“It’s chaotic, it’s messy, it’s human”: Nick Butler, Noah Parker and Liza Weil on Lunar Sway at BFI Flare 2026

The BFI Flare festival has always been one of this writer’s favourites – not just for its incredible, inclusive atmosphere and the spectrum of queer storytelling on display, but for the way it continues to push boundaries in terms of genre and form.

Lunar Sway, from director Nick Butler, feels like it fits perfectly within that programming. A real genre mash-up, it carries an otherworldly, almost surreal quality, laced with dark humour, resulting in an offbeat, nonconventional but completely compelling road movie/thriller.

The film follows Cliff, a young bisexual man stuck in a rut in a small desert town, whose life is upended by the arrival of Marg – a woman claiming to be his estranged birth mother. What follows is a strange, often chaotic odyssey, as Cliff drifts through a series of bizarre encounters, romantic entanglements and shifting truths, never quite sure who or what to trust.

We sat down at BFI Flare with Butler and his two stars to talk about the origins of this unusual story – not least his own experience of unrequited love and that idea of searching for connection in all the wrong places. We also discussed the ambiguous, constantly shifting relationship at its centre, particularly Marg, a character who keeps both Cliff and the audience wrong-footed throughout.

The conversation also touched on the film’s striking desert location, the retro, small-town Americana settings filled with dive bars and cowboy hats, and how the story ultimately becomes about figuring out who you are through the people you encounter along the way.

And while Lunar Sway is rooted in a specifically LGBTQ+ experience, we also spoke about the universality of that search – for identity, for love – and how the film reflects a broader shift in queer storytelling, moving beyond more familiar tropes of coming-out narratives defined by trauma or tragedy.

Sarah Bradbury

Lunar Sway does not have a release date yet.

Watch the trailer for Lunar Sway here: