Hard Shoulder

Director: Nicholas David Lean

Year: 2012

Carl Foster, a work obsessed man, reluctantly agrees to a weekend away with his disgruntled wife and disruptive children - it’s as much as he can do to muster any kind of enthusiasm for the few days he must endure in their company. Their constant bickering finally takes its toll on Carl when they are passed, on a deserted country road, by a convoy of ‘carnival types’, who, by mischief or accident, cause Carl to swerve off the road. With rage descending Carl gets into heated exchange with the travellers. Taking an enforced stop hours later, in a small layby, the family are again affronted as their stationary vehicle is rammed by an unseen assailant in a large truck. Dazed by the impact they wake, bound and gagged, within the dreary confines of an abandoned roadside diner, with, seemingly, the same carnival types now their abductors and antagonists. As the gang demeans, insults, and tortures each of their captives in turn, it falls to Carl to free his family from their predicament. But not everything is as it seems, their environment not as tortuous as they imagined, and Carl not all that he would have us believe.

Director: Gabe Gabriel, Loren Loubser

Year: 2026

Soft-spoken transmasc driver, Toni, is used to dealing with an array of strange customers in their day-to-day work transporting locals and tourists through the economically divided City of Cape Town in their late father’s vintage Daimler. But when Claudia, a German digital nomad with blonde dreadlocks, offloads a traumatic story on a short ride across town, Toni’s car becomes dangerously possessed with Claudia’s invisible trauma demon. Inside Out Film Festival 2026 Wicked Queer: Boston's LGBTQ+ Film Festival 2026

Director: Maryam Hamidi

Year: 2026

A famous Black actor accepts a role in a lucrative government film, but when he learns he’s starring in a welcome video for a British Internment camp, he is confronted by the devastating cost of his political indifference.