It would be an understatement to say that Jimpa, the newest semi-autobiographical work from Australian queer filmmaker Sophie Hyde, was one of the most anticipated queer films of the year. After Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), Hyde had already shown how gently, and how bravely, she could speak about sex, intimacy, and power. That film was funny, tender, and quietly radical. It made difficult conversations feel alive.
Jimpa feels like a natural next step for Hyde, but also a more fragile one. If Good Luck to You, Leo Grande found intimacy in the charged space between two strangers, Jimpa asks what happens when intimacy is harder because the people involved are family. Here, the difficulty is not simply desire, but history: what parents owe children, what children project onto elders, and what queer freedom means when it is lived across generations.
The premise is simple. Filmmaker Hannah (Olivia Colman), her partner Harry (Daniel Henshall), and their non-binary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) travel to Amsterdam to visit Hannah’s father Jim (John Lithgow), known as ‘Jimpa’. He is a veteran LGBT activist, an academic, and a beloved figure in the local queer community. During their stay, the family are forced to confront one another while reexamining their relationships, their understanding of each other, and their own sense of self.
Premiering at Sundance last year, the film shares similarities with Dreams (Sex Love) by Dag Johan Haugerud, particularly in its interest in generational disagreements surrounding identity and sexuality. However, Haugerud’s approach centres primarily on the youngest generation and frames the story through first love, feminism, artistic creation and power dynamics, allowing the film to develop greater nuance and emotional layering. Hyde instead adopts a more fragmented structure, dividing the narrative attention almost equally between Hannah, Frances, and Jimpa.
This structure is both the film’s weakness and its most interesting quality. Jimpa tries to hold too much. It looks at Jimpa’s past as an activist, his ageing body, his students, his desire, his place in Amsterdam’s queer community, and his uncertain future. Alongside this, Hannah struggles with making a semi-autobiographical film about her parents while attempting to avoid conflict within her screenplay and reconsidering her parents’ relationship from multiple perspectives. Frances, meanwhile, navigates desire, gender identity, and queer community while gradually realising that Jimpa’s generation may not be as progressive as they had imagined. In 113 minutes, there is not enough room for all of this to breathe.
And yet, it’s hard to dismiss the film for being unresolved. Queer life is often unresolved, messy, and contradictory. Real life rarely resembles melodrama with a neat conclusion, nor poetry stripped of direct and earnest conversations that may sometimes resemble lessons. In this regard, Jimpa succeeds in capturing the misalignment between what people intellectually believe and what they emotionally feel. The film shows that while they can show support for ideas such as respecting pronouns, accepting non-monogamy, and supporting individual choice, while also showing how people can still experience hurt, disappointment, jealousy or confusion, despite consciously embracing progressive ideals.
This is where Jimpa moved me most. This contradiction between rational belief and emotional response feels deeply human. Our emotions cannot always be governed by our politics or our principles, nor should they be. While a sharper and more confrontational exploration of these tensions might have produced a more dramatically satisfying film, it is difficult to entirely fault Hyde for refusing resolutions. In real queer life, many people avoid confrontation, remain emotionally conflicted, or leave disagreements unresolved. In that sense, the film’s quietness and reluctance to force closure may itself reflect the complicated reality of queer family life.
Olivia Colman, brilliant as always, gives Hannah warmth, humour and unease. She plays her as someone who wants to understand, but also finds it difficult to hide her feelings while making difficult decisions. John Lithgow’s Jimpa is witty, charismatic and vulnerable, an ageing gay icon whose openness does not protect him from his own blind spots. Aud Mason-Hyde brings Frances a careful mix of confusion, self consciousness and quiet determination. They make Frances feel like a person, not only a symbol of a younger queer generation.
Jimpa may not always succeed as a drama. It is sometimes too full, too soft around the edges, and too eager to let every feeling co-exist without collision. But there is also something moving in that refusal to tidy itself. Its flaws are closely tied to its earnestness. Hyde’s film seems to know that family, like queerness, is not something that can always be resolved into clarity. Sometimes it remains unfinished, embarrassing, loving, contradictory and alive.
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