15 Essential Movies For LGBT* Pride Month

Shot on a minimal budget in the intense heat of Nevada, Desert Hearts remains director Donna Deitch's only fictional feature film, and was often overlooked by fans of art-house cinema at the time of its release. More recently, reappraisals have correctly registered it as one of the most significant works of LGBT* cinema from the 1980s.

A tale of passionate and unexpected romance, Desert Hearts stars Helen Shaver as a university professor who arrives in Reno to file for a divorce, and Patricia Charbonneau as the young woman who enters her life and turns it upside down with an unanticipated affair. Set during the late 1950s, Desert Hearts was a labour of love for Deitch, who took six years to make the movie, with barely the funds to shoot multiple takes of each scene.

The end result of her efforts is one of the most memorable gay films to have emerged from America in the 1980s, enhanced by luminous cinematography by long-standing Paul Thomas Anderson collaborator Robert Elswitt, who brings the Nevada desert and the small towns dotted on the landscape into sharp focus.