Saturday, January 10, 2026
Palm Springs High School
By Valerie Milano
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/9/25 – Jimpa, directed by Sophie Hyde, is a moving and uncompromisingly modern portrait of a nontraditional family, generational queerness, and the evolving language of identity.
Hannah (Olivia Colman), a filmmaker from Adelaide, travels with her husband Jack and their 16-year-old non-binary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) to Amsterdam to visit Hannah’s estranged father Jim (John Lithgow). Known affectionately as “Jimpa,” he is a charismatic, HIV-positive gay advocate and university professor who left Hannah and her family when she was 13 to pursue a freer life abroad.
That abandonment remains an open wound. Hoping for healing, Hannah sets out to make a non-confrontational film about her parents, an artistic reckoning that mirrors her own emotional one. Frances, however, initially sees Jimpa as a hero: provocative, witty, and surrounded by a catty café clan of longtime gay friends who embody a living archive of queer history. Frances dreams of leaving Adelaide to live with Jimpa in Amsterdam.
But admiration soon gives way to friction. Jimpa, shaped by activism during the AIDS crisis, holds views that clash with Frances’s lived experience of contemporary queerness. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, Jim laments the loss of subtext in favor of overt representation in modern cinema, while Frances firmly pushes back. The exchange plays less like debate than provocation, an intergenerational tension that pulses throughout the film.
Through Jimpa, Frances experiences pivotal coming-of-age moments: first love, first heartbreak, and a deeper understanding of queer lineage. Yet cracks emerge. Jimpa can be passive-aggressive and dismissive of Frances’s transness, revealing blind spots that complicate his legacy. His health, too, becomes a quiet but persistent concern, grounding the film’s emotional stakes in the realities of aging and mortality.
Hyde has more than earned her place telling this story. Her debut, 52 Tuesdays, won Best Director and explored a transitioning parent’s relationship with their daughter with rare sensitivity. She returned with Animals, a sharp adaptation of Emma Jane Unsworth’s novel about a fracturing friendship, followed by Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, an unusually frank and tender comedy-drama that showcased Emma Thompson in one of her most fearless performances.
With Jimpa, Hyde continues her exploration of intimacy, identity, and uncomfortable truths, this time through a semi-autobiographical lens that feels both personal and universal.
Jimpa will screen once at the Palm Springs International Film Festival on Saturday, January 10, 2026, at 4:45 PM, at Palm Springs High School, a singular opportunity to experience one of the festival’s most quietly provocative and emotionally resonant films.
