Freeheld

Surprise surprise, Hollywood is still doing a bad job at representing LGBT people on screen. Despite a great year for queer indie films in 2015, major studios are failing to depict quality queer characters, especially LGBT people of color.

The characters in Freeheld repeatedly tell one another that “life isn’t fair” — and with good reason. The film is about a decorated police officer who spent most of her life hiding her homosexuality to avoid discrimination and bigotry. After years in the closet, she finally falls in love and enters into a domestic partnership, only to be stricken with terminal cancer. All she wants to do is award her pension to her partner so that she can afford to keep their house, but the local government denies her request simply because her partner happens to be a woman. Every single aspect of this scenario is unfair.

The Freeheld trailer presents a “based on true events” period piece drama that is all about the social injustices of another era. Unlike most movies cut from this cloth, this particular case of social injustice isn’t being remembered several decades later, but only 10 years after the fact. The story of a lesbian couple’s battle for equal treatment in the eyes of the law, Freeheld couldn’t have landed in a more appropriate year. 2015 has been a year of victories for the LGBT community and this trailer is a reminder of how quickly change has come and just how many worlds away 2005 is from today.