong, who ducks behind the court to touch up his foundation; Pia, a transgender cabaret star with more stage presence than most professional athletes; and Wit, whose parents don't yet know he is gay. Together, they face down not just opposing teams and match officials who want them disqualified for existing.

It's frequently hilarious, occasionally campy and smart enough to know the difference. The film doesn't avoid the discrimination its characters face; it refuses to let that define them. It took a Teddy Award Special Mention in Berlin. In Thailand, it won something even more important: a massive mainstream audience that walked out having rooted, wholeheartedly, for a team of queer athletes. Streaming on Netflix.

Director: Ekachai Uekrongtham
Cast: Asanee Suwan

One of the most striking sporting biopics ever made in Southeast Asia. The story of Nong Toom – a transgender Muay Thai fighter from rural Thailand who became a champion in the ring while saving her prize money for gender-affirming surgery – could have been told in many ways, most of them exploitative. Ekachai Uekrongtham chooses grace.

Asanee Suwan delivers a performance that swept the festival circuit: physically extraordinary, emotionally honest and fully committed. We see Nong Toom training through childhood poverty, fighting in full make-up, dismantling opponents while flowers are woven into her hair and navigating a world that wanted the spectacle of her but not the reality. There's a quiet moment where she watches other women move through the world with an ease she can only imagine, and it stays with you long after the final bell.

For 2003 – for any year, frankly – a mainstream Asian film centring a transgender protagonist with this level of care was remarkable. Beautiful Boxer asks its audience not just to admire Nong Toom's athletic talent but to understand her, and it succeeds. A landmark of Thai queer cinema and an essential sports film.

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cast: Banlop Lomnoi, Sakda Kaewbuadee

The one that won Cannes and baffled everyone, including, allegedly, a few members of the jury. Apichatpong's Jury Prize winner is two films stitched together at the middle, and the seam is deliberately visible.

In the first half, soldier Keng falls tenderly for a village boy named Tong. It is gentle, sun-dappled and a little awkward in the way a new attraction always is. Then the film does something wild: it ends. A second film begins – or continues; it is not entirely clear which – as a soldier stalks a spirit-tiger through the jungle at night, and Thai folktale and queer desire become the same thing.

Shot in long, meditative takes that dare you to fidget, Tropical Malady repays patience and punishes the hunt for conventional narrative. It ran in Thai cinemas for ten days before being pulled. Internationally, it became the film that established Apichatpong as one of the most important filmmakers in the world. Whether it is a love story, a myth or both, it remains an experience: dense, strange and revelatory.

Director: Chookiat Sakveerakul
Cast: Witwisit Hiranyawongkul, Mario Maurer, Sinjai Plengpanich, Kanya Rattanapetch

The one that swept every major Thai film award in 2007 while the marketing quietly tried to sell it as a straightforward teen romance. The posters showed two boys and two girls. The film itself – all 150 minutes of it – centred an unambiguous, deeply felt love story between two young men, and Thai audiences showed up in enormous numbers anyway.

Mew and Tong were childhood neighbours who drifted apart after Tong's sister went missing and his family collapsed inward with grief. Years later, they find each other again near Siam Square, both carrying losses they haven’t fully named. Mew is a serious music student, composing pop songs after his grandmother's death. Tong is the handsome, popular boy going through the motions of a life that doesn't quite fit. The film takes its time – luxuriously, sometimes maddeningly – with the space between them.

Chookiat Sakveerakul's debut feature didn’t just make history by depicting a same-sex kiss in mainstream Thai cinema. It won Best Picture at every major Thai award ceremony that year, including Thailand’s equivalent of the Oscars. Queerness, for once, wasn’t a footnote or a subplot. It was the whole point, wrapped inside a family drama tender enough to disarm audiences before they knew what had happened. A cultural timestamp that a generation still carries.

Director: Sarasawadee Wongsompetch
Cast: Sucharat Aom Manaying, Suppanad Tina Jittaleela

The campus romance that built an international fandom and, at least partly, a genre. Pie is conservative, a little uptight and deeply uncomfortable with her new university roommate Kim, a tomboyish woman whose clothes and confidence disrupt everything Pie thought she knew about attraction. There is tape on the floor dividing their dorm room. There is a very long pause before it comes down.

Director Sarasawadee Wongsompetch, who identifies as lesbian and brings visible warmth and specificity to the material, treats the tom-dee dynamic as simply how some people are rather than something exotic in need of explanation. That was radical for mainstream Thai cinema. Aom and Tina have a chemistry the film trusts completely, and the result is light on its feet, genuinely sweet and historically significant as the first explicitly lesbian Thai film to find mainstream commercial success.

It launched a franchise, made Tina Jittaleela famous across Asia and became, by many accounts, a first sapphic film for a generation of women across the region who finally found something made for them.

Director: Anocha Suwichakornpong
Cast: Phakpoom Surapongsanuruk, Arkaney Cherkam, Paramej Noiam

The Film at Lincoln Center called it the arrival of a bold new visionary in Thai cinema. The International Film Festival Rotterdam gave it the Tiger Award. The Thai Film Board gave it the country's most restrictive rating. All three responses tell you something true about Mundane History.

Anocha Suwichakornpong's feature debut is deceptively plain on the surface. Ake is a young man from a wealthy Bangkok family, paralysed from the waist down after an accident, confined to his father's house and furious about it. Pun is the nurse from the rural north hired to care for him – to wash him, dress him, sit with him through the long, airless days. At first, Ake is contemptuous. Gradually, something shifts. A connection forms between two men separated by class, health and everything Thai society has assigned them, and the film stubbornly refuses to let either of them stay in his assigned place.

Then Anocha blows her own film open. The cosmos intrudes. The death of stars. A c-section. Thai history. The edit turns aggressive and strange, the punk score by Malaysian band Furniture clashing against the household's airless stillness. What could have been a contained character study expands into something genuinely cosmic and irreducibly human at the same time.

Controversial in Thailand for its frank sexual content, celebrated everywhere else for being exactly what it was, this is one of the great overlooked entries in Thai queer cinema, and proof that the wave Apichatpong started had very capable hands to carry it forward.

Director: Tanwarin Sukkhapisit

Cast: Tanwarin Sukkhapisit, Nonpavit Dansriboon, Suchada Rojmanothum

This one still stings. Tanwarin Sukkhapisit's debut feature was banned by the Thai Culture Ministry's National Film Board for being ‘immoral’ – a decision that generated more international coverage than most Thai queer films receive in a decade, and said more about the government than the film.

Tanya, played by Sukkhapisit herself, is raising her teenage siblings Johnny and Jennifer in the absence of their parents. She chain-smokes, overdresses, worships Audrey Hepburn and is doing her absolute best in circumstances the state couldn’t care less about. As the three of them search for connection in their own fractured ways – through Internet hookups, shifting desires and complicated acts of survival – the film refuses to comfort either its characters or its audience.

What got it banned wasn’t really the explicitness. It was the seriousness. A gay comedy was acceptable. A film that treated queer lives as a genuine subject for drama, laced with political critique, was not. The Thai Film Archive has since registered it as a national film heritage, a belated reversal that says plenty about how far the cultural conversation has moved.

Director: Arunsak Ongla-or
Cast: Apinya Saiparn Sakuljaroensuk, Isabella Lete

The title is a law: Section 1448 of Thailand's Civil and Commercial Code, the clause that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. That wording stood for more than a century. This film spends 93 minutes making the case against it.

Pim meets Pat in Pai, the northern mountain town that attracts artists and drifters in roughly equal measure, and what starts as friendship becomes something more complicated, then more certain. They open a café together. They hold a wedding ceremony without Pat's parents there to witness it. Then Section 1448 closes in, in the most concrete and devastating way possible.

Apinya Sakuljaroensuk is a formidable screen presence under any circumstances, and she brings full weight to Pim's arc from romantic uncertainty to grief. The film isn't subtle about its politics – it is named after a law – but the performances keep it from becoming a pamphlet. It is a document of a specific historical moment, made when same-sex marriage felt distant and people were trying to change that one film at a time. The law has now changed. Films like this helped.