Watch A Garden Under the Earth (2024) Official Trailer

In a series of dreamlike digital vignettes, two wild fairies engage in an increasingly intense erotic ritual. Through lyrical poetry and oneiric imagery, the film mythologizes the homosexual practice of “cruising”: clandestine sexual encounters in public spaces. It analogizes this queer custom to ancestral Pan-European accounts of fairie ceremonies and equates the faerie ring–a mythical portal to the underworld–to the real-world liminal spaces where cruising historically occurred. These sensual, magical encounters take place in between worlds. Spaces not yet completely retaken by nature but no longer the domain of man either; alluding both to ancient beliefs that the faerie realm was located somewhere between humanity and the wild; and to the history of queer sexuality: often relegated to the fringes of society.