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Meet the STARS!

Every year, Desperado brings filmmakers, actors, producers, and writers to Phoenix to interact with our audience. It’s a highlight of the festival that brings film making to life. Make sure to join our mailing list so you’ll be the first to know who’ll join us this year.

Take a look at photos from Desperado’s history.

Audience Award Winners

  • 2010 – The Big Gay Musical 

    Directors: Casper Andreas, Fred M. Caruso. Paul and Eddie have just begun previews for the new Off-Broadway musical “Adam and Steve Just the Way God Made ‘Em.” Their lives strangely mirror the characters they are playing.  

  • 2011 – Undertow

    Director Javier Fuentes-León. An unusual ghost story set on the Peruvian seaside; a married fisherman struggles to reconcile his devotion to his male lover within his town’s rigid traditions.

  • 2012 – Going Down in La La Land

    Director Casper Andreas. A fresh face comes to Hollywood to act in movies but only the gay porn studios are eager to provide him with work.

  • 2013 – Cloudburst

    Director Thom Fitzgerald. A lesbian couple escapes from their nursing home and heads up to Canada to get married. Along the way, they pick up a young, male hitchhiker.

  • 2014 – Reaching for the Moon

    Director Bruno Barreto. A chronicle of the tragic love affair between American poet Elizabeth Bishop and Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares.

  • 2015 – Boy Meets Girl

    Director Eric Schaeffer. Boy Meets Girl is a funny, tender, sex-positive romantic comedy that explores what it means to be a real man or woman, and how important it is to live a courageous life not letting fear stand in the way of going after your dreams.

  • 2016 – Akron

    Directors Sasha King and Brian O’Donnell. Benny, a college freshman at the University of Akron, Ohio meets and falls for fellow freshman Christopher at a football game. With the support of their families and friends, they embark on a new relationship.

  • 2017 – A Million Happy Nows

    Director Albert Alarr. A veteran soap opera star retires to a beach house with her publicist and partner, but her Early Onset Alzheimer’s will strain the couple’s relationship until they find the strength to redefine themselves and what they mean to one another.

  • 2018 – Snapshots

    Director Melanie Mayron. When a grandmother’s secret past collides with her granddaughter’s secret future and her daughter’s angry present, can the love of three generations be enough to accept decades of deceit? With a simple roll of film, it begins.

  • 2018(September) – My Big Gay Italian Wedding

    Director Alessandro Genovesi. In this merry movie of matrimony, happily engaged Antonio brings his fiancé Paulo to the exquisite old Italian village of his birth to meet his headstrong parents and reveal his sexuality, setting out on a quest to make a city founded on religious tradition

  • 2019 – For They Know Not What They Do

    A Film by Daniel Karslake.  From the director/producer of FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO comes a new film, FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO, a powerful exploration of the intersection of religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity in America. The film features four families of