The world's longest-running queer film festival is live at the Castro and runs through June 27. Frameline's own curators just told Mission Local what's worth your evening.

The San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival opened tonight at the Castro Theatre and runs through June 27 — 11 days of screenings at venues across San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland. This is Frameline50: the organization's 50th anniversary edition of the world's longest-running queer film festival, founded here in 1977. Individual tickets and a Prestige Pass for multi-film bundles are at frameline.org. The Castro is at 429 Castro St.; Castro BART is a three-minute walk.

Tonight's opening film is Lady Champagne, a dragsploitation comedy written and directed by SF drag laureate D'Arcy Drollinger, shot entirely in the city. Doors are at 5 p.m. The after-party follows at The Foundry SF.

In a Q&A with Mission Local published this morning, Frameline executive director Allegra Madsen and associate director of programs Kate Bove laid out what they'd actually tell a friend to see. Their consensus: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which closes the festival on June 27. Madsen called it the right film for right now — it circles the quintessential queer question of whether you can be truly seen when you can't be fully honest about yourself. Bove's second pick: At the Place of Ghosts (Sk+te'kmujue'katik), a queer Indigenous horror from director Bretten Hannam — more atmospheric than jump-scary, she says, deliberately oblique about what it's doing with time.

Madsen also flagged Test, a sweet melodrama about gender performance set inside competitive bodybuilding, and Public Access, a documentary on 1980s cable access TV as the weird forerunner to today's social media and queer self-representation. The team's curatorial filter, as they described it: they ask "who is this really for?" — and if the film is aimed at explaining queer life to outsiders rather than speaking to people inside the community, it gets set aside.

One not to miss: a screening of Desert Hearts (1985) at the Castro with director Donna Deitch in attendance. The film is historically notable for the radical move of letting its gay characters survive; seeing it with Deitch in the room is exactly the kind of live-moviegoing experience Frameline was built around.

Frameline50 runs June 17–27. Full schedule and tickets at frameline.org. Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St., San Francisco.