Downtown (HKLGFF 2026)

Frameline Film Festival
Opening Film, Netherlands Film Festival

Asian Premiere

Amsterdam, 1986: the music is electric, The dance floor is heaving, and a generation of young gay men are living freely, defiantly, and gloriously as themselves. Ronnie spins records at the Downtown club, where he and the radiant Bas and restless Lennart forge a bond built on friendship, sex and euphoric excess… until regulars begin to vanish and the shadow of AIDS falls over everything. Thirty-two years later, reunited in the strange stillness of the COVID lockdown, the three survivors confront the choices and silences that shaped their lives. Director Michiel van Erp draws on his own memories of the era, weaving between two pandemics in a film that is at once a love letter to a lost generation and a portrait of how one carries on after surviving the unthinkable. Tender, euphoric and aching.