Downtown

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

Downtown

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: Downtown has been picked up for distribution by M-Appeal, so hopefully it will come to a streaming service near you (or even perhaps a cinema), and then finally get a trailer. I hope that the warm reception it received at its world premiere at Frameline will spur some interest.

I fall between Bas and Lennart in age, and was one year out of university in 1986, so to say this film is about my contemporaries is an understatement. The difference is that Safer Sex promotion was already ubiquitous when I came out, so I missed out on the freedom, and also the risk, of the unbridled unprotected promiscuity of just a few years prior. I did still experience seeing friends and neighbors get sick and die from HIV/AIDS, but not to nearly the “ghost town” level of some people only slightly older. I was already in my 30s when The Cocktail was introduced.

Clearly this film resonated strongly with me in ways that it might not with most viewers, but I hope you will give it a chance even if you’re much older or much younger. The characters are well drawn, with depth and empathy. The events they go through, both in the flashback and in the present-day scenes (when they have unexpectedly reunited for dinner after many years of separation), are clearly based on real, lived experiences. We see some of the consequences of their free-spirited youth, but without any heavy judgment. It’s a must see for anyone who lived through the 1980s or who wonders what it was like.

• IMDb: Downtown ◦ I Am a Woman Now • Official website • Filmmaker • Instagram • Facebook • preview: none that I can find 😢 • Rotten Tomatoes • Letterboxd •