News

The cult documentary “The Aggressives” began with a queer NYU graduate film student, Daniel Peddle, hanging out on the West Side Highway with a minicam before becoming a groundbreaking indie sensation in 2005. Shot with a vérité brio throughout New York City, “The Aggressives” pivoted around half a dozen queer and Bipoc people struggling with health and housing while finding community in identifying as masculine-presenting “AGs,” or aggressives, stretching their self-expression beyond the borders of their assigned gender. But Peddle was left dissatisfied with that documentary’s ending, which left doors of uncertainty ajar in detailing the pleasures and pains of queer life. Thus, a quarter of a century later, he returns to his subjects for “Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later,” a heartfelt and hopeful portrait of four of the original AGs that feels more complete and finds each of them on steadier footing — eventually.

A few of the lesbians...

In the early 2000s, director Daniel Peddle turned his gaze to the lives of several young, masculine-presenting lesbians of color living in New York City. He called his documentary “The Aggressives,” in a nod to the label given to, but also embraced by, the women featured. The film was groundbreaking then and remains illuminating today. For his sequel, “Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later,” Peddle has gathered four of the subjects who made the 2005 film both insightful and inspiring. The original was filmed between 1997 and 2003. The sequel covers the years 2018-23, with Peddle and editor Yvette Wojciechowski deftly interspersing footage from the original documentary throughout.

It’s good to see Kisha Batista, Trevon Haynes, Octavio Sanders and Chin Tsui again. In the original, they were teenagers wrestling with identity amid issues of race, class, sexuality and, it turns out, gender. Beneath their swagger coursed questions about belonging, labels and identity. In “Beyond,...