Holding ground through queer film.

Brief

Frameline is the largest and oldest queer film festival in the world, and each year they adopt a theme that weaves the two-week festival and hundreds of events together. In late 2024, we were asked to create a theme for Frameline49, scheduled for June 2025. As usual, the theme would need to reflect current events and conversations around the queer community.

Audience

While Frameline is physically centered in San Francisco, it is beloved and streamed across much of the world and touches many generations – from those who have been fighting for equality for decades to the youngest generations growing up in a world that feels easier in some ways, but can never be taken for granted.

Opportunity

When the U.S. political climate flipped suddenly in early 2025, it became clear that Frameline49’s theme would need to inspire strength in an urgent way. Day after day, people around the world were waiting to see what would happen next, and the queer community felt especially vulnerable. We needed a theme that invited the entire world into the conversation and let it be know that we were paying close attention.

Concept

“The World is Watching” became Frameline49’s rally cry. It simultaneously became a voice of resistance and an invitation to immerse in important queer films from around the world.

Design

The visual identity borrows the pink triangle, a symbol used in Nazi concentration camps to identify homosexual men and transgender women but reclaimed in the 1970s as a symbol of gay liberation and in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis, as its core element. By turning it on its side, we created a simple but powerful play button, symbolizing the power of film in amplifying queer voices. This is combined with flexing rectangular shapes that represent the many ways we consume media, and an oversized broadsheet-style festival program that reinforced the urgency of the theme through urgent headlines and a full-page poster used throughout the festival as both a symbol of defiance and community.