Premiering at the 2024 Bronzelens Film Festival, Ryan Ashley Lowery’s Light Up doesn’t so much arrive as it glows—a defiant, tender beam cast into the corners where stories often go untold. Lowery calls it “a love letter to myself, the LGBTQ+ community and anyone struggling to live their full truth.” That’s not just a tagline—it’s the film’s heartbeat.
There’s a docuseries version out there, sprawling and expansive with 22 voices. But this is the feature-length cut, and it’s focused, intimate, and quietly electric. Five lives take centre stage—Simone Tisci, Derek Jae, Octavius Terry, Obio Jones, and Benjamin Carlton—each one a prism of experience, identity, and resilience. You may know some of them. You may not. Doesn’t matter. What matters is how they shine.
Set against the backdrop of Atlanta Fashion Week, Light Up is visually lush—runways, fabrics, bodies in motion—but never style over substance. The fashion is a frame, not a filter. What’s inside is raw and real: stories of queer men and trans women navigating a world that too often reduces them to tropes or erases them entirely. Lowery refuses that erasure. He lets them speak, breathe, be.
There’s pain here. Of course there is. But there’s also joy, humour, and a kind of quiet triumph. The kind that doesn’t need a parade to be powerful. The kind that says: I’m still here. I’m still me. What lingers most is the sense of community—chosen family, blood family, the messy, beautiful tangle of connection. It’s not just about coming out. It’s about coming into something: selfhood, solidarity, light.
By the end, I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted the docuseries. I wanted more time with these people, their voices, their truths. That’s the mark of something special—not just a film, but a space. A mirror. A spark.
Light Up is a film that deserves to be seen—at festivals, on streaming, wherever it can find you. And when it does, let it. Let it light you up too.
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