Downtown

🤩 Downtown, dir. Michiel van Erp, 2026, Netherlands, 98 min., in Dutch with English subtitles throughout
Sunday, June 21, 2026, 1:15 PM, Castro Theatre
🌐 World premiere

Downtown
(photo: Mark de Blok)

Frameline blurb: Amsterdam, 1986. The Downtown club is alive, the music is electric, and a genera­tion is living freely, defiantly, gloriously as themselves. Ronnie spins the records. Lennart comes to dance and hook up with whoever he can. When 20-year-old artist Bas arrives — golden, radiant, irresistible — something shifts between the three of them, and a bond forms that will outlast everything, even when their realities begin to change as more and more regulars start to vanish from Downtown. Downtown is a film about what it meant to be young, gay, and alive in one of history's most beautiful and brutal decades.

Director Michiel Van Erp (I Am a Woman Now, Frameline36) weaves between the 80s and the modern-day Amsterdam, where Ronnie, Lennart, and Bas — now older, reunite years later, their bond, rooted in memories of love and euphoric excess, still lingers as they revisit the unspoken truths and choices that changed their lives forever. Sexy, tender, and quietly hopeful, Downtown is a love letter to the time of the 80s and a lifeline for the living.

My take: This story hits pretty close to home for me. I turned 23 in 1986, so I would’ve been some­where in the middle of the group, agewise. But I was a bit of a late bloomer, waiting a while before finally venturing into the world of gay sex. By that time, Safer Sex messages were everywhere, and the tide of public sentiment had largely turned against the wanton sexual hedonism that had been ascendant just a few years earlier.

Downtown switches back and forth between the events of 1986 and 1987, and a dinner reunion of the three main characters in 2021, with Covid still a major presence. That leads to comparisons of one pandemic to the other, but not in facile movie tropes, but in much more nuanced and thoughtful interplay. The story engages your attention for the full 98 minutes and leaves you something to think about after, not just how you made it through one or both pandemics, but the nature of friendship and relationships and our reaction to adversity. It’s definitely a must see for anyone who lived through the early days of AIDS, but I think everyone should see it, even if you weren’t yet around in those dark days.

• IMDb • Official website • Filmmaker • Instagram: @KaapHolland • Facebook: @KaapHollandFilm • preview • other •